is often, if not always, a strange admixture of sensuality in
cruelty. Cruelty, profoundly evil as it is, has a living intensity
which makes it less dull, less thick, less deliberately insensitive,
less coldly hostile, than the pure emotion of malice, and therefore
less adapted than malice to be regarded as the true opposite of love.

But the best indication of the distinction I want to make will be
found in the contrast between the conceptions of creation and
destruction. The dull, thick, insensitive callousness which we are
conscious of in the opposite of love is an indication that while love
is essentially creative the opposite of love is essentially _that
which resists creation_.

The opposite of love is not destructive in the sense of being an
active destructive force. Such an active destructive force must
necessarily, by reason of the passionate energy in it, be a perversion
of creative power, not the opposite of creative power.

Creative power, even in its unperverted activity, must always be
capable of destroying. It must be capable of destroying what is in
the way of further creation. Thus the true opposite of creation is not
destruction, but the inert, heavy, thick, callous, brutal, insensitive
"obscurantism" or "material opacity" which resists the pressure of
the creative spirit.

By this analysis of the ultimate duality of emotion we are put in
possession of a basic aspect of the complex vision, which must
largely shape and determine its total activity. The soul within us,
that mysterious "something" which is the living and concrete
"person" whose vision the complex vision is, is a thing subject at the
start to this unfathomable duality, the emotion of love and the
emotion of malice.

The emotion of love is the life-begetting, life-conceiving force, the
creator of beauty, the discoverer of truth, and the reconciler of
eternal contradictions.

The emotion of malice, with its frozen sneer of sardonic denial,
raises its "infernal fist" against the centrifugal outflowing of the
emotion of love. It is impossible to conceive of self-consciousness
without love and hatred; or, as I prefer to say, without love and
malice. Self-consciousness implies from the start what we call the
universe; and the universe cannot appear upon the scene without
exciting in us the emotion of love and hate. Every man born into the
world loves and hates directly he is conscious of the world. This is
the ultimate duality. Attractio