Hobbes writes the following “Of Man’’:

When in the mind of man, Appetites, and Aversions, Hopes, and Feares, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternately; and divers goods and evil consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an Appetite to it; sometimes an Aversion from it; sometimes Hope to be able to do it; sometimes Despaire, or Feare to attempt it; the whole summe of Desires, Aversions, Hopes and Fears, continued till the thing will be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call deliberation (...).

Here is the key passage from book 3 of Seneca’s On Anger, in the section on moral therapy called “ How to Avoid the Onset of Anger’’:
We may find help in that sound advice of Democritus which points to tranquility “if we refrain from doing many things, either in private or in public, or anything beyond our powers.’’ If one runs off on many different activities, one will never have the luck to spend a day without some annoyance arising, from someone or something, to dispose the mind to anger. If one hurries through the crowded parts of the city, one cannot help knocking into many people; one is bound to slip, to be held back, to be splashed. In the same way, if one’s course of life is fragmented and always taking a different direction, many things will get in the way and there will be much to complain about—one man has disappointed us, another put us off, a third cut us short; our plans did not take the course that we intended. No one has fortune so much on his side as always to answer to his wishes, if he attempts many things. As a result, should he do so, he finds his plans thwarted and becomes impatient with people and things. At the slightest provocation he loses his temper with the person involved, with the matter in hand, with his position, with his luck, with himself. So if the mind is to have the possibility of being calm, it must not be tossed about nor, as I said, exhausted by doing many things or anything too ambitious for its powers. (...)

We can learn a good deal about the rhetoric of human nature in early modern Europe simply by asking what passions were.
When we do, we find not only that their descriptions disagree but also that the things described as passions seem incommensurable. Are passions tangible “things’’ residing in the soul, or are they dispositions of the heart, or beliefs of the mind? Is passion a matter of personal expression, or is it something essentially social that a person performs? Do they come from our interior, or from the things we perceive? Can they be measured and manipulated— their causes controlled—or do passions elude control by their very nature? Are they divine, diabolical, or human, and can we distinguish them according to their origin? Are they the enabling condition of virtue or its enemy? Are they necessary or disposable? What is their number and what do they do?