Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/42

20 when they be ranged under the rule of reason, and give them their own hateful terms indeed, when they strive with reason and violently make resistance. But when convinced by the tears which they shed, by trembling and quaking of their joints, yea, by change of colour going and coming; instead of naming dolour and fear directly, come in with (I wot not what) pretty devised terms of morsures, contractions or conturbations: also when they would cloak and extenuate the imperfection of other passions, by calling lust a promptitude or forwardness to a thing: it seemeth that by a flourish of fine words they devise shifts, evasions, and justifications, not philosophical but sophistical.

And yet verily they themselves again do term those joys, those promptitudes of the will, and wary circumspections by the name of eupathies, i.e. good affections, and not of apathies, that is to say, impassibilities: wherein they use the words aright and as they ought. For then is it truly called eupathy, i.e., a good affection, when reason doth not utterly abolish the passion, but guideth and ordereth the same well in such as be discreet and temperate. But what befalleth unto vicious and dissolute persons? Surely, when they have set down in their judgment and resolution, to love father and mother as tenderly as one lover may another, yet they are not able to perform so much. Marry, say that they determine to affect a courtesan or a flatterer, presently they can find in their hearts to love such most dearly. Moreover, if it were so, that passion and judgment were both one, it could not otherwise be, so soon as one had determined that he ought to love or hate, but that presently love or hate would follow thereupon.

But now it falleth out clean contrary; for that the passion as it accordeth well with some judgments and obeyeth, so it repugneth with others, and is obstinate and disobedient: whereupon it is, that themselves enforced thereto by the truth of the thing, do affirm and pronounce that every judgment is not a passion, but that only which stirreth up and moveth a strong and vehement appetite to a thing: confessing thereby, no doubt, that one thing it is in us which judgeth, and another thing that suffereth, that is to say, which receiveth passions: like as that which moveth, and that which is moved be divers. Certes, even Chrysippus himself, defining in many places what is patience and what is continency, doth avouch that they be habitudes, apt and fit to obey and follow the choice of reason: whereby he sheweth evidently that by the force of truth, he was driven to confess and avow that there is one thing in us