work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context 4525,Ruling Passion,HDIS,2003-11-04 00:00:00 UTC,"As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death;
The young disease that must subdue at length,
Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength:
So, cast and mingled with his very frame,
The mind's disease, its ruling passion came:
Each vital humour which should feed the whole,
Soon flows to this, in body and in soul
;
Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head,
As the mind opens, and its functions spread,
Imagination plies her dang'rous art,
And pours it all upon the peccant part.
(Epistle II, ll. 133-44) ",2004-05-25,11881,"•I've included this entry twice: once in Body and once in Government (5/25/2004).
•Christopher Fox reads these lines as influencing Hume and quotes the following from the Treatise: ""a predominant passion swallows up an inferior, and converts it to it self."" See Fox, ""Defining Eighteenth-Century Psychology"" in Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 1987). p. 11.","""So, cast and mingled with his very frame, / The mind's disease, its ruling passion came: / Each vital humour which should feed the whole, / Soon flows to this, in body and in soul.""","",2011-04-26 18:10:21 UTC,Epistle II