no right over the physical movements which
immediately depend on it. But the instinct does not confine itself to
simple desire; it presses, it advances, it endeavors to realize its
object; and if it does not meet in the autonomy of the mind an energetic
resistance, it will even anticipate it, it will itself take the
initiative of those sorts of acts over which the will alone has the right
to pronounce. For the instinct of conservation tends without ceasing to
usurp the legislative powers in the domain of the will, and its efforts
go to exercise over man a domination as absolute as over the beast.
There are, then, two sorts of distinct movements, which, in themselves
and by their origin, in each affective phenomenon, arise in man by the
instinct of conservation: those firstly which immediately proceed from
sensation, and which, consequently, are quite involuntary; then those
which in principle could and would be voluntary, but from which the blind
instinct of nature takes all freedom. The first refer to the affection
itself, and are united necessarily with it; the others respond rather to
the cause and to the object of the affections, and are thus accidental
and susceptible of modification, and cannot be mistaken for infallible
signs of the affective phenomena. But as both one and the other, when
once the object is determined, are equally necessary to the instinct of
nature, so they assist, both one and the other, the expression of
affective phenomena; a necessary competition, in order that the
expression should be complete and form a harmonious whole.

If, then, the will is sufficiently independent to repress the aggressions
of instinct and to maintain its rights against this blind force, all the
phenomena which the instinct of nature, once excited, produce, in its
proper domain, will preserve, it is true, their force; but those of the
second kind, those which came out of a foreign jurisdiction, and which it
pretended to subject arbitrarily to its power, these phenomena would not
take place. Thus the phenomena are no longer in harmony; but it is
precisely in their opposition that consists the expression of the moral
force. Suppose that we see a man a prey to the most poignant affection,
manifested by movements of the first kind, by quite involuntary
movements. His veins swell, his muscles contract convulsively, his voice
is stifled, his chest is raised and projects, whilst the lower portion of
the torso is sunken and co