regard to emotion, how difficult it is to find adequate
words to cover the actual field of what we feel.

I should like to write even the word "love" with some such mark of
hesitation. For, just because of the appalling importance of this
ultimate duality, it is essential to be on our guard against the use
of words which convey a narrow, crude, rough-and-ready, and
superficial meaning. By the emotion of "love" I do not mean the
amorous phenomenon which we call "being in love." Nor do I mean
the calmer emotion which we call "affection." The passion of
friendship, when friendship really becomes a passion, is nearer my
meaning than any of these. And yet the emotion of love, conceived
as one side of this eternal duality, is much more than the "passion of
friendship"; because it is an emotion that can be felt in the presence
of things and ideas as well as persons. Perhaps the emotion of love
as symbolized in the figure of Christ, combined with the aesthetic
and intellectual passion inherited from the Greek philosophers,
comes nearest to what I have in mind; though even this, without
some tangible and concrete embodiment, tends to escape us and
evade analysis.

And if it is hard to define this "love" which is the protagonist, so to
speak, in the world's emotional drama, it is still harder to define its
opposite, its antagonist. I could name this by the name of "hate," the
ordinary antithesis of love, but if I did so it would have to be with a
very wide connotation.

The true opposite to the sort of "love" I have in my mind is not so
much "hate" as a kind of dull and insensitive hostility, a kind of
brutal malignity and callous aversion. Perhaps what we are looking
for as the true opposite of love may be best defined as malice.

Malice seems to convey a more impersonal depth and a wider reach
of activity than the word hate and has also a clearer suggestion of
deliberate insensitiveness about it. The most concentrated and
energetic opposite of love is not either hate or malice. It is
_cruelty_; which is a thing that seems to draw its evil inspiration
from the profoundest depths of conscious existence.

But cruelty must necessarily have for its "object" something living
and sentient. A spiritual feeling, a work of art, an idea, a principle,
a landscape, a theory, an inanimate group of things, could not be
contemplated with an emotion of cruelty, though it could certainly
be contemplated with an emotion of malice.

There