 Hugh of St Victor regarded love as the basic emotion and defined it as the pleasure of the heart that is directed to something because of something (On the Substance of Love 2.48–49). This emotion is an actual orientation of the soul to an object with a subjectively felt pleasure. In the same place, Hugh dealt with love as the first stage of the sequence of love, desire, and joy (49–51). He thinks that emotions are generated in the heart as various forms of the sensory moving affect, not the controlling intellectual will (De sacramentis 273C). The incipient pleasant feeling of love about a reachable end, if not expelled, increases in power, and leads to new emotional stages separated from each other by typical behavioral changes. It is desire when moving the subject towards an end and joy when reaching the end (On the Substance of Love 2.50–51). The beginnings of emotions are not acts of free choice as their continuances are, but Hugh differed from Aelred in regarding involuntary sexual movements as venial sins (De sacramentis 315C–316A, 391B). 