humility.  Immoderate desire for honor is termed ambition; if the desire to please others is kept within due bounds it is praised as unpretentiousness, courtesy, modesty (modestia).  Ambition, luxury, drunkenness, avarice, and lust have no contraries, for temperance, sobriety, and chastity are not emotions (passive states), but denote the power of the soul by which the former are moderated, and which is discussed later under the name fortitudo.  Self-abasement or humility is a feeling of pain arising from the consideration of our weakness and impotency; its opposite is self-complacency.  Either of these may be accompanied by the (erroneous) belief that we have done the saddening or gladdening act of our own free will; in this case the former affection is termed repentance.  Hope and fear are inconstant pleasure and pain, arising from the idea of something past or to come, concerning whose coming and whose issue we are still in doubt.  There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear without hope; for he who still doubts imagines something which excludes the existence of that which is expected.  If the cause of doubt 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.