Moroseness and melancholy are very opposite in nature; and melancholy is more nearly related to happiness than to moroseness.  Melancholy attracts; moroseness repels.  Hypochondria not only makes us unreasonably cross and angry over things concerning the present; not only fills us with groundless fears of imaginative mishaps for the future; but also causes us to unjustly reproach ourselves concerning our actions in the past.

Hypochondria causes a man to be always searching for and racking his brain about things that either irritate or torment him.  The cause of it is an internal morbid depression, combined often with an inward restlessness which is temperamental; when both are developed to their utmost, suicide is the result.

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What makes a man hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, sufficient in his own troubles to bear.  This is why people placed in happier circumstances than they have been used to are sympathetic and charitable.  But people who have always been placed in happy circumstances are often the reverse; they have become so estranged to suffering that they have no longer any sympathy with it; and hence it happens that the poor sometimes show themselves more benevolent than the rich.

On the other hand, what makes a man so very curious, as may be seen in the way he will spy into other people’s affairs, is boredom, a condition which is diametrically opposed to suffering;—­though envy also often helps in creating curiosity.

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At times, it seems as though we wish for something, and at the same time do not wish for it, so that we are at once both pleased and troubled about it.  For instance, if we have to undergo some decisive test in some affair or other, in which to come off victorious is of great importance to us; we both wish that the time to be tested were here, and yet dread the idea of its coming.  If it happens that the time, for once in a way, is postponed, we are both pleased and sorry, for although the postponement was unexpected, it, however, gives us momentary relief.  We have the same kind of feeling when we expect an important letter containing some decision of moment, and it fails to come.

In cases like these we are really controlled by two different motives; the stronger but more remote being the desire to stand the test, and to have the decision given in our favour; the weaker, which is closer at hand, the desire to be left in peace and undisturbed for the present, and consequently in further enjoyment of the advantage that hoping on in uncertainty has over what might possibly be an unhappy issue.  Consequently, in this case the same happens to our moral vision as to our physical, when a smaller object near at hand conceals from view a bigger object some distance away.

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