ABSTRACT
Although they are separated by 400 years or so, Aquinas and Descartes both register the necessity, if analysing emotions, of rendering them as objects, of placing them at an intellectual distance from the selves that house them. In this respect their approaches are surprisingly similar:
We may consider the passions of the soul in two ways: first, in themselves; secondly, as being subject to the command of the reason and will. 1
The defectiveness of the sciences we inherit from the ancients is nowhere more apparent than in what they wrote about the Passions. For even though this is a topic about which knowledge has always been vigorously sought, and though it does not seem to be one of the most difficult – because everyone feels them in himself, one need not borrow any observation from elsewhere to discover their nature – nevertheless what the Ancients taught about them is so little, and for the most part so little believable, that I cannot hope to approach the truth unless I forsake the paths they followed. For this reason I shall be obliged to write here as though I was treating a topic which no one before me had ever described. 2
