(1) How does love differ from liking? Quantitatively. The degree of emotion expressed by love is out of all proportion to that of liking. I love my friends and like their surroundings; I like this gift and love the giver. An exchange of terms in either of these sentences would make moral nonsense. Liking touches only the surface; I like strawberries. Loving goes all through; I love my old servant. Of course, then, loving includes liking, though liking may or may not be accompanied by loving; and equally, of course, loose talkers, who do not know what they mean, will try to be impressive by using the weightier word. I love automobiling, I love the opera, I love ice-cream; these are all forms of silly exaggeration which no one will seriously defend. But there is a reason for this quantitative difference. An additional factor enters into love and greatly increases its depth. Love always implies the possibility of the loved one’s knowledge and his capacity for response. It is applicable therefore primarily to persons and the higher animals, and only in a metaphoric way suits things. No doubt the response often fails, but it is always desired and sought. Love seeks to establish a personal tie. No one ever loved without wishing to be loved. Furthermore, between love and liking there is a sharp contrast of mental attitude. In liking, my thoughts are on myself; in loving, on another. I like whatever brings me pleasure or profit. But Browning rightly asks: “How can one love but what he yearns to help?” That is, what we love always seems to us to have such worth as calls on us for protection and the offering up of ourselves. To the lover it appears august, superior, and supplemental to anything possessed by himself. It fills him with awe and a spirit of sacrifice. Spenser addresses his lady as “My dear dread.” There is nothing of this in liking. Our thoughts are there fixed on ourselves, heedless of the condition of whatever furnishes us profit. Oxen we like, because they supply our tables and till our fields. What matter if in doing so they perish? We tend the dog we love and do not let him be harmed in our service. In short, loving is our forthgoing toward one possessing a worth preferred above our own; liking, our feeling toward anything from which we derive benefit, even though inferior in general worth to ourselves.