Editing Emotion (section)

== History ==
Human nature and the accompanying bodily sensations have always been part of the interests of thinkers and philosophers. Far more extensively, this has also been of great interest to both Western and Eastern societies. Emotional states have been associated with the divine and with the enlightenment of the human mind and body.<ref>{{cite book|last=Kagan|first=Jerome|title=What is emotion?: History, measures, and meanings|publisher=Yale University Press|year=2007|pages=10, 11}}</ref> The ever-changing actions of individuals and their mood variations have been of great importance to most of the Western philosophers (including [[Aristotle]], [[Plato]], [[Descartes]], [[Aquinas]], and [[Hobbes]]), leading them to propose extensive theories—often competing theories—that sought to explain emotion and the accompanying motivators of human action, as well as its consequences.

In the [[Age of Enlightenment]], Scottish thinker [[David Hume]]<ref>{{cite book|last=Mossner|first=Ernest Campbell|title=The Life of David Hume|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2001|pages=2 |isbn=978-0-199-24336-5}}</ref> proposed a revolutionary argument that sought to explain the main motivators of human action and conduct. He proposed that actions are motivated by "fears, desires, and passions". As he wrote in his book ''[[A Treatise of Human Nature]]'' (1773): "Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will… it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will… The reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them".<ref>{{cite book|last=Hume|first=David|title=A treatise of human nature|publisher=Courier Corporation|year=2003}}{{ISBN?}}</ref> With these lines, Hume attempted to explain that reason and further action would be subject to the desires and experience of the self. Later thinkers would propose that actions and emotions are deeply interrelated with social, political, historical, and cultural aspects of reality that would also come to be associated with sophisticated neurological and physiological research on the brain and other parts of the physical body.