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f atlotts, of which honour, reputation, wealth and power, are the uncertain 

 aim. Our passions have not yet been analyzed with the same care as our 

 ideas: no one has yet duly stated the differences there are, in respect to 

 their number and energy, betwixt savage man, and man in the midst of 

 civilized and enlightened society. 



As the habitual state of the stomach, of the lungs, of the liver and 

 internal organs, is conncted with certain sets of ideas ; as every vivid sen- 

 sation of joy or distress, of pleasure or pain, brings on a feeling of anxie- 

 ty in the prsecordia, the ancients placed in the viscera the seat of the 

 passions of the soul: they placed courage in the heart, anger in the liver, 

 joy in the spleen, Sec. Bacon and Van Helmont seated them in the sto- 

 mach; Lecat in the nervous plexuses; other physiologists in the gang- 

 lions of the great sympathetic, Sec. But have they not confounded the 

 effect with the cause? the appetite with the passion to which it disposes? 

 The appetites, out of which the passions spring, reside in the organs 

 they suppose only instinctive determinations, whilst passion carries with 

 it the idea of intellectual exertion. Thus, the accumulation of semen in 

 the vesiculae which serve for its reservoirs, excites the venereal appetite, 

 quite distinct from the passion of love, though often its determining 

 cause. Animals have scarcely more than appetite, which differs as much 

 from passion as instinct from intelligence. However, the brain is not to 

 be considered as the primitive seat of the passions*, as is done by the 

 greater number of philosophers. Of all the feelings of man, the most 

 lasting, the most sacred, the most passionate, the least susceptible of in- 

 jury from all the prejudices of the social state, maternal love, is surely 

 not the result of any intellectual combination, of any cerebral action: it 

 is in the bowels (entrailles) its source lies : thence it springs, and all the 

 efforts of imagination cannot attain it for those who have not been blevss- 

 ed with a mother's name. 



All passion springs from desire, and supposes a certain degree of exalta- 

 tion of the intellectual faculties. The shades of the passions are infi- 

 nite: they might be all arranged by a systematic scale; of which indif- 

 ference would be the lowest gradation, and maniacal rage the highest. A 

 man without passion, is as impossible to imagine, as a man without de- 

 sires ; yet we distinguish, as passionate, those whose will rises power- 

 fully towards one object earnestly longed for. In tne delirium of the 

 passions, we are for ever making unconsciously, false judgments, of which 

 the error is exaggeration. A man recovering from a seizure of fear, laughs 

 at the object of his terror. Look at the lover whose passion is extinct! 

 freed, at last, from the spell that enthralled him, all the perfections with 

 which his love had invested its object are vanished : the illusion has pass- 

 ed away; and he can almost believe that it is she who is no longer the 

 same, while himself alone is changed : like those maniacs who, on their 

 return to reason, wonder at the excesses of their delirium, and listen, in- 

 credulously, to the relation of their own actions. The ambitious man 

 feeds on imaginations of wealth and power. He who hates, exaggerates 



* If we analyzed the passions carefully, it would be right to distinguish those which 

 are common to all men, which appertain to our physical wants and to our nature, from 

 certain caprices of the mind which have been honoured with the name of passion, as 

 Avarice, ambition, &c. which should be referred to kinds of mental derangement, and 

 classed as species, of monomania. 



