 Is ‘emotion’ the right term for the experiences under consideration? In Thomas Dixon’s well-known study (2003) of the history of the concept of emotion, he argues that the term ‘emotion’ was coined in the early 19th century, by psychologists impressed with physics, as a secular replacement for the morally, religiously, and metaphysically freighted distinction between ‘passion’ and ‘affection.’ In the older Christian psychology (which still had distinguished representatives in the late 19th century), the phenomena that we call emotions were called passions and affections, these two categories being distinguished from one another. Aquinas is a paradigm thinker in this psychology of “emotions.” Passions (passiones) are feeling-responses such as humans share with animals, responses to bodily and sensory occurrences (e.g. sense perceptions of danger, of food, of sexual opportunity). They are marked by visceral commotion and are associated with moral temptation or turpitude. Affections (affectiones), by contrast, are generated not in the sensory appetite, but in the will or intellectual appetite, a psychological capacity peculiar to human beings. Human beings share affectiones not with the animals, but with higher beings such as angels and God. Passions, however, are not always sinful, and a passion can be transformed into an affection if the person feeling it endorses it by an act of the will or intellectual appetite. Dixon argues that ‘emotion’ was coined by physiological psychologists Thomas Brown, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain. It was later adopted by William James (1884), though his work on religious experience (1901–02) was more phenomenological and less focused on physical causation. In “What Is An Emotion” (1884) James famously proposed that an emotion is just an awareness of a bodily perturbation that is directly produced by objects (for example, a large bear advancing toward you on a lonely path). In psychology even today ‘emotion’ tends to have this physicalist connotation and is less discriminating than the earlier vocabulary of passions and affections, with its openness to spiritual “emotions.” Rather than call the briefly sketched biblical responses of joy and so forth emotions, would it not be more discriminating and less confusing to follow the earlier Christian vocabulary and call them affections? If gratitude can succeed, as religious people think it can, in being to God, and if Paul’s joy can be about the moral status of the Corinthians’ remorse, then they seem clearly not to be simple responses to physical or sensory stimuli. Indeed, most human emotions fail to qualify as emotions in the original historical sense of the word. The kind that does plausibly qualify — “the startle response” (see Robinson 1995) — is only controversially an emotion in our ordinary sense of the word. Our ordinary sense is very far from its historical origin as Dixon has traced it. Dixon is right that ‘emotion’ blurs the distinction that ‘passion’ and ‘affection’ once embodied. But arguably that distinction is well lost. Fears marked by strong physiological commotion can be evoked by objects inaccessible to animals without an intellect, for example, a fall in the stock market. And it seems to take more than the mere sensory “stimulus” of a large bear coming toward me on a lonely path to arouse fear. For example, I may recognize her as my pet, and her rapid advance as her enthusiasm in greeting me. Nor is the moral dividing line between passions and affections valid. Passions may be morally beautiful (for example, a woman’s erotically tinged joy upon seeing her husband after an absence) and affections despicable (the cool cruel joy of humiliating a colleague as you dismantle his pet argument). The very indifference of the concept of emotion to whether the object is simple or intellectually complex, sensory or not, whether accompanied or not by bodily perturbations, and whether it merits moral evaluation or not, seems to recommend it in preference to the older vocabulary. Gratitude, contrition, compassion, joy, hope, and all the other religious emotions fit quite commodiously in the category of emotion.