Benevolence And Anger

Ideas may be compared to the extension and solidity of matter.

Impressions, especially reflective ones, may be compared to colours, tastes, smells and other sensible qualities.

Ideas never admit of a total union. ◦ They are endowed with a kind of impenetrability, by which they: ▪ exclude each other ▪ are capable of forming a compound by their conjunction, not by their mixture. • Impressions and passions are susceptible of an entire union. ◦ Like colours, they may be blended so perfectly together, that each of them may: ▪ lose itself ▪ contribute only to vary that uniform impression arising from the whole. • Some of the most curious phenomena of the human mind are derived from this property of the passions. • I see a misfortune in every system of philosophy in the phenomena which are capable of uniting with love and hatred. ◦ There is always some more stubborn phenomenon in the operations of nature which will not so easily bend to our purpose. • We should not be surprised if this happens in natural philosophy. ◦ The essence and composition of external bodies are so obscure. ◦ In our conjectures on them, we must necessarily involve ourselves in contradictions and absurdities. • But the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known. ◦ I have used all caution in forming conclusions on them. ◦ I have always hoped to keep clear of those contradictions present in every other system. • The difficulty I currently have is not contrary to my system. ◦ It only departs a little from that simplicity, which has been its principal force and beauty. • Love and hatred are always followed by or conjoined with benevolence and anger. ◦ This conjunction chiefly distinguishes these affections from pride and humility. • Pride and humility are pure emotions in the soul. ◦ They are unattended with any desire. ◦ They do not immediately excite us to action. • But love and hatred: ◦ are not completed within themselves ◦ do not rest in that emotion, which they produce, but carry the mind to something farther. • Love is always followed by: ◦ a desire of the happiness of the person beloved ◦ an aversion to his misery. • Hatred produces: ◦ a desire of the misery ◦ an aversion to the happiness of the person hated. • This remarkable difference between pride and humility and love and hatred merits our attention. ◦ In many other particulars, they correspond to each other. • Two different hypotheses account for the conjunction of this desire and aversion with love and hatred. • The first is, that love and hatred have: ◦ a cause which excites them: pleasure and pain ◦ an object, to which they are directed: a person or thinking being ◦ an end, which they endeavour to attain: the happiness or misery of the person beloved or hated; ▪ All these mix together to make only one passion. • According to this system, love is nothing but the: ◦ desire of happiness to another person ◦ hatred that of misery. • The desire and aversion constitute the very nature of love and hatred. ◦ They are not only inseparable but the same. • But this is contrary to experience. • We never: ◦ love anyone without desiring his happiness. ◦ hate anyone without wishing his misery. • Yet these desires: ◦ arise only on the ideas of the happiness or misery of our friend or enemy being presented by the imagination ◦ are not absolutely essential to love and hatred. • They are the most obvious and natural sentiments of these affections, but not the only ones. • The passions may: ◦ express themselves in 100 ways. ◦ may subsist a considerable time, without our reflecting on the happiness or misery of their objects. ▪ This clearly proves that these desires: • are not the same with love and hatred • do not make any essential part of them. • Therefore, we may infer that benevolence and anger are: ◦ different from love and hatred ◦ only conjoined with love and hatred by the mind’s original constitution. • Nature has given the body certain appetites and inclinations. ◦ She changes these according to the situation of the fluids or solids. ◦ She has done a similar thing with the mind. • If we have love or hatred, the correspondent desire of the person’s happiness or misery, who is the object of the love or hatred: ◦ arises in the mind ◦ varies with each variation of these opposite passions. • This order of things, abstractedly considered, is not necessary. ◦ Love and hatred might have been unattended with any such desires, or their particular connection might have been entirely reversed. ◦ If nature had so pleased, love might have had the same effect as hatred, and hatred as love. • I see no contradiction in supposing a desire of producing misery annexed to love, and of happiness to hatred. ◦ If the sensation of the passion and desire be opposite, nature could have altered the sensation without altering the tendency of the desire, and by that means made them compatible with each other.