s personified as a being--the living Good whose voice we hear.

Some speak of lifeless formulas; of these there are very few. A word, an
idea, is a formula of possible action and of sentiments ready to pass
into acts; they are "verbs." Now, every sentiment, every impulse which
becomes formulated with, as it were, a _fiat_, acquires by this alone a
new and quasi-creative force; it is not merely rendered visible by its
own light to itself but it is defined, specified, and selected from the
rest, and _ipso facto_ directed in its course. That is why formulas
relative to action are so powerful for good or evil; a child feels a
vague temptation, a tendency for which it cannot account. Pronounce in
its hearing the formula, change the blind impulse into the luminous
idea, and this will be a new suggestion which may, perhaps, cause it to
fall in the direction to which it was already inclined. On the other
hand, some formulas of generous sentiments will carry away a vast
audience immediately they are uttered. The genius is often the man who
translates the aspirations of his age into ideas; at the sound of his
voice a whole nation is moved. Great moral, religious, and social
revolutions ensue when the sentiments, long restrained and scarcely
conscious of their own existence, become formulated into ideas and
words; the way is then opened, the means and the goal are visible alike,
selection takes place, all the volitions are simultaneously guided in
the same direction, like a torrent which has found the weakest point in
the dam.

5. Sentiments[164]

We seldom experience the primary emotions in the pure or unmixed forms
in which they are commonly manifested by the animals. Our emotional
states commonly arise from the simultaneous excitement of two or more of
the instinctive dispositions; and the majority of the names currently
used to denote our various emotions are the names of such mixed,
secondary, or complex emotions. That the great variety of our emotional
states may be properly regarded as the result of the compounding of a
relatively small number of primary or simple emotions is no new
discovery. Descartes, for example, recognized only six primary emotions,
or passions as he termed them, namely--admiration, love, hatred, desire,
joy, and sadness, and he wrote, "All the others are composed of some out
of these six and derived from them." He does not seem to have formulated
any principles for the determination of the primari