Character is the sum of its "affections," that is, of all states and motions of the disposition. These are divisible into "passions,"--included under selfishness, which is the general, all-embracing passion,--and the active conditions of existence. These two divisions are also identical with pain and pleasure, passion with pain, and activity with pleasure. All desires have their root in the primary instinct of self-preservation and self-propagation, the instinct of self-propagation being only the racial form of the instinct of self-preservation. The instinct of self-propagation is the highest of all the passions, yet, as Spinoza says, every form of love which recognizes another cause than mental freedom is easily turned to hate,--if it is not already a sort of madness, nourished rather by discord than concord. The various forms of family love, the love of country, and friendship, noble sisters of love in the narrower sense, result in desirable activity only as they exist in the form of concepts. Civilization is nothing but the struggle of inadequate and adequate concepts, in which, as in the struggle for existence in nature, only that is triumphant which, instead of assuming a position of separation, makes the general and the conditions of existence its own; so that charity in the widest sense of the term is, of all humane feelings, that to which the palm has been given. In this feeling, the dialectic movement of the concept "man" is completed and perfected, the single man, instead of perishing in the struggle of all against all, first working his way upward out of his species and then taking up, in his own being, the whole of mankind through the medium of benevolence. By this evolution he raises himself to the level of the general. Far higher than that confused sympathy which, in lending temporary aid to one, brings lasting harm to many, is this adequate concept; true benevolence is founded upon the clearest reasoning, and is the activity of the mind's fullest power. The discord which self-consciousness has caused in man can be done away with only by the greatest possible clarification of self-consciousness: man returns mentally to the bosom of the universal, when every living thing causes him to exclaim in the words of the Indian philosopher: "Behold thyself."