"If it matters much to friendship and love, it matters but little to our
instinctive sympathy that some one should be good or bad, do good or
ill, provided that we accept the secret force that animates him. That
secret force often reveals itself at the first meeting; sometimes also
we learn to know it only after long habit. It has scarce anything in
common with the outward acts or even with the thoughts of the real
person, who does not seem to be its exact representative, but its chance
interpreter, by means of whom it manifests itself as best it may. Thus
we have all of us, among those whom the see-saw of our days mingles with
our existence, friends or associates whom we scarcely esteem, who have
done us more than one ill office and in whom we know that we can have no
confidence. Nevertheless, we do not bring ourselves to despise them as
they deserve and to thrust them from our path. Across and in spite of
all that separates us and all that disfigures them, an averment in which
we place a more solid and more organic belief than in all the experience
and all the arguments of reason, an obscure but invincible averment
testifies to us that that man, were he to precipitate us into the most
real and most grave misfortunes, is not our enemy in the general and
eternal plan of life. It may be that there is no sanction for these
sympathies and antipathies, and that nothing answers to them either
among the visible or invisible phenomena of which our existence is made
up, or among the known or unknown fluids that form and maintain our
physical or moral health, our feelings of joy or sadness and the mobile
and most impressionable medium in which our destiny floats. The fact
none the less remains that there is here an undeniable force which plays
a decisive part in the accomplishment of our happiness, both in
friendship and in love. This third power has regard to neither age nor
sex, neither beauty nor ugliness; it is independent of physical or
sexual attraction and of affinities of mind and character. It is, as it
were, the beneficent and generous atmosphere in which that attraction
and those affinities bathe. To the absence of this third power, this
vivifying atmosphere, from love are due all the misunderstandings, all
the griefs, all the deceptions that disunite two beings who esteem,
understand and passionately love each other. Since the nature of this
power is unknown, it is given various obscure names. It is called the
soul, the instinct, the unconscious or the subconscious, the divine
even. It probably emanates from the undefined organ that binds us to
all that does not directly concern our individuality, to all that
extends beyond it in time and space, in the past and in the future."