Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/79

76 pleasure or pain, the same emotion involuntarily arises in us. But this moreover not only gives rise to sympathetic joy and sorrow, but it may also inspire envy and pleasure at the misfortune of others, i.e. if we ourselves wish to enjoy another’s pleasures, or if we are previously filled with hatred towards the unfortunate.—Just as pleasure becomes love by means of the idea of its cause, so mere appetite (appetitus, conatus) becomes desire (cupiditas), when joined with the idea of its object.

In Spinoza’s description of emotional and volitional life we discover a degree of vacillation between a purely intellectualistic and a more realistic (or voluntaristic) theory. In several passages he describes the emotions as confused and inadequate ideas (ideæ confusæ et inadequatæ), which vanish as soon as the idea becomes perfectly clear. But there are other passages in which the emotions are regarded as real, positive states, which can only be displaced by other real states. The same thing occurs with the concept of the will. In several passages volition is treated as one with the activity of thought; will and understanding are identical. But in other passages the will is identical with the impulse of self-preservation, and all ideas of value and value-judgments are dependent on it; “We seek, choose, desire and wish for a thing, not because we think it is good, but, inversely, we think a thing is good, because we seek, choose, desire and wish for it.” In this case therefore he asserts the priority of the will.—This vacillation is evidently (in agreement with F. Tönnies in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, VII) to be explained from the fact that, during the preparation of the Ethics, Spinoza’s older, intellectualistic