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The experience of the passion is the last redoubt where the mystery of psychic reality can hide. Unlike the philosophy of action, hedonism, functionalism, behavioralism, or theories of biological adaptation or homeostatic balance, passion is an ethic of excess and an esthetic of suffering and death. Passions are ritual acts which convey the expressions of the movements of the soul. Rather than considering them on the basis of the facts and characters which appear to be at their source, we should wonder about their inner meaning and their symbolic significance.