Stephen here questions the commonly expressed concept of ambivalence: the splitting of the figure of a person into two objects, a hated and a loved one, because it is intolerable to have a good object which is also bad. He holds this is 'attributing to small children a too highly sophisticated view of what is often called the "external world"', and what really happens in the child's mind is simply a failure of recognition that the pain evoking person is the same person as the pleasure evoking one—just as a child is unable to realize that the red-hot stove of the evening is the same stove as the cold one of the early morning. Thus the child passes through a 'preambivalent stage' in which 'since the object of love could not be continuous with the object of hate there could of necessity be no true ambivalence'. Ambivalence would only arise later 'when the child began to adopt the adult principle and to isolate entities—not according to their emotive qualities but, principally at least, according to their more permanent physical qualities'. Finally Stephen points