 Śāntarakṣita argues that love and hatred exist due to habit and repetition which is ascertained by confirming and disconfirming concomitance. This means that they are learned through experience. For example, love is learned by a person being confronted with objects to which this feeling is attributed and thus reinforced the more of these objects a person encounters. However, we can observe the existence of love and hatred in babies who have not had the repeated experience of these objects in this life. Śāntarakṣita claims that the existence of love and hatred cannot be due to the first encounter with the object of love or hatred because it would be possible, as indeed happens according to him, to encounter this object without the respective feelings of love or hatred or to encounter it with another feeling, such as disgust. As an example, Śāntarakṣita mentions the attraction a man might feel towards a woman. He claims that men are attracted to women if they also attribute “goodness” and “devotedness” to them, even though a particular woman might not possess these qualities. So the qualities that make, for example, a woman “lovable” do not have to exist in the woman and therefore, according to Śāntarakṣita, the woman cannot be said to be the cause of the feeling of love in the man. Love, then is not an object of the senses (viṣaya). Therefore, the reason why these feelings exist is through force of habit in previous lives. We have learned over time that women are “lovable”. This argument is meant to demonstrate that love and hatred could not exist if the materialists were right and mental life was simply the result of bodily processes.