A Sensual Soul

The celebrated French writer Charles de Saint-Evremond (1614-1703) once wrote to a friend about his idea that, in addition to the thinking soul, there is a sensual soul, "which is more mixed with the body, which is within all sentient things, which knows and enjoys the pleasures." While an avowed hedonist, he lived in a Christian age, and he also had ideas about how Christianity overlapped with and even bested Epicureanism in some ways. He shared his thoughts the good life and the moral life in a series of brief, polished and terse epistolary essays. This collection contains the following works, all in new translations: -A Self-Portrait By Saint- vremond.-On the Pleasures.-On the Morality of Epicurus.-An Exemplary Voluptuary: Petronius.-"Acknowledge All Your Passions, to Exercise All Your Virtues" (A Letter).-"Abstaining from Pleasure Is a Sin" (A Letter).-"The Key to Happiness in Everyday Life".-"I Love, Therefore I Am" (A Letter).-On Friendship.-On Retirement.-Man, Who Would Like to Know Everything, Does Not Even Know Himself.-A Judgment on the Sciences in Which a Gentleman Can Engage.-"Eternal Love" (A Poem on Quietism)-How Devotion Is Our Last Romance.-Discourse on Religion.-Thoughts on Religion.-On the Fantastic Elements in the Poems of the Ancients.-Marshal d'Hocquincourt's Conversation with Father Canaye.-On Opera.-On the Characters in the Tragedies.-On the Peace Treaty.