is removed, hope is transformed into a
feeling of confidence and fear into despair. There are as many kinds of
emotions as there are classes among their objects or causes.

Besides the emotions to be termed "passions" in the strict sense, states
of passivity, Spinoza recognizes others which relate to us as active. Only
those which are of the nature of pleasure or desire belong to this class
of _active_ emotions; the painful affections are entirely excluded, since
without exception they diminish or arrest the mind's power to think. The
totality of these nobler impulses is called _fortitudo_ (fortitude), and
a distinction is made among them between _animositas_ (vigor of soul) and
_generositas_ (magnanimity, noble-mindedness), according as rational
desire is directed to the preservation of our own being or to aiding our
fellow-men. Presence of mind and temperance are examples of the former,
modesty and clemency of the latter. By this bridge, the idea of the active
emotions, we may follow Spinoza into the field of ethics.

%(c) Practical Philosophy.%--Spinoza's theory of ethics is based on the
equation of the three concepts, perfection, reality, activity (V. _prop_.
40, _dem_.). The more active a thing is, the more perfect it is and the
more reality it possesses. It is active, however, when it is the complete
or adequate cause of that which takes place within it or without it;
passive when it is not at all the cause of this, or the cause only in part.
A cause is termed adequate, when its effect can be clearly and distinctly
perceived from it alone. The human mind, as a _modus_ of thought, is active
when it has adequate ideas; all its passion consists in confused ideas,
among which belong the affections produced by external objects. The essence
of the mind is thought; volition is not only dependent on cognition, but at
bottom identical with it.

Descartes had already made the will the power of affirmation and negation.
Spinoza advances a step further: the affirmation cannot be separated from
the idea affirmed, it is impossible to conceive a truth without in the
same act affirming it, the idea involves its own affirmation. "Will and
understanding are one and the same" (II. _prop_. 49, _cor_.). For Spinoza
moral activity is entirely resolved into cognitive activity. To the two
stages of knowing, _imaginatio_ and _intellectus_, correspond two stages
of willing--desire, which is ruled by imagination, and volition, which is
gu