----- The intellect is capable of instantaneously finding out a new truth, or recognising an idea as just and conformable to the nature of things; but all this remains in a theoretic condition—_i.e._, without emotional colouring or tendency to realise itself. That which is discovered so rapidly by means of logic, takes years, or even centuries, to become a motive for action. “If the Greeks were unable to extend their feelings of humanity so as to include the barbarians, the cause lay, not in intellectual insufficiency, but in the arrestive power of their national feeling. Christianity overthrew these barriers, not by means of intellectual reflection, but by the effect of an acute and deeply-seated feeling. Afterwards, within the limits of Christianity, intolerance raised new barriers, and fettered the natural development of religion.”[126] We might find in history numerous examples of this inertia of the feelings, as in the case of slavery, etc. We imagine the emotions as in a state of perpetual motion and instability, whilst a habitual manner of feeling, in fact, possesses a formidable arrestive power, only gradually lost under the influence of time. It is a common saying that an argument has never changed a conviction; but this is only the case if we regard the present; it can act by incubation and at a great distance of time. ----- Footnote 126: Höffding, _Psychologie_ (4th edit., German translation, 1893), pp. 411-412, where this point is briefly but ably treated. ----- Another reason for disagreement between the two modes of development, the intellectual and the emotional, may be expressed under a form which, though rather pedantic, is clear and precise. Intellectual evolution is subject to the principle of contradiction, emotional evolution is not; it is, indeed, subject to a logical principle to be determined later, but the principle is another. Let us suppose a purely intellectual being: affirmations and negations regarding the same object cannot co-exist in his brain; one eliminates the other. If we suppose a purely emotional being it will be found that two opposite tendencies can be simultaneously active in him, each working towards its own end, provided that they do not bring about the destruction of the individual. In every individual who contradicts himself there is, at the moment when he contradicts himself, an emotional element at work. We shall see later on that this is the key to all contradictory characters, which are quite natural from the emotional point of view, though they are the stumbling-blocks of the intellect.