The imagination acts with great force upon the body, whether its numerous associations produce pleasure or pain. But the passions pour a constant stream upon the wheels of life. They have been subdivided into emotions and passions properly so called. The former have for their objects present, the latter, future good and evil. All the objects of the passions are accompanied with desire or aversion. To the former belong chiefly, hope, love, ambition, and avarice; to the latter, fear, hatred, malice, envy, and the like. Joy, anger, and terror, belong to the class of emotions. The passions and emotions have been further divided into stimulating and sedative. Our business at present is to consider their first effect only upon the body. In the original constitution of human nature, we were made to be stimulated by such passions and emotions only as have moral good for their objects. Man was designed to be always under the influence of hope, love, and joy. By the loss of his innocence, he has subjected himself to the dominion of passions and emotions of a malignant nature; but they possess, in common with such as are good, a stimulus which renders them subservient to the purpose of promoting animal life. It is true, they are like the stimulus of a dislocated bone in their operation upon the body, compared with the action of antagonist muscles stretched over bones, which gently move in their natural sockets. The effects of the good passions and emotions, in promoting health and longevity, have been taken notice of by many writers. They produce a flame, gentle and pleasant, like oil perfumed with frankincense in the lamp of life. There are instances likewise of persons who have derived strength and long life from the influence of the evil passions and emotions that have been mentioned. Dr. Darwin relates the history of a man, who used to overcome the fatigue induced by travelling, by thinking of a person whom he hated. The debility induced by disease is often removed by a sudden change in the temper. This is so common, that even nurses predict a recovery in persons as soon as they become peevish and ill-natured, after having been patient during the worst stage of their sickness. This peevishness acts as a gentle stimulus upon the system in its languid state, and thus turns the scale in favour of life and health. The famous Benjamin Lay, of this state, who lived to be eighty years of age, was of a very irascible temper. Old Elwes was a prodigy of avarice, and every court in Europe furnishes instances of men who have attained to extreme old age, who have lived constantly under the dominion of ambition. In the course of a long inquiry which I instituted some years ago into the state of the body and mind in old people, I did not find a single person above eighty, who had not possessed an active understanding, or active passions. Those different and opposite faculties of the mind, when in excess, happily supply the place of each other.