Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on quotations
- 1 Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions
- 2 Passions and affections in Augustine and Aquinas
- 3 From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason
- 4 The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’: David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers
- 5 The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin
- 6 Christian and theistic responses to the new physicalist emotions paradigm
- 7 What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics
- 8 Conclusions: how history can help us think about ‘the emotions’
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on quotations
- 1 Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions
- 2 Passions and affections in Augustine and Aquinas
- 3 From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason
- 4 The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’: David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers
- 5 The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin
- 6 Christian and theistic responses to the new physicalist emotions paradigm
- 7 What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics
- 8 Conclusions: how history can help us think about ‘the emotions’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Appetite, fear, hope and the rest of the passions are not called voluntary; for they proceed not from, but are the will, and the will is not voluntary: for, a man can no more say that he will will, than he will will will, and so make an infinite repetition of the word will, which is absurd and insignificant.
Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, 69Age of reason, age of passions
In 1755 Samuel Johnson's dictionary of the English language was first published. The entries for ‘affection’, ‘appetite’, ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’, ‘passion’, ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’ provide a rough-and-ready guide to usage in the middle of the eighteenth century. They reveal that the predominant terms for describing states such as love, fear, joy and sorrow were still ‘passions’ and ‘affections’, each of which was given an extensive entry. Isaac Watts, one of the authors discussed below, was quoted as an authority for the entry on ‘passions’, to the following effect: ‘The word passion signifies the receiving of any action in a large philosophical sense; in a more limited philosophical sense, it signifies any of the affections of human nature; as love, fear, joy, sorrow: but the common people confine it only to anger.’ ‘Passions’, as well as being a very general term, referred to the more violent commotions of the mind. The seventh meaning given for ‘passion’ was ‘The last suffering of the redeemer of the world’.
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- From Passions to EmotionsThe Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, pp. 62 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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