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Emotion

Key terms
What it is
Particular passions
Reason and passion
Disorder and the city

Passion and the body

Is a feeling in the soul or in the body? Passion is the name given to a movement of the soul joined to a change in the body. These readings ask which comes first, and how the feeling and the bodily change relate.

3 readings

In Book I, chapter 1, of On the Soul Aristotle asks whether the affections of the soul belong to the soul alone or to the composite of soul and body. He takes “anger” as his instance and sets the “physicist” beside the “dialectician”, each defining it by “matter” or by “form”. The treatise is the foundation of the scholastic psychology of the “passions”, and the passage stands under this term as the place where the affections are first brought into the study of nature.

In the Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, question 22, article 3, St Thomas asks whether “passion” is more properly in the “sensitive appetite” than in the “intellectual appetite”. In the body of the article he speaks of “corporeal transmutation” and appeals to the definitions of St John Damascene. The question opens his treatise on the passions of the soul, and the article gives the term its place under this heading.

Chapter 25 of the second volume of William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), on “The Emotions”, sets out the hypothesis later called the James-Lange theory. He contrasts what “common-sense says” with the order that he proposes, in which “bodily manifestations” come first. The chapter was among the most debated in nineteenth-century psychology, and the passage stands under this term as a modern account of what an emotion is.