He began by positing a natural experience: Every feeling involves a convincing certainty of itself that is apparently part of its nucleus. It must also be assumed, on equally general grounds, that the differences among feelings originate no less with this nucleus. He gave several examples. Love of a friend has a different origin and different traits from love of a girl, of a woman in full bloom, or of a woman who lives in saintly seclusion; and feelings that diverge even further, such as—to remain with the subject of love—love, veneration, lechery, sexual dependence, or the various kinds of love and kinds of antipathy, are already different at their source. If one allows both these assumptions, then all feelings, from beginning to end, would have to be as solid and transparent as crystals. And yet no feeling is unmistakably what it appears to be; and neither self-observation nor the actions prompted by the feeling provide any certainty about it. Now, this difference between the self-assurance and the uncertainty of feelings is certainly not negligible. But if one observes the birth of a feeling in the context of its physiological as well as its social causes, that difference becomes quite natural. These causes awaken in broad outlines, so to speak, merely the species of a feeling without determining it more specifically; for corresponding to every drive and every situation that triggers it, there is a whole bundle of feelings that can answer for them. That which is there at the beginning can be called the nucleus of the feeling still in a state between being and nonbeing; but if one wanted to describe this nucleus, irrespective of its nature, nothing more accurate could be said about it than that it is a something which, in the course of its development, and dependent on a great many things that are or are not added to it, will develop into the feeling it was supposed to become. Thus every feeling has, in addition to its original disposition, a destiny as well; and because what it later develops into is increasingly dependent on accruing conditions, there is no feeling that could unmistakably be itself from the beginning; indeed there is perhaps not even one that would purely and indisputably be a feeling. Put another way, it follows from this interplay of disposition and elaboration that in the domain of feelings it is not their pure occurrence and unequivocal fulfillment that predominate, but their progressive approximation and approximate fulfillment. And something similar is also true of everything that requires feeling in order to be understood.

This was the conclusion of the observation introduced by Ulrich, which contained approximately these formulations in this sequence. Hardly less curt and hyperbolic than the assertion that feeling is the least part of love, it could also be said that because love is a feeling, it cannot be recognized by feeling. Incidentally, this shed some light on the question of why he had called love a moral event. Those three nouns, however—disposition, elaboration, and crystallization—had been the main knots that held together the ordered understanding of the phenomenon of feeling, at least according to a certain fundamental view to which Ulrich, too, was not unhappy to turn when he had need of such an explanation. But because working this out properly would have demanded a more extensive and more methodical treatment than he was willing to take on, he broke off what he had begun at this point.