Soliloquies

¹⁹ R. You speak as if I were now inquiring what you hope. I am not inquiring what, denied, delights not, but what delights, obtained. For an extinguished plague is one thing, a dormant plague another. And, as some wise men say, all pools are so unsound, that they always smell of every foul thing, although you do not always perceive this, but only when you stir them up. And there is a wide difference whether a craving is suppressed by hopelessness of compassing it, or is expelled by saneness of soul. A. Although I am not able to answer you, never will you, for all this, persuade me that in this affection of mind in which I now perceive myself to be, I have advantaged nothing. R. This, doubtless, appears so to you, because although you might desire these things, yet they would not seem to you objects of desire, on their own account, but for ulterior ends. A. That is what I was endeavoring to say: for when I desired riches, I desired them for this reason, that I might be rich.

And those honors, the lust of which I have declared myself to have but even now thoroughly overcome, I craved by a mere delight in some intrinsic splendor I imputed to them; and nothing else did I expect in a wife, when I expected, than the reputable enjoyment of voluptuousness. Then there was in me a veritable craving for those things; now I utterly contemn them all: but if I cannot except through these find a passage to those things which in effect I desire, I do not pursue them as things to be embraced, but accept them as things to be allowed. R. A thoroughly excellent distinction: for neither do I impute unworthiness to the desire of any lower things that are sought on account of something else.