LIKES AND DISLIKES

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2328, 23 December 1925, Page 5

LIKES AND DISLIKES

INSTINCTIVE IMPRESSIONS Most of us, if not all, flatter ourselves that we possess great powers or intuition. We take sudden likes or dislikes to people whom we meet for the first time; to people, even, with whom we never speak, the furniture of whose minds we cannot know at all, with whom we sit in train or omnibus, or pass in a crowded street. We do not know the reason. We cannot say why our hearts instinctively go out to some find close their portals fast to others who may knock, writes F. Aveling, M.C., Ph.D., D.Sc., in the “Daily Mail.” It is a case of love or hatred —unreasoned and unreasoning—at first sight. ; We think we have summed them up by intuition, and perhaps we have. We have subconsciously caught a flash of the eye, unconsciously noted a poise of the head, or somehow got an impression, almost too faint to be. recorded, of lips curved in humour or sympathy, or twisted in meanness and selfishness. Mostly we can pick out nothing but that sort of fleeting impression which we call intuition and ascribe to our own good judgment. I But though there must be some sort of awareness, even if it is too faint to be detected, the cause of our likes and dislikes lies deep in the depths of the instincts —the root desires and aversions of our human nature. There are racial antagonisms and sympathies that have to be reckoned with. Certain racial types mingle well, others badly. There are the un conscious hatreds between us and those who are our “inferiors;” Still deeper-rooted ones, perhaps, between us and those we recognise—unoonsciously—as “superiors.” There are types of people which please or displease us instantly. The psycho-ana-lysts tell us of loves born in the cradle, the while we adults look upon the child as responsive to few stimuli none at all. Does not the mothertype or the father-type draw us in after-life, and can we not sometimes discern in those we love and those we hate some trait forgotten fr&m our nursery days? But more than all, perhaps (and it may. Indeed, amount to the same thing in the end), are we attracted to the “objectivation” of our ideals. Our ideal of beauty is caught for a moment in this, reflected by that. The ugly may be beautiful —and therefore lovable —for us. Truly we are riot in love with people, but ideas —our own ideas —that set the machines of instinct working and flood us with emotions. And as we love, so we hate. Thos« we dislike stand in our minds for some thing we do not like. They are symbols of aversion from ideas. And herein lies the truth that is, perhaps, the most curious of all. We always dislike people with the same faults as our own. Though we ignore them in ourselves, though we may not discern them in the people whom we hate, we hate them none the less for sinning 'ss o,ucselvc3.