When an agreeable sensation, after having charmed our soul, quits it and vanishes, the soul experiences a sort of suffering, a want, a need,--it is agitated, disquieted. This disquietude, at first vague and indecisive, is soon determined; it is borne towards the object that has pleased us, whose absence makes us suffer. This movement of the soul, more or less vivid, is desire. Is there in desire any of the characters of liberty? What is it called to be free? Each one knows that he is free, when he knows that he is master of his action, that he can begin it, arrest it, or continue it as he pleases. We are free, when before acting we have taken the resolution to act, knowing well that we are able to take the opposite resolution. A free act is that of which, by the infallible testimony of my consciousness, I know that I am the cause, for which, therefore, I regard myself as responsible. God, the world, the body, can produce in me a thousand movements; these movements may seem to the eyes of an external observer to be voluntary acts; but any error is impossible to consciousness,--it distinguishes every movement not voluntary, whatever it may be, from a voluntary act. True activity is voluntary and free activity. Desire is just the opposite. Desire, carried to its culmination, is passion; but language, as well as consciousness, says that man is passive in passion; and the more vivid passion is, the more imperative are its movements, the farther is it from the type of true activity in which the soul possesses and governs itself. I am no more free in desire than in the sensation that precedes and determines it. If an agreeable object is presented to me, am I able not to be agreeably moved? If it is a painful object, am I able not to be painfully moved? And so, when this agreeable sensation has disappeared, if memory and imagination remind me of it, is it in my power not to suffer from no longer experiencing it, is it in my power not to feel the need of experiencing it again, and to desire more or less ardently the object that alone can appease the disquietude and suffering of my soul? Observe well what takes place within you in desire; you recognize in it a blind emotion, that, without any deliberation on your part, and without the intervention of your will, rises or falls, increases or diminishes. One does not desire, and cease to desire, according to his will. Will often combats desire, as it often also yields to it; it is not, therefore, desire. We do not reproach the sensations that objects produce, nor even the desires that these sensations engender; we do reproach ourselves for the consent of the will to these desires, and the acts that follow, for these acts are in our power.