1. Envy and hatred are passions so like each other that they are
often taken for the same. And generally, vice has (as it were) many
hooks, whereby it gives unto those passions that hang thereto many
opportunities to be twisted and entangled with one another; for as
differing diseases of the body agree in many like causes and effects,
so do the disturbances of the mind. He who is in prosperity is equally
an occasion of grief to the envious and to the malicious man; therefore
we look upon benevolence, which is a willing our neighbor’s good, as
an opposite to both envy and hatred, and fancy these two to be the
same because they have a contrary purpose to that of love. But their
resemblances make them not so much one as their unlikeness makes
them distinct. Therefore we endeavor to describe each of them apart,
beginning at the original of either passion.
2. Hatred proceeds from an opinion that the person we hate is evil,
if not generally so, at least in particular to us. For they who think
themselves injured are apt to hate the author of their wrong; yea, even
those who are reputed injurious or malicious to others than ourselves
we usually nauseate and abhor. But envy has only one sort of object,
the felicity of others. Whence it becomes infinite, and, like an evil
or diseased eye, is offended with every thing that is bright. On the
other hand, hatred is always determined by the subject it adheres to.
3. Secondly, hatred may be conceived even against brutes; for there are
some men who have an antipathy to cats or beetles or toads or serpents.
Germanicus could endure neither the crowing nor the sight of a cock;
and the Persian Magi were killers of mice, as creatures which they
both hated themselves and accounted odious to God. In like manner also
all the Arabians and Ethiopians abhor them. But envy is purely a human
passion, and directed only against man.
4. Envy is not likely to be found among brutes, whose fancies are not
moved by the apprehensions of each other’s good or evil; neither can
they be spirited with the notions of glorious or dishonorable, by which
envy is chiefly stirred up. Yet they have mutual hatred; they kill each
other, and wage most incredible wars. The eagles and the dragons fight,
the crows and the owls, yea, the little titmouse and linnet; insomuch
that it is said, the very blood of these creatures, when slain, will by
no means be mixed; but though you would temper them together, they will
immediately separate again. The lion also vehemently hates the cock,
and the elephant the hog; but this probably proceeds from fear; for
what they fear, the same are they inclined to hate.
We see then herein a great difference betwixt envy and hate, that the
one is natural to brutes, but they are not at all capable of the other.
5. Further, envy is always unjust; for none wrong by being happy, and
upon this sole account they are envied. But hatred is often just; for
there are some men so much to be avoided and disliked, that we should
judge those worthy to be hated themselves who do not shun and detest
them. And of this it is no weak evidence, that many will acknowledge
they hate, but none will confess they envy; and hatred of the evil is
registered amongst laudable things.
Therefore, as some were commending Charillus, the nephew of
Lycurgus and king of Sparta, for his universally mild and gentle
disposition,—How, answered his colleague, can Charillus be a virtuous
person, who is pleasing even to the vicious? So the poet too, when he
had variously and with an infinite curiosity described the deformities
of Thersites’s body, easily couched all the baseness of his manners in
a word,—
Most hateful to Achilles and Ulysses too;
for to be an enemy to the good is the greatest extravagance of vice.
Men will deny the envy; and when it is alleged, will feign a thousand
excuses, pretending they were angry, or that they feared or hated the
person, cloaking envy with the name of any passion they can think of,
and concealing it as the most loathsome sickness of the soul.
6. Moreover, these disturbances of the mind, like plants, must be
nourished and augmented by the same roots from which they spring;
therefore hatred increases as the persons hated grow worse, while
envy swells bigger as the envied rise higher in the true braveries of
virtue. Upon this consideration Themistocles, whilst he was yet young,
said that he had done nothing gallant, for he was not yet envied. And
we know that, as the cantharis is most busy with ripe fruits and roses
in their beauty, so envy is most employed about the eminently good and
those who are glorious in their places and esteem.
Again, extreme badness makes hatred more vehement and bitter. The
Athenians therefore had so utter an abhorrence of those who accused
Socrates, that they would neither lend them fire, nor answer them any
question, nor wash with them in the same water, but commanded the
servants to pour it out as polluted; till these sycophants, no longer
able to bear up under the pressure of this hatred, put an end to their
own lives.
Yet envy often gives place to the splendor of a matchless prosperity.
For it is not likely that any envied Alexander or Cyrus, when they
arrived at the height of their conquests and became lords of all. But
as the sun, where he passes highest and sends down his beams most
directly, has none or very little shadow, so they who are exalted to
the meridian of fortune, shining aloof over the head of envy, have
scarce any thing of their brightness eclipsed, while envy retires,
being driven away by the brightness overspreading it.
On the contrary, hatred is not vanquished by the greatness and glory
of its objects. For though Alexander had not one to envy him, yet he
had many haters, by whose treacheries at last he fell. So, on the other
side, misfortunes cause envy to cease, but take not enmity away; for
men will be malicious even toward abject enemies, but none envy the
distressed. However, what was said by one of our Sophists, that the
envious are tenderly inclinable to pity, is true; and in this appears
a great unlikeness of these passions, that hatred leaves neither the
happy nor the miserable, but envy becomes languid when its object has
either prosperity or adversity in excess.