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.