§ 38
The most striking fact of most emotions, except those of love, is the facility with which they are reassociated with ideas different from those with which they first occurred.
The love emotions appear to be the least easily transferred, as indeed they are the least easily stirred to their depths. This is said advisedly on the well grounded observation that most people who say they love do not love fully, and deeply. The more deeply they love, the more their passion instills itself into every fibre of their being and the more slowly they are able to change their love object.
But ordinary emotions, other than the erotic, are readily and almost universally shifted from one object to another. Indeed, it may be asserted that there is no innate content of any of the emotions except love. Love innately requires an object of the opposite sex.
To illustrate the reassociability of the other emotions it is necessary only to recall what things one has liked or feared years ago and compare them with the present likes or fears.
And it would be enough to take fear itself as an illustration of the variability of its content. When fear becomes fixed in a phobia, it is extraordinary how irrational the association is, viewed from any logical standpoint. A woman fears mice or snakes, although she has never been injured by either, or beetles, although possibly she has never touched one. Or she fears to cross an open square, and nearly faints if she has to do so alone, although there is not a chance in ten thousand that any harm would come to her. An association of an emotion so profound as fear with some chance place or occurrence is ample proof that the emotions themselves have no essential connection with any external object. The absence of fear in some persons under circumstances where people generally would be afraid also demonstrates the ready dissociation of emotions from particular experiences. One can learn to like or to dislike almost anything.
To a certain extent this is true of love but far less so if we restrict the use of the term “love” to its more ideal phases. When we speak of “Off with the old love and on with the new,” it will be conceded that we speak not of true love but of a very shallow interest.