 Even recognizing some early modern writings on the emotions for what they are is no easy task. In part, this is due to diverging and rapidly changing vocabularies for talking about the emotions. Seventeenth century philosophers favored talk of ‘passion’, ‘affect,’ and ‘affection,’ while their eighteenth century counterparts made increasing use of ‘sentiment.’ None of these terms (or their French and Latin cognates) carried the meaning they now do or that ‘emotion’ has come to bear (which had the sense of physical motion or agitation as much as psychological well into the nineteenth century). It is also easy to overlook the role early modern philosophy gives to ‘calm’ emotions, if we concentrate on the current notion of passions as violent, turbulent and overwhelming. In general, early modern philosophers tended to prefer their emotions calm, but took turbulence to mark only certain kinds of passions. Another difficulty arises from the seemingly ambivalent nature early modern philosophers granted to the emotions. ‘Passion,’ in particular, is connected with a kind of receptivity, but how the passions are receptive and what they are receptive to tend to cross over various comfortable divisions taken to mark early modern philosophy: mind and body; perception and will; reason, judgment and desire; occurrent consciousness and dispositions or character; representations and presentations; private and social; nature and convention; and even what is internal and what external to subjectivity.