1. The author makes an analogy between ideas and the (now) so-called “primary qualities” of matter, extension and solidity, and impressions and the “sensible qualities,” colors, tastes, smells etc. Ideas do not blend with each other, being endowed with a kind of “impenetrability,” while impressions may mix to the point of an “entire union,” where “each of them may lose itself, and contribute only to vary that uniform impression, which arises from the whole.” This gives rise to “some of the most curious phænomena of the human mind.”

2. There is a stubborn phenomenon of this type which threatens every system which has attempted to explain the passions. It is understandable that such cases arise in natural philosophy, where we are making only conjectures, but it should not happen in the science of the mind, “as the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known.” So the author can avoid any contradiction in his system in accommodating this phenomenon, though it does compromise its simplicity, “hitherto its principal force and beauty.”

3. Love and hatred differ from pride and humility in that the former are always conjoined to new affections of benevolence and anger, while the latter are not. They are “not compleated within themselves, nor rest in that emotion, which they produce, but carry the mind to something farther.” The farther thing is a desire for the happiness of the beloved person or for the misery of the hated person. This remarkable difference deserves our attention.

4. There are two different ways to account for this. The first is that an end is always part of love and hatred. The nature of love might be understood as the desire for the happiness of the beloved, and hatred the desire for his misery. “They are not only inseparable but the same.”

5. But this explanation is contrary to experience. We may love or hate someone for quite a while before reflecting on their happiness or misery, though “’tis certain we never love any person without desiring his happiness, nor hate any without wishing his misery.” The ideas of happiness and misery have to be presented to the imagination. This “clearly proves, that the desires are not the same with love and hatred, nor make any essential part of them.”

6. The only remaining explanation is that it is the “original constitution of the mind” that conjoins benevolence to love and anger to hatred. “As nature has given to the body certain appetites and inclinations, which she encreases, diminishes, or changes according to the situation of the fluids or solids; she has proceeded in the same manner with the mind.” There is no necessary connection here, as nature might not have given us this constitution: we might be angry at those we love and benevolent to those we hate. There is no contradiction in this. “If the sensation of the passion and desire be opposite, nature cou’d have alter’d the sensation without altering the tendency of the desire, and by that means made them incompatible with each other.”

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