That the Soul expends its Passions upon False Objects, where the True are wanting

The soul that has nothing to fasten upon will yet fasten. It is not in our power to leave passion unemployed, any more than we can leave the body at rest by refusing it all motion. When we have lost the true cause of our sorrow, we do not therefore cease to sorrow — we merely shift the target. We weep, and find something, anything, worthy of our weeping.

I have observed this in myself at funerals, where grief, having exhausted its proper object, turns upon trifles with an almost comic fury. A man will rage at the pallbearers for their slowness, or fall to sobbing over the dead man’s coat left hanging on a peg. The coat is nothing. But the soul must pour itself somewhere, and it cannot hold itself back when it is full. This is not hypocrisy — it is the mechanics of feeling, which demands an outlet whether the outlet is worthy or no.

“We weep and lament, and tear our hair, but we do not seek the cause of our affliction in ourselves; we seek it abroad, in the empty air, in whatever happens to present itself.”

The same engine that drives us to great loves and great griefs may be set running by the most frivolous provocations. I have seen men of perfectly sound judgment reduced to fury by a game of chess; men who bore the deaths of their children with admirable composure but wept at the loss of a favourite dog. These are not failings in proportion so much as evidence of the soul’s need to exercise itself upon something. Nature does not allow a vacuum in the feelings any more than in the physical world.

What follows from this is that we ought to be suspicious of the vehemence of our own emotions. When we find ourselves most passionate, we should ask whether the passion has met its true object or only borrowed one. The man who tears his garments at the graveside may be weeping not for the dead but for himself, for his own mortality, for some loss he has never permitted himself to name. The soul is endlessly inventive in its evasions, and endlessly hungry for the exercise of its powers.