[Footnote 1: Georges Sorel: _Reflection on Violence_ (English translation), p. 9.] The attitude of affection for others is profoundly influential in stimulating our interest in specific individuals, and modifying our attitudes toward them. We cannot help being more interested in those for whom we entertain affection than in those to whom we are indifferent. In the same way our judgments of our own friends, families, and children are qualified by our affection for them. Parents and lovers are notoriously partial, and a fair judgment of the work of our friends demands unusual clarity, determination, and poise. In a larger way the generally friendly attitude towards others, genial expansive receptivity, is at the basis of what is called "charity for human weakness." The gentle cynic can see and tolerate other men's weaknesses: "He knows how much of what men paint themselves Would blister in the light of what they are; He sees how much of what was great now shares An eminence transformed and ordinary; He knows too much of what the world has hushed In others, to be loud now for himself."[2] [Footnote 2: Edwin Arlington Robinson: "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford," in his _Man Against the Sky_.] The devoutly religious have displayed keen psychological insight when they made man's salvation dependent on God's charity, and identified, as did Dante, charity with love.[3] [Footnote 3: "Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing." _The New Life_. XX (son XI) _Amore e cor gentile son una cosa._ To Dante the spontaneous impulse to love is the basis of all altruism. To feel and to follow this impulse is to be truly noble, to have a "_cor gentile_," a gentle heart.] HATE. Hate may be described as an extreme form of disaffection usually provoked by some marked interference with our activities, desires, or ideals. But in less intense degree the negative feeling towards others may be provoked immediately and unmistakably by most casual evidence of voice, manner, or bearing. Such immediate revulsions of feeling contrast with the instances of "instinctive sympathy" previously cited, and are as direct and uncontrollable. Even kindly disposed persons cannot help experiencing in the presence of some persons they have never seen before, a half-conscious thrill of repulsion or a dislike colored with dread. A shifting gaze, a noticeably pretentious manner, a marked obsequiousness, a grating voice, a chillness of demeanor, a physical deformity, these, however little they may have to do with a person's genuine qualities, do affect our attitudes toward them. As the familiar verse has it: "I do not like you, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell, But this I know, and know full well, I do not like you, Dr. Fell."