At any rate one can always hope for more from him than from the
spendthrift, who has lost his all and is himself helpless and in debt.
_Mas da el duro que el desnudo_, says a Spanish proverb; the man who
has a hard heart will give more than the man who has an empty purse.
The upshot of all this is that Avarice is not a vice.
On the other side, it may be said that Avarice is the quintessence of
all vices. When physical pleasures seduce a man from the right path,
it is his sensual nature--the animal part of him--which is at fault.
He is carried away by its attractions, and, overcome by the impression
of the moment, he acts without thinking of the consequences. When,
on the other hand, he is brought by age or bodily weakness to the
condition in which the vices that he could never abandon end by
abandoning him, and his capacity for physical pleasure dies--if he
turns to Avarice, the intellectual desire survives the sensual. Money,
which represents all the good things of this world, and is these good
things in the abstract, now becomes the dry trunk overgrown with all
the dead lusts of the flesh, which are egoism in the abstract. They
come to life again in the love of the Mammon. The transient pleasure
of the senses has become a deliberate and calculated lust of money,
which, like that to which it is directed, is symbolical in its nature,
and, like it, indestructible.
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