Love

Feeling of strong attraction toward animate things; modification of the feeling tone which goes with any cognition. One distinguishes two great cla es of feelings, pleasurable, tending to attract, and painful, to repel. When under certain conditions the emotional tone reaches a sufficiently high degree of the pleasurable, the subject may be said to experience love. Naturally the sexual life, which plays so large a rôle in our emotional existence, will determine the sentiment felt toward other persons to a marked degree, but even sexual love must be considered as but one phase of the feeling of attraction aroused by objects to which the reaction is pleasurable. The various manifestations of the emotion are impulses based upon it. See VOLITION.