Fate, Fortune, and the Inner Emotions

145. Those which depend only on other causes. What is Fortune?

There are things that do not depend on us at all, no matter how good they are.

We should never desire such things passionately. This is because:

• they might not happen.
  • This non-happening will afflict us in proportion to how much we have wished for it.
• they occupy our thoughts.
  • This diverts us from directing our affection to other things that depend on us.

There are 2 general remedies against these vain Desires:

1. Generosity

I will explain this later.

2. Our regular reflection on the divine Providence

This represents to ourselves that it is impossible for anything to happen otherwise than it has been determined from all eternity by this Providence; so that it is like a fate or an unchangeable necessity, which must be opposed to Fortune, to destroy it, as a chimera that only comes from the error of our understanding.

This is because:

• we can only desire what we think is possible.
• we cannot assign possibility to those things that do not depend on us
  • We can only do this if we think that such things depend on chance
  • This is when we think that such things can happen, and that similar things have happened before.

This belief on chance is only based on not knowing all the causes that contribute to each effect.

When something that we think is chance-based does not happen, it means that its cause has failed.

Consequently, it was absolutely impossible.

This means that what we thought could easily happen was actually possible only by the concurrence of all its causes.

146. Concerning those things that depend on us and on others

Therefore, we must entirely reject the common opinion that there exists outside of us a Fortune which causes things to happen or not happen according to its pleasure.

Everything is guided by divine Providence, whose eternal decree is so infallible and immutable.

This means that:

• everything that happens to us has a cause.
• we should not wish to for whatever that happens to us to have happened differently.

But most of our Desires extend to things which do not all depend:

• on us or
• on others.

This is why we must carefully distinguish in them what depends only on us, so as to extend our desire only to that alone.

For the rest, even though we should consider the outcome entirely fated and immutable, so that our Desire does not concern itself with it,

we should nonetheless consider the reasons which increase or decrease its probability of success so that they may guide our actions.

Assume we have business in a place where we can go by 2 different paths, one path is customarily much safer than the other.

The decree of Providence might be that we would:

• be robbed if we took the safer path
• be safe if we took the less safe path.

It means that we should take the less safe path.

But reason dictates that we should choose the customarily safer path.

• We feel our Desire fulfilled when we have followed it

Whatever bad happens to us we think is inevitable.

• And so we do not think to wish to be exempt from it.
• Instead, we only hope to do the best that we can/

When we exercise to distinguish in this way between Fate and Fortune, we can easily get used to regulate our Desires so that we can get complete satisfaction with any outcome that depends only on us.

The Inner Emotions

147. The Inner Emotions of the Soul

Our good and our evil principally depends on the inner emotions which are aroused in the soul only by the soul itself.

These inner emotions differ from those passions which always depend on some movement of the animal spirits.

These emotions of the soul are often joined with passions similar to them.

Yet they can often:

• also occur with others
• even arise from those that are contrary to them.

For example, a husband mourns his deceased wife.

• But he would also be troubled to see her resurrected.

His heart is gripped by Sadness because of:

• his loneliness
• the solemnity of the funeral

It may be that some remnants of love or pity, which present themselves to his imagination, draw true tears from his eyes, notwithstanding that he feels at the same time a secret Joy in the innermost part of his soul, the emotion of which has such power that the Sadness and tears accompanying it cannot diminish its strength.

In another example, we feel Sadness, sometimes Joy, or Love, or Hatred when we:

• read adventures in a book
• watch a play

But these passions lead to an intellectual Joy from the book or the play.

148. The exercise of virtue is a sovereign remedy against the Passions

These inner emotions touch us more closely. They consequently have much more power over us than the Passions with which they differ, which meet with them.

Provided our soul always has enough to content it within itself, all the troubles that come from elsewhere have no power to harm it, but rather they serve to increase its joy, in that seeing it cannot be offended by them shows it its perfection.

And so our soul needs only to follow virtue exactly so that it may thus have enough to content it.

Anyone who has lived in such a way that his conscience cannot reproach him.