Antonio Damasio's "Looking for Spinoza"
An affect cannot be restrained or neutralized except by a contrary affect that is stronger than the affect to be restrained. In other words, Spinoza recommended that we fight a negative emotion with a stronger but positive emotion brought about by reasoning and intellectual effort (12). * . . . his (Spinoza's) notion that the human mind is the idea of the human body (12). * Spinoza prescribed an ideal democratic state, where the hallmarks were freedom of speech-- let every man think what he wants and say what he thinks, he wrote--separation of church and state, and a generoud social contract that promoted the well-being of citizens and the harmony of government (15). * Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind (28). * The single word homeostasis is convenient shorthand for the ensemble of regulations and the resulting state of regulated life. . . . We can picture the homeostasis machine as a large multibranched tree of phenomena cha...