The continuation extended in two directions. In accord with the theme of the conversation, the object and the action of love should have been next in turn, in order to determine what it was in them that gave rise to their highly dissimilar manifestations, and finally to discover what love “really” is. That was why they had talked about the role actions played in defining a feeling at its very beginning, a determining influence which that feeling’s subsequent destiny should be all the more capable of reprising. But Agathe asked another question: it might have been possible—and she had reasons, if not for distrust, then at least for fear of such distrust arising—that the explanation her brother had chosen really applied only to a weak feeling or even to an experience that wanted to have nothing to do with strong ones.

Ulrich responded: “Not in the least! It is precisely in its greatest strength that feeling is not at its most secure. In the greatest fear, one is paralyzed or screams instead of fleeing or defending oneself. In the greatest happiness there is often a peculiar pain. Too much zeal “loses the way,” as the proverb says. And in general it can be maintained that at its most exalted, feeling loses its color and fades away as if blinded. It may be that the entire world of feelings that are known to us is suited to a middling life and ceases at the highest degrees, just as it does not begin at the lowest.”

Tangentially related to this was the experience that often occurs when one observes one’s feelings, especially if one “holds them up to scrutiny.” They become indistinct and are hard to tell apart. But what they lose in clarity of strength they ought to gain, at least to some extent, through the clarity of attention, and they don’t do even that. —That was Ulrich’s reply, and it was not by chance that he associated the extinction of emotion under scrutiny and its dying away in the highest degrees of excitation. For both are states in which action is suspended or disrupted; and because the connection between feeling and action is so close that some people consider them a unit, the way the two examples complemented each other was not without meaning.

But what he avoided saying was precisely what they both knew from their own experience, that at its highest stage the feeling of love can involve a state of mental obliteration and physical disarray. This led him to turn the conversation somewhat arbitrarily away from the significance action has for feeling, apparently with the intention of coming back to the classification of love with regard to its objects. At first glance, this somewhat capricious possibility did seem better suited to the purpose of bringing order to love’s multiplicity of meanings. If it is in effect a blasphemy, to begin with a concrete example, to use the same word for the love of God and the love of fishing, this is doubtless due to the differences between the beloved objects. Similarly, the significance of the object can be measured by other examples. When we love something, therefore, the factor that introduces the enormous differences in the relationship between love and its object is not be found in the love but in the something. Thus there are objects that make love rich and healthy; and others that make it poor and sickly, as if that were due entirely to them. There are objects that must reciprocate love if it is to unfold all its power and unique character; and there are others of which it would be meaningless from the outset to make any similar demand. This separates categorically a relationship with living beings from one with inanimate things; but even when inanimate, the object is the true partner of love, and its qualities influence those of love.