he first part of this proposition) preventing the body from becoming
less capable. So far, therefore, will pain be good.

Love is joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause. Pleasurable
excitement, therefore with the accompanying idea of an external cause,
is love, and therefore love may be excessive. Again, desire is greater
as the emotion from which it springs is greater. Inasmuch, therefore, as
an emotion may overpower the other actions of a man, so also the desire
which springs from this emotion may also overpower the other desires,
and may therefore exist in the same excess which we have shown (in the
preceding proposition) that pleasurable excitement possesses.

Cheerfulness, which I have affirmed to be good, is more easily imagined
than observed; for the emotions by which we are daily agitated are
generally related to some part of the body which is affected more than
the others, and therefore it is that the emotions exist for the most
part in excess, and so hold the mind down to the contemplation of one
object alone, that it can think about nothing else; and although men are
subject to a number of emotions, and therefore few are found who are
always under the control of one and the same emotion, there are not
wanting those to whom one and the same emotion obstinately clings. We
see men sometimes so affected by one object, that although it is not
present, they believe it to be before them; and if this happens to a man
who is not asleep, we say that he is delirious or mad. Nor are those
believed to be less mad who are inflamed by love, dreaming about nothing
but a mistress or harlot day and night, for they excite our laughter.
But the avaricious man who thinks of nothing else but gain or money, and
the ambitious man who thinks of nothing but glory, inasmuch as they do
harm, and are, therefore, thought worthy of hatred, are not believed to
be mad. In truth, however, avarice, lust, etc., are a kind of madness,
although they are not reckoned amongst diseases.

IV

_The Evil Emotions_

The man whom we hate we endeavor to destroy, that is to say we endeavor
to do something which is evil. Therefore hatred can never be good.[31]

Envy, mockery, contempt, anger, revenge, and the other affects which are
related to hatred or arise from it, are evil.

Everything which we desire because we are affected by hatred is base and
unjust in the State.

I make a great distinction between mockery (which I have said i