Select Works, Section 348 (part 2)

Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches finally upon the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life and generation by which the body becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain: this principle it was that made the body a thing of bile and bitterness, and thus it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states- churlish and angry under stress of environment- so that being wronged itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition. That this soul-vestige, which determines the movements of passion is of one essence [con-substantial] with the other is evident from the consideration that those of us less avid of corporeal pleasures, especially those that wholly repudiate the body, are the least prone to anger and to all experiences not rising from reason. That this vegetal principle, underlying anger, should be present in trees and yet passion be lacking in them cannot surprise us since they are not subject to the movements of blood and bile. If the occasions of anger presented themselves where there is no power of sensation there could be no more than a physical ebullition with something approaching to resentment [an unconscious reaction]; where sensation exists there is at once something more; the recognition of wrong and of the necessary defence carries with it the intentional act. But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a desiring faculty and a passionate faculty- the first identical with the vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it acting upon the blood or bile or upon the entire living organism- such a division would not give us a true opposition, for the two would stand in the relation of earlier phase to derivative. This difficulty is reasonably met by considering that both faculties are derivatives and making the division apply to them in so far as they are new productions from a common source; for the division applies to movements of desire as such, not to the essence from which they rise. That essence is not, of its own nature, desire; it is, however, the force which by consolidating itself with the active manifestation proceeding from it makes the desire a completed thing. And that derivative which culminates in passion may not unreasonably be thought of as a vestige-phase lodged about the heart, since the heart is not the seat of the soul, but merely the centre to that portion of the blood which is concerned in the movements of passion.