‘From this explanation of the nature of fear and things fearful, and of the several dispositions that incline us to fear individually, we may plainly gather what confidence is, and the sort of things that inspire confidence, and the dispositions or habits of mind that incline us to confidence: because confidence is the opposite of fear, and that which inspires the one, the object of the one, is opposite to that which inspires, the object of, the other: and therefore, the hope (which θάρσος implies, its hope) of what is conducive to security, is attended by a fancy’ (or mental representation, or impression, derived from and connected with sense, see on I 11. 6) ‘of their being close at hand, and the expectation’ (ἐλπίς in its alternative, general, sense) ‘of things to be dreaded by a fancy of either their non-existence or remoteness’. This latter fancy being characteristic of fear, defin. § 1, we may infer that the opposite fancy is characteristic of confidence.
Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Edward Meredith Cope. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1877.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.