ad not been the slave of passion, I should have known that
my nun could not be a different creature from all the pretty women whom I
had loved for the thirteen years that I had been labouring in the fields
of love. But where is the man in love who can harbour such a thought? If
it presents itself too often to his mind, he expels it disdainfully!
M---- M---- could not by any means be otherwise than superior to all other
women in the wide world.

Animal nature, which chemists call the animal kingdom, obtains through
instinct the three various means necessary for the perpetuation of its
species.

There are three real wants which nature has implanted in all human
creatures. They must feed themselves, and to prevent that task from being
insipid and tedious they have the agreeable sensation of appetite, which
they feel pleasure in satisfying. They must propagate their respective
species; an absolute necessity which proves the wisdom of the Creator,
since without reproduction all would, be annihilated--by the constant law
of degradation, decay and death. And, whatever St. Augustine may say,
human creatures would not perform the work of generation if they did not
find pleasure in it, and if there was not in that great work an
irresistible attraction for them. In the third place, all creatures have
a determined and invincible propensity to destroy their enemies; and it
is certainly a very wise ordination, for that feeling of
self-preservation makes it a duty for them to do their best for the
destruction of whatever can injure them.

Each species obeys these laws in its own way. The three sensations:
hunger, desire, and hatred--are in animals the satisfaction of habitual
instinct, and cannot be called pleasures, for they can be so only in
proportion to the intelligence of the individual. Man alone is gifted
with the perfect organs which render real pleasure peculiar to him;
because, being, endowed with the sublime faculty of reason, he foresees
enjoyment, looks for it, composes, improves, and increases it by thought
and recollection. I entreat you, dear reader, not to get weary of
following me in my ramblings; for now that I am but the shadow of the
once brilliant Casanova, I love to chatter; and if you were to give me
the slip, you would be neither polite nor obliging.

Man comes down to the level of beasts whenever he gives himself up to the
three natural propensities without calling reason and judgment to his
assistance; b