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Grief shall be the last of which we shall speak
in our treatment of the passions, and with it
we will conclude. Now grief
is a certain kind of sorrow arising from
the contemplation of some good which we have
lost, and [lost] in such a way that there is no
hope of recovering the same. It makes its
imperfection so manifest that as soon as we
only examine it we think it bad. For we have
already shown above that it is bad to bind and
link ourselves to things which may easily, or
at some time, fail us, and which we cannot have
when we want them. And since it is a certain
kind of sorrow, we have to shun it, as we have
already remarked above, when we were treating
of sorrow.
I think, now, that I have already shown and proved sufficiently that it is only True Belief or Reason that leads us to the knowledge of good and evil. And so when we come to prove that Knowledge is the first and principal cause [N1] of all these passions, it will be clearly manifest that if we use our understanding and Reason aright, it should be impossible for us ever to fall a prey to one of these *passions* which we ought to reject. I say our Understanding, because I do not think that Reason alone is competent to free us from all these: as we shall afterwards show in its proper place. [Note N1]: B omitted "cause," but the word seems to have been inserted recently -- perhaps by Van Vloten, as a marginal pencil note suggests. We must, however, note here as an excellent thing about the passions, that we see and find that all the passions which are good are of such kind and nature that we cannot be or exist without them, and that they belong, as it were, to our essence; such is the case with Love, Desire, and all that pertains to love. But the case is altogether different with those which are bad and must be rejected by us; seeing that we cannot only exist very well without these, but even that only then, when we have freed ourselves from them, are we really what we ought to be. To give still greater clearness to all this, it is useful to note that the foundation of all good and evil is Love bestowed on a certain object: for if we do not love that object which (nota bene) alone is worthy of being loved, namely, God, as we have said before, but things which through their very character and nature are transient, then (since the object is liable to so many accidents, ay, even to annihilation) there necessarily results hatred, sorrow, &c., according to the changes in the object loved. Hatred, when any one deprives him of what he loves. Sorrow, when he happens to lose it. Glory, when he leans on selflove. Favour and Gratitude, when he does not love his fellow-man for the sake of God. But, in contrast with all these, when man comes to love God who always is and remains immutable, then it is impossible for him to fall into this welter of passions. And for this reason we state it as a fixed and immovable principle that God is the first and only cause of all our good and delivers us from all our evil. Hence it is also to be noted *lastly,* that only Love, &c., are limitless: namely, that as it increases more and more, so also it grows more excellent, because it is bestowed on an object which is infinite, and can therefore always go on increasing, which can happen in the case of no other thing except this alone. And, maybe, this will afterwards give us the material from which we shall prove the immortality of the soul, and how or in what way this is possible.[N1] [Note N1]: B: And this will give us the material from which we shall, in the 23rd chapter, make out a case for, and prove, the immortality of the Soul. [A marginal note in A also refers to chapter 23.] Having so far considered all that the third kind of [N1] effect of true belief makes known we shall now proceed to speak, *in what follows,* of the fourth, and last, effect which was not stated by us on page [ST204].[N2] [Note N1]: A and B: or. [Note N2]: A gives this sentence in a foot-note; B in the body of the text, as above. |
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