or we must dissolve and thaw away all bonds of morality by the irresistible shocks of an irresistible sensibility with Sterne.
[Wedded Union]
The well-spring of all sensible communion is the natural delight and need, which undepraved man hath to transfuse from himself into others, and to receive from others into himself, those things, wherein the excellency of his kind doth most consist; and the eminence of love or marriage communion is, that this mutual transfusion can take place more perfectly and totally in this, than in any other mode.
Prefer person before money, good-temper with good sense before person; and let all, wealth, easy temper, strong understanding and beauty, be as nothing to thee, unless accompanied by virtue in principle and in habit.
Suppose competence, health, and honesty; then a happy marriage depends on four things:
1. An understanding proportionate to thine, that is, a recipiency at least of thine:
2. natural sensibility and lively sympathy in general:
3. steadiness in attaching and retaining sensibility to its proper objects in its proper proportions:
4. mutual liking; including person and all the thousand obscure sympathies that determine conjugal liking, that is, love and desire to A. rather than to B.
This seems very obvious and almost trivial: and yet all unhappy marriages arise from the not honestly putting, and sincerely answering each of these four questions: any one of them negatived, marriage is imperfect, and in hazard of discontent.
[Difference Between Hobbs and Spinosa]
In the most similar and nearest points there is a difference, but for the most part there is an absolute contrast, between Hobbes and Spinosa. Thus Hobbes makes a state of war the natural state of man from the essential and ever continuing nature of man, as not a moral, but only a frightenable, being: Spinosa makes the same state a necessity of man out of society, because he must then be an undeveloped man, and his moral being dormant; and so on through the whole.