ienation.

*There is no appetite, desire, or affection which may not become a
passion*, and there is no passion which does not impair the sense of
right, and interfere with the discharge of duty. The appetites, the lower
desires, the malevolent affections, and, not infrequently, love, when they
become passions, have their issues in vice and crime. The nobler desires
and affections when made passions, may not lead to positive evil, but can
hardly fail to derange the fitting order of life, and to result in the
dereliction of some of its essential duties. Thus, the passion for
knowledge may render one indifferent to his social and religious
obligations. Philanthropy, when a passion, overlooks nearer for more
remote claims of duty, and is very prone to omit self-discipline and
self-culture in its zeal for world-embracing charities. Even the religious
affections, when they assume the character of passions, either, on the one
hand, are kindled into wild fanaticism, or, on the other, lapse into a
self-absorbed quietism, which forgets outside duties in the luxury of
devout contemplation; and though either of these is to be immeasurably
preferred to indifference, they both are as immeasurably inferior to that
piety, equally fervent and rational, which neglects neither man for God,
nor God for man, and which remains mindful of all human and earthly
relations, fitnesses, and duties, while at the same time it retains its
hold of faith, hope, and habitual communion, on the higher life.

* * * * *

*Habit* also involves the suspension of reason and motive in the
performance of individual acts; but it differs from passion in that its
acts were in the beginning prompted by reason and motive. Indeed, it may
be plausibly maintained that in each habitual act there is a virtual
remembrance--a recollection too transient to be itself remembered--of the
reasoning or motive which induced the first act of the series. In some
cases the habitual act is performed, as it is said, unconsciously,
certainly with a consciousness so evanescent as to leave no trace of
itself. In other cases the act is performed consciously, but as by a felt
necessity, in consequence of an uneasy sensation--analogous to hunger and
thirst--which can be allayed in this way only. Under this last head we may
class, in the first place, habits of criminal indulgence, including the
indulgence of morbid and depraved appetite; secondly, many of tho