LOVE. Love, used in this broad sense, varies in intensity. It may be nothing more--it certainly frequently starts as nothing more--than the feeling, so native as to be fairly called instinctive, of common sympathy, fellow feeling, immediate affinity with another. The psychological origins of this disposition have already been noted in connection with man's tendency to experience sympathetically immediately the emotions of others. Every business man, lawyer, teacher, any one who comes much into contact with a wide variety of people, knows how, antecedent to any experience with an individual's capacities or talents, or even before one had a chance to draw any inferences from a person's walk, his bearing, or his clothing, one may register an immediate like or dislike. Every one has had the experience in crossing a college campus or riding in a train or street car of noting, in passing some one whom one has never seen before, an immediate reaction of good-will and affection. This has been charmingly expressed by a well-known English poet:
"The street sounds to the soldiers' tread, And out we troop to see; A single redcoat turns his head, He turns and looks at me.
"My man, from sky to sky's so far, We never crossed before; Such leagues apart the world's ends are, We're like to meet no more.
"What thoughts at heart have you and I, We cannot stop to tell; But dead or living, drunk or dry, Soldier, I wish you well."[1]
[Footnote 1: A. E. Housman: _The Shropshire Lad_ (John Lane edition), p. 32.]
All affection for individuals probably starts in this immediate instinctive liking. "The first note that gives sociability a personal quality and raises the comrade into an incipient friend is doubtless sensuous affinity. Whatever reaction we may eventually make on an impression, after it has had time to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectual habit, its first assault is always on the senses; and no sense is an indifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial rate of vibration, and gives its stimuli a varying welcome. Little as we may attend to these instinctive hospitalities of sense, they betray themselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons and things, in the _je ne sais quai_ that makes instinctive sympathy."[2] From this immediate instinctive liking it may rise to deep personal attachments, strikingly manifested in friendship and love between the sexes, both immemorially celebrated by poets and novelists. Love is aroused chiefly by persons, and among persons, especially in the case of sexual love, most frequently by more or less physical beauty and attractiveness. But affection may be aroused and is certainly sustained by other than merely physical qualities.