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963 s4s4s4s4s4 c h a p t e r 1 6a How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Harm Well-Being b There is more of a connection than you think between the perfection of the soul and the improvement of the goods of the body; man can leave these two things distinct and alternately envisage each one of them; but he cannot separate them entirely without finally losing sight of both of them. Animals have the same senses that we have and more or less the same desires: there are no material passions that we do not have in common with them and whose germ is not found in a dog as well as in ourselves. So why do the animals only know how to provide for their first and most crude needs, while we infinitely vary our enjoyments and increase them constantly? What makes us superior in this to animals is that we use our soul to find the material goods toward which their instinctaloneleadsthem.Withman, the angel teaches the brute the art of satisfying himself. Man is capable of rising abovethegoodsof thebodyandevenof scorninglife,anideaanimals a. “It is the soul that teaches the body the art of satisfying itself. You cannot neglect the one up to a certain point without decreasing the means to satisfy the other” (YTC, CVf, p. 33). b. “The perfection of the soul serves not only to find new means to satisfy the body, but it also increases the ability that the body has to enjoy. Idea of L[ouis (ed.)]. “I am persuaded in fact that a man of spirit, imagination, genius, feels material enjoyments a thousand times more when he gives himself to them than a fool, a dull or coarse being” (Rubish, 1). 964 excessive love of well-being do not even conceive; he therefore knows how to multiply these very advantages to a degree that they also cannot imagine. Everything that elevates, enlarges, expands the soul, makes it more capable of succeeding at even those enterprises that do not concern it. Everything that enervates the soul, on the contrary, or lowers it,weakens it for all things, the principal ones as well as the least ones, and threatens to make it almost as powerless for the first as for the second. Thus, the soul must remain great and strong, if only to be able, from time to time, to put its strength and its greatness at the service of the body. If men ever succeed in being content with material goods, it is to be believed that they would little by little lose the art of producing them, and that they would end by enjoying them without discernment and without progress, like the animals. ...

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