In the fifth book, in trying to give some idea of our passions, I have, it seems to me, adequately shown that they are established to unite us to all sensible things, and to make us choose among them the disposition we should have for their preservation and our own; that just as our senses unite us to our bodies and distribute (so to speak) our soul into all the parts that compose it, so our emotions make us go outside ourselves to distribute ourselves into everything around us: that finally they ceaselessly represent things to us, not according to what they are in themselves in order to form judgments of truth, but according to the relation they have to us, in order to form judgments useful for the preservation of our being and the being of those with whom we are united either by our will or by nature.