These passions and volitional habits are not rigidly fixed, for nothing in the field of facts is rigidly fixed. As the bed of the river regulates the course of the river and is at the same time continuously modified by it, so is it with the passions and volitional acts, which reality keeps forming and modifying, and in modifying, forms anew and in forming modifies. For this reason there is always something arbitrary in defining habits as though they corresponded to a distinct and limited reality; and for this reason the concepts of them are arbitrary and empirical. Habits are not categories, nor do they give rise to distinct concepts; but they are the like in the unlike, unlike, itself also, in itself, although discernible in a certain way from other groups of dissimilar facts. Their importance is great, because they constitute, as it were, the bony structure of the body of reality. In them individuality understood as an empirical concept, has its foundation, for which, if it be not substance, neither is it a complex of casually divergent states.
The control of the passions in so far as they are volitional habits.
The nature of the passions as volitional habits to be both fixed and mobile, that is to say, only relatively fixed and relatively mobile, is the principle that aids the solution of several much-debated and certainly important questions of the Philosophy of the practical. And in the first place, the passions being understood as habits, the answer to the question as to whether or no they can be controlled, and if the answer be in the affirmative, then in what limits, receives a somewhat different meaning, which explains the interest which that question has always aroused. Nothing, in fact, removes our consciousness of freedom and personality in so brutal a manner and makes us feel our impotence and misery in so depressing a way, as to find ourselves with our good intention and action hardly begun, face to face with the unchained forces of our passions and of the habits that oppose it, which drown with their deafening clamour the weak and timid voice of the incipient action, vex it with their arrogance, and drag it along paths well known and abhorred. We fall then into mistrust and baseness, believe ourselves lost for ever; freedom and will seem to be fables for the adornment of sermons and the books of moralists. The sage who recalls to man the absolute empire that he possesses over his passions and exhorts him never to be troubled and to repeat the twenty or four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, so that the spirit may have time to recuperate its strength, to resist and to conquer, seems to utter the insipid babble of one who has never truly loved and hated, and to measure the full and overflowing souls of others on the model of his own empty or almost empty soul. We laugh freely at the "short legs" of ideals and good intentions, and read again with satisfaction not undiluted with bitterness, some little story like Voltaire's Memnon ou la sagesse humaine, which bears as motto the very appropriate epigraph:
Nous tromper dans nos entreprises,
C'est à quoi nous sommes sujets:
Le matin je fais des projets,
Et le long du jour des sottises;
or at the most they conclude that there is no way to free oneself from a bad passion save with another one equally bad, from a vice with a vice, "as from a plank we pluck with nail a nail."
Difficulty and reality of dominating them.
Nevertheless, he who torments himself and gets angry, or laughs and draws such conclusions as these, is not in the right. That is to say, he is right to laugh at ingenuous sages and at odious preachers and moralists, for their theories are certainly simplicist and false. But he is wrong in not understanding that his own theory is also simplicist and false, for it runs into the opposite extreme.—Habits and passions are habits and passions, because slowly formed: it is therefore a vain illusion to attempt to destroy them at a blow. Perhaps it is believed that the passions are tender flowerets or grasses that a child has attached to the surface of the soil? They are a rank growth, strong oaks whose roots dive deep into the earth!—That is most true, but it is not for this reason impossible to modify and destroy them. They are indeed actually modified, for that very pain, that very disappointment, are a beginning of modification; since we do not persist in what we abhor and follow, dragged along by force; and little by little we end by freeing ourselves. The process of freeing ourselves from the passions, or from vicious habits, then, is effective, but slow, as the formation of those habits has been slow. We do not cure an illness with a sudden act of will, but nevertheless the will guides and directs the process of healing, and can open or close the entrance to the medicinal forces of nature. Now the passions or vicious habits are maladies that must follow their course, which, in order to be beneficial, must coincide with the cure. The sages who give receipts for freeing ourselves from them immediately are the Dulcamaras of moral maladies; but the existence of the Dulcamaras should not impel us to deny the existence of doctors, and above all of ourselves as doctors of ourselves. And we should certainly adopt a very bad and illusory method of cure, were we to accept the method so often recommended, of destroying passion with passion, or vice with vice, thus adding vice to vice, as those who treat the illnesses of the body with narcotics or with stimulants often add malady to malady.
Volitional habits and individuality.
Habits, then, not less than single volitional acts, of which they were and are composed, can be and are continually conquered and modified, in so far as they are opposed to the new volitional syntheses. This confirms what has already been said in criticizing the polipathetic view, which ignores the volition for the volitions, as the virtuous habit is ignored in favour of vicious habits. But the theory of apathicism is also to be found in this field, and it is needful to assert in opposition to it, the great importance proper to the volitional habits in giving concrete form to virtue. This second critical thesis is that which affirms the value of individuality or peculiarity in the practical field.