 Pretty much every philosopher of the early modern period developed distinctive terms of art for discussing the emotions. Still, some vocabulary was general currency. The most common term for describing the emotions in the seventeenth century was undoubtedly ‘passion,’ perhaps because of the influence of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649), perhaps because of a general tendency to see the emotions as receptive, passive states. It was not the only term used: ‘affect’ and ‘sentiment’ also appeared, as did ‘perturbation,’ and ‘emotion,’ although these were not usually terms of art, and ‘emotion’ usually meant little more than ‘motion.’ The choice of terminology often marked intellectual allegiances: Descartes saw himself as introducing a new theory, in which “passions” are a species of perception, while Spinoza’s “affects” signaled his debt to Stoic ethics, as well as distinctive features of his metaphysics. In his Pensées (1670), Pascal introduced “feelings” or “sentiments” [sentiments], sometimes contrasting them with the corrupted passions and marking his neo-Augustinian understanding of love (see Pensées 680, 531).