Note 77 — Chapter X · ETHICS. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE STOIC ETHICS. ABSTRACT THEORY OF MORALITY.

(b) Varieties of emotion. Emotions being called forth by imagination, their character depends on the kind of imagination which produces them. Now all impulses are directed to what is good and evil, and consist either in pursuing what appears to be a good, or in avoiding what appears to be an evil.77 This good and this evil is sometimes a present, and sometimes a future object. Hence there result four chief classes of faulty imagination, and, corresponding with them, four classes of emotions. From an irrational opinion as to what is good there arises pleasure, when it refers to things present; desire, when it refers to things future. A faulty opinion of present evils produces care; of future evils, fear.78 Zeno had already distinguished these four principal varieties of emotions.79 The same division was adopted by his pupil Aristo,80 and afterwards became quite general. Yet the vagueness, already mentioned, appears in the Stoic system in the definition of individual emotions. By some, particularly by Chrysippus, the essence of emotions is placed in the imagination which causes them; by others, in the state of mind which the imagination produces.81 The four principal classes of emotions are again subdivided into numerous subordinate classes, in the enumeration of which the Stoic philosophers appear to have been more guided by the use of language than by psychology.82