Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/522

 504 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sequently he believes in God. In the case of love, it is very generally recognized that, especially in earlier years, it is not the mere reaction of our soul which proceeds directly from the influence of its object, as the sensation of color arises in our opti- cal apparatus. On the contrary, the soul' has an amatory impulse, and selects for itself an object which satisfies this need, although the soul itself under certain circumstances first clothes that object with the qualities which apparently evoke the love. With the modification to be introduced presently, nothing can be shown to disprove the assertion that the like is the case with hate: that the soul possesses also an autochthonous need of hating and of fighting, which often on its side projects their offensive qualities upon the objects which it selects. The reason why this case does not emerge so evidently as that of love may be that the love impulse, in connection with its intense physio- logical stimulation in youth, gives unmistakable evidence of its spontaneity, its impulse from the terminus a quo. The impulse to hate has in itself only in exceptional cases such acute stages, through which its subjective-spontaneous character would be equally evident. All relationships of one human being to others are in their ultimate ground to be distinguished by this question although in countless variations between absolute affirmation and negation namely, whether their psychical basis is an impulse of the subject, which develops itself as an impulse without any external stimulus, and then of itself seeks an adequate object, whether this object be originally presented as adequate, or by the phantasy of the subject reconstructed into adequacy ; or, on the other hand, whether the psychical basis consists in the reac- tion which the being or the acting of a personality produces in us. Of course, the possibility of such reaction must be present in our mind, but such possibilities would in themselves have remained latent, and would never of themselves have taken the form of impulses. All relationships to human beings present themselves in terms of this antithesis, whether they are intellectual or aesthetic, sympathetic or antipathetic. It is often only from this basis that they may be formulated as to their intensity and their content.