“In other words a vegetal, perhaps even vegetarian, disposition, beside the animal one?” There was a hint of amusement and teasing in Agathe’s question.

“Almost!” Ulrich replied. “Maybe the animalistic and the vegetative, understood as basic opposites in the sphere of desires, would be a trove for a philosopher! But would that make me want to be one? All I’m presuming to claim is what I’ve said, and particularly what I said last, that the two kinds of passionate existence have a model, perhaps even their origin, in every emotion, because every emotion contains those two aspects distinctly,” he continued. But curiously, he went on to speak only about what he called the appetitive aspect. Its drive is toward action, toward movement, toward enjoyment; by its operation, emotion transforms itself into a work, or into an idea or conviction, or into a disappointment. Those are all different ways in which emotion discharges its tension, but they can also be means for it to recharge and gain strength. For emotion changes in being expended; it wears down, disperses, and ultimately expires even as it succeeds; or it encapsulates itself in its product, transforming its vital energy into stored energy, which later yields a return of vital energy, occasionally with compound interest. “And doesn’t that explain one thing, namely that the robust activity of our worldly emotion, with its irrelevance, which you were so pleasantly sighing about, doesn’t make a great difference to us, even if it is a profound difference?”

“You may be only too right!” Agathe agreed. “My God, this entire work of the emotions, its worldly wealth, the wanting, the rejoicing, the to-do, the infidelity, all for no reason other than that emotion drives us to it! Including everything one experiences and forgets: It’s certainly beautiful like a tree full of apples of every color, but it’s also meaningless and monotonous, like everything that grows to the same plump roundness each year and then falls off the branch!”

Ulrich nodded at his sister’s answer with its breath of impetuousness and renunciation. “The world owes all its works of beauty, all progress, but also all unrest, and ultimately its meaningless cycling, to the appetitive side of the emotions!” he confirmed. “Do you know, by the way, that this term, ‘appetitive,’ is commonly used to refer to the share that our innate drives have in every emotion? Therefore,” he added, “what we have said is that it’s the drives to which the world owes its beauty and progress.”

“Its crazed agitation too,” Agathe added.

“Usually that is exactly what one says; so it seems useful to me not to disregard the other side! Because it’s at the very least unexpected that man should owe precisely his progress to something that actually belongs to the animal stage!”—He smiled as he said this. He too had now propped himself up on his elbow and turned completely toward his sister, as if he wanted to elucidate something for her: but he went on hesitantly like one who wants first to be instructed himself by the words he is searching for. “Without question,” he said, “the actively prehensile feelings of man—and you were right to speak of an animal disposition—have at their core the same few instincts the animal already has. This is quite clear in the major emotions: in hunger, anger, joy, self-will, and love, the soul’s veil barely covers the most naked wanting—!”