of refinement the concrete personal image is replaced by a vague impersonal representation, an ideal, a concept; this is pure platonic mystical love, the organic accompaniment of which is so feeble that it is usually denied. These subtle and refined forms which the intellectualists regard as superior are really only an impoverishment of feeling. They are besides rare, and except in a few cases ineffective; for it is a rule that every feeling loses its strength in the measure that it becomes intellectualised. The blind faith in “the power of ideas” is in practice an inexhaustible source of illusions and errors. An idea which is only an idea, a simple fact of knowledge, produces nothing and does nothing; it only acts if it is _felt_, if it is accompanied by an affective state, if it awakes tendencies, that is to say, motor elements. One may have thoroughly studied Kant’s _Practical Reason_, have penetrated all its depths, covered it with glosses and luminous commentaries, without adding one iota to one’s practical morality; that comes from another source, and it is one of the most unfortunate results of intellectualist influence in the psychology of the feelings that it has led us to ignore so evident a truth. IV. It may be remarked that in contemporary treatises the word _passion_ has almost entirely disappeared, or is only met with incidentally.[9] Yet it has a long past which would be interesting to trace, if I had not forbidden myself all historical digressions. At present the term emotion is preferred to designate the chief manifestations of the affective life; it is a generic expression; passion is only a mode of it. Ordinary language rightly preserves the word, since it answers to a reality; and passion is an event of too much practical importance for us to dispense with speaking of it, explaining how it differs from emotion, what its nature is, and under what conditions it appears. ----- Footnote 9: Höffding, _Psychologie_, pp. 392-394, second German edition. J. Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 56, considers emotion as a genus of which affection and passion are the species: affection is a fixed emotional disposition; passion is the violent form of the emotion. Nothing can be vaguer and more uncertain than the terminology of our subject, and yet, as Wundt says in his _Essays_, it has made a very appreciable progress when compared to the confusion which existed at the beginning of the century. ----- There is a fairly general agreement as to its definition; and beneath different formulas, according as they emanate from a moralist, a theologian, a philosopher, or a biologist, we always find the same essential characters: “it is an intemperate want;” “it is an inclination or liking carried to excess;” “it is a violent and sustained desire which dominates the whole cerebral being,” etc.; the terminology alone varies.[10] ----- Footnote 10: