Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"Plutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"
Plutarch
Classical literature; Essays; Ethics; Philosophy
1. Envy and hatred are passions so like each other that they are
often taken for the same. And generally, vice has (as it were) many
hooks, whereby it gives unto those passions that hang thereto many
opportunities to be twisted and entangled with one another; for as
differing diseases of the body agree in many like causes and effects,
so do the disturbances of the mind. He who is in prosperity is equally
an occasion of grief to the envious and to the malicious man; therefore
we look upon benevolence, which is a willing our neighbor’s good, as
an opposite to both envy and hatred, and fancy these two to be the
same because they have a contrary purpose to that of love. But their
resemblances make them not so much one as their unlikeness makes
them distinct. Therefore we endeavor to describe each of them apart,
beginning at the original of either passion.
2. Hatred proceeds from an opinion that the person we hate is evil,
if not generally so, at least in particular to us. For they who think
themselves injured are apt to hate the author of their wrong; yea, even
those who are reputed injurious or malicious to others than ourselves
we usually nauseate and abhor. But envy has only one sort of object,
the felicity of others. Whence it becomes infinite, and, like an evil
or diseased eye, is offended with every thing that is bright. On the
other hand, hatred is always determined by the subject it adheres to.
3. Secondly, hatred may be conceived even against brutes; for there are
some men who have an antipathy to cats or beetles or toads or serpents.
Germanicus could endure neither the crowing nor the sight of a cock;
and the Persian Magi were killers of mice, as creatures which they
both hated themselves and accounted odious to God. In like manner also
all the Arabians and Ethiopians abhor them. But envy is purely a human
passion, and directed only against man.
4. Envy is not likely to be found among brutes, whose fancies are not
moved by the apprehensions of each other’s good or evil; neither can
they be spirited with the notions of glorious or dishonorable, by which
envy is chiefly stirred up. Yet they have mutual hatred; they kill each
other, and wage most incredible wars. The eagles and the dragons fight,
the crows and the owls, yea, the little titmouse and linnet; insomuch
that it is said, the very blood of these creatures, when slain, will by
no means be mixed; but though you would temper them together, they will
immediately separate again. The lion also vehemently hates the cock,
and the elephant the hog; but this probably proceeds from fear; for
what they fear, the same are they inclined to hate.
We see then herein a great difference betwixt envy and hate, that the
one is natural to brutes, but they are not at all capable of the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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