These were the mental conditions on which Mrs Tulliver had undertaken to act persuasively, and had failed; a fact which may receive some illustration from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers fail in preparing their bait so as to make it alluring in the right quarter, for want of a due acquaintance with the subjectivity of fishes.
There is some subjectivity in deciding whether a word is positive, negative, or neutral, but if you try it yourself, I think you'll find that most of the time it's fairly easy to classify words.
The troublewith these approaches of course is that they rely on honest insight and a heftydose of subjectivity.
