Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God’s handiwork.  If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself.  He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man.  He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.

Now I consider those who would prevent the birth of the passions almost as foolish as those who would destroy them, and those who think this has been my object hitherto are greatly mistaken.

But should we reason rightly, if from the fact that passions are natural to man, we inferred that all the passions we feel in ourselves and behold in others are natural?  Their source, indeed, is natural; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams; they are a great river which is constantly growing, one in which we can scarcely find a single drop of the original stream.  Our natural passions are few in number; they are the means to freedom, they tend to self-preservation.  All those which enslave and destroy us have another source; nature does not bestow them on us; we seize on them in her despite.

The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it.  In this sense, if you like, they are all natural.  But most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful.  They change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself.

Self-love is always good, always in accordance with the order of nature.  The preservation of our own life is specially entrusted to each one of us, and our first care is, and must be, to watch over our own life; and how can we continually watch over it, if we do not take the greatest interest in it?

Self-preservation requires, therefore, that we shall love ourselves; we must love ourselves above everything, and it follows directly from this that we love what contributes to our preservation.  Every child becomes fond of its nurse; Romulus must have loved the she-wolf who suckled him.  At first this attachment is quite unconscious; the individual is attracted to that which contributes to his welfare and repelled by that which is harmful; this is merely blind instinct.  What transforms this instinct into feeling, the liking into love, the aversion into hatred, is the evident intention of helping or hurting us.  We do not become passionately attached to objects without feeling,