On Grief by Baruch Spinoza

Grief shall be the last of which we shall speak in our treatment of the passions, and with it we will conclude. Now grief is a certain kind of sorrow arising from the contemplation of some good which we have lost, and [lost] in such a way that there is no hope of recovering the same. It makes its imperfection so manifest that as soon as we only examine it we think it bad. For we have already shown above that it is bad to bind and link ourselves to things which may easily, or at some time, fail us, and which we cannot have when we want them. And since it is a certain kind of sorrow, we have to shun it, as we have already remarked above, when we were treating of sorrow.

I think, now, that I have already shown and proved sufficiently that it is only True Belief or Reason that leads us to the knowledge of good and evil. And so when we come to prove that Knowledge is the first and principal cause of all these passions, it will be clearly manifest that if we use our understanding and Reason aright, it should be impossible for us ever to fall a prey to one of these passions which we ought to reject. I say our Understanding, because I do not think that Reason alone is competent to free us from all these: as we shall afterwards show in its proper place.

We must, however, note here as an excellent thing about the passions, that we see and find that all the passions which are good are of such kind and nature that we cannot be or exist without them, and that they belong, as it were, to our essence; such is the case with Love, Desire, and all that pertains to love.

But the case is altogether different with those which are bad and must be rejected by us; seeing that we can not only exist very well without these, but even that only then, when we have freed ourselves from them, are we really what we ought to be.

To give still greater clearness to all this, it is useful to note that the foundation of all good and evil is Love bestowed on a certain object: for if we do not love that object which alone is worthy of being loved, namely, God, as we have said before, but things which through their very character and nature are transient, then (since the object is liable to so many accidents, aye, even to annihilation) there necessarily result hatred, sorrow, etc., according to the changes in the object loved. Hatred, when anyone deprives him of what he loves. Sorrow, when he happens to lose it. Glory, when he leans on self-love. Favor and Gratitude, when he does not love his fellow-man for the sake of God.

But, in contrast with all these, when man comes to love God who always is and remains immutable, then it is impossible for him to fall into this welter of passions. And for this reason we state it as a fixed and immovable principle that God is the first and only cause of all our good and delivers us from all our evil.

Hence it is also to be noted lastly, that only Love, etc., are limitless: namely, that as it increases more and more, so also it grows more excellent, because it is bestowed on an object which is infinite, and can therefore always go on increasing, which can happen in the case of no other thing except this alone. And, maybe, this will afterwards give us the material from which we shall prove the immortality of the soul, and how or in what way this is possible.