What are the Passions of the Soul?

1. What is Passion in relation to one subject is always Action in another respect.

The deficiency of the sciences that we have inherited from the ancients is most obvious with what they have written about the Passions.

Everyone experiences the passions within themselves. This makes the knowledge about it always highly sought after.

But what the ancients have taught us is so little and mostly so hard to believe. This is why I must deviate from the paths they followed.

Everything that happens, or occurs anew, is:

• a Passion with regard to its subject
• an Action with regard to its actor

The actor and the [feeler] are often very different.

• But Action and Passion remain always the same thing

2. We must distinguish the soul’s functions from the body’s functions in order to know the soul’s Passions

Our body acts most against our soul, which is connected to it.

Consequently, a Passion in the soul is commonly an Action in the body.

Therefore, we can best understand our Passions by examining the difference between the soul and the body.

This will let us know to which of the two is the cause of the functions in us.

3. What rule should be followed for this purpose

Everything we experience in ourselves that we experience also in inanimate bodies must be attributed only to our body.

Conversely, everything in us which we cannot conceive as belonging to a body must be attributed to our soul.

4. Heat and the movement of the limbs come from the body. Thoughts come from the soul

All types of thoughts in us belong to the soul.

A flame alone has much more heat and movement than any of our limbs.

There are inanimate bodies that:

• can move in as many or more diverse ways than ours,
• have as much or more heat than our bodies

All the heat and all the movements in us, insofar as they do not depend on thought, belong only to the body.

5. The soul does not give movement and heat to the body

People think that:

• dead bodies are unable to move and generate heat because they lack the soul
• our natural heat and all the movements of our bodies depend on the soul

This wrong idea is why there has been no good explanation of the Passions up to now.

Instead, they should have thought the opposite, that the soul only departs when one dies because:

• this heat ceases and
• the organs that move the body become corrupted.

6. What is the difference between a living body and a dead body

Death never occurs due to the fault of the soul, but only because some of the principal parts of the body become corrupted.

The body of a living man differs as much from that of a dead man as a working clock is different from a broken one that ceases to act.