 Although Hartley identifies “sympathy” and “theopathy” as basic orientations, the orientations do not necessarily have a positive content. Hartley does not claim that everyone is kind to others, or loves God. In some, these modes are pathological, and theopathy is often only rudimentarily developed. In discussing the “associations [that] may be observed in fact to be heaped upon” the word God, he observes that these begin with the “compound fictitious idea” children form when they “suppose [God] to stand for a man whom they have never seen” and that they end, for many people, when this idea “is quite obliterated, without anything of a stable precise nature succeeding in its room” (OM 1, prop. 98). Many adults live with feelings of fear, aversion, boredom, and sometimes an ardent longing, directed at a blankness—a mental picture, from which the central image has been effaced.