 Happiness, as Descartes defines it for Elisabeth, is a “perfect contentment of mind and inner satisfaction” (AT IV 264/CSMK 257), or the “satisfaction and pleasure” that accompanies the practice of virtue (AT IV 284/CSMK 263). In the Passions, he distinguishes these affects from the passions that originate in the body. The former are described as “internal emotions of the soul,” which are “produced in the soul only by the soul itself. In this they differ from its passions, which always depend on some movement of the [animal] spirits” (art. 147; CSM I 381). “Internal emotions” are thus independent of the body and the basis of a happiness that can withstand “the most violent assaults of the passions”: