If I have duties towards myself, it is not towards myself as an individual, it is towards the liberty and intelligence that make me a free moral person. It is necessary to distinguish closely in us what is peculiar to us from what pertains to humanity. Each one of us contains in himself human nature with all its essential elements; and, in addition, all these elements are in him in a certain manner that is not the same in two different men. These particularities make the individual, but not the person; and the person alone in us is to be respected and held as sacred, because it alone represents humanity. Every thing that does not concern the moral person is indifferent. In these limits I may consult my tastes, even my fancies to a certain extent, because in them there is nothing absolute, because in them good and evil are in no way involved. But as soon as an act touches the moral person, my liberty is subjected to its law, to reason, which does not allow liberty to be turned against itself. For example, if through caprice, or melancholy, or any other motive, I condemn myself to an abstinence too prolonged, if I impose on myself vigils protracted and beyond my strength; if I absolutely renounce all pleasure, and, by these excessive privations, endanger my health, my life, my reason, these are no longer indifferent actions. Sickness, death, madness, may become crimes, if we voluntarily bring them upon ourselves. I have not established this obligation of self-respect imposed on the moral person, therefore I cannot destroy it. Is self-respect founded on one of those arbitrary conventions that cease to exist when the two contracting parties freely renounce them? Are the two contracting parties here _me_ and myself? By no means; one of the contracting parties is not _me_, to wit, humanity, the moral person. And there is here neither convention nor contract. By the fact alone that the moral person is in us, we are obligated towards it, without convention of any sort, without contract that can be cancelled, and by the very nature of things. Hence it comes that obligation is absolute. Respect of the moral person in us is the general principle whence are derived all individual duties. We will cite some of them. The most important, that which governs all others, is the duty of remaining master of one's self. One may lose possession of himself in two ways, either by allowing himself to be carried away, or by allowing himself to be overcome, by yielding to enervating passions or to overwhelming passions, to anger or to melancholy. On either hand there is equal weakness. And I do not speak of the consequences of those vices for society and ourselves,--certainly they are very injurious; but they are much worse than that, they are already bad in themselves, because in themselves they give a blow to moral dignity, because they diminish liberty and disturb intelligence.