Sentimental, or true love, is a conscious altruism and is the antithesis of the egotistic sensual love. Before applying the term true love to the relation of both mates, the test of disinterested affection, as found in the instinctive parental love, must be applied. The distinction between sensual and sentimental love is the selfish desire of libido in the former and the self-sacrificing ardor of altruistic affection in the latter.
The two emotions have some characteristics in common, and for that reason, sensual love is, as a rule, mistaken for sentimental love, even by the greatest thinkers and best poets. An essential and invariable ingredient in sentimental, as well as in sensual love, is the imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of the beloved person. But while in sensual love this desire springs from an egotistic source, selfish elements are foreign to this desire in sentimental love. The latter knows only devotion and sympathy, which urge the lover to seek the welfare of the one beloved, if need be at the expense of his own.
The only true index of genuine love lies, therefore, in the sacrifice of one’s own happiness for another’s sake. Pure love is always ready to lose its own life in an effort to save another’s. The sentimental lover is, indeed, not less overjoyed to have his affection returned; but if it is not reciprocated, his love is, unlike sensual love that turns into resentment, none the less affectionate. He never slakes his thirst with the blood of his beloved, even if he is rejected. His constant solicitude is how he can make the beloved happy and save the adored person from grief, at whatever cost to his own comfort. He feels the joys and sorrows of his beloved, as if they were his own. He has completely surrendered himself and his own peculiarity to the other and has, in a certain respect, died as something specific and individual.AG
True love, therefore, was slow in coming and is a child of a higher civilization, and is, even then, known only to the cultured. Only when humanity has reached that state of civilization when men and women show not only their respective physical but also mental secondary characters, then admiration and respect enter into the relation of the sexes. Love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty, and sentimental love is made possible. For true love cannot exist without respect, and genuine affection is chiefly evoked by intellectual, emotional and moral qualities.
The secondary mental characters in the man are strength, hardiness, robustness, courage, aggressiveness, activity, creativeness, stern justice, gallantry, generosity, manly will, manly grace, tenderness, and intelligence. The feminine qualities are gentleness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy, self-sacrifice, meekness, sensitiveness, emotionality, modesty, demureness, coyness, and domesticity. The highest phases of genuine love are possible only where the secondary psychic qualities are highly developed. Such persons do not care to possess in the low, coarse way that characterizes sensual love. They are content to love and be silent, to worship even at a distance.
Love, says Horowicz, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life has, under the repressing influences of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, supersensual, ethereal character, so that to the true lover every thought of naturalia seems indelicate and improper. True love is, therefore, only possible between refined and cultured people, between a man capable of adoration, sympathy and affection and a woman equipped with mental and moral charms. In true love the woman must show the same traits as in her maternal capacity. She has to be a real mother to the man she loves. The man starts life at a woman’s knees, and it is to a woman’s knees that he returns when he marries. Woe to him and her, if the second woman’s love is less selfish and sacrificing than that of the first.
A sympathetic disposition is as essential to the individual who wishes to be loved truly and permanently as all the other secondary psychic qualities. Cruel indifference is not incompatible with sensual love, but it is fatal to love based upon sentiment. Ordinary, sensual infatuation could be strong and unprincipled enough to lead a person to sacrifice honor and self-respect for the caprices of another. But true love would turn into contempt for the one who could wantonly subject it to persistent insults and degradation; and contempt is the death of genuine love, though yet compatible with sensual love.AH
True love is, therefore, characterized by patience, kindness, generosity, humility, unselfishness, good temper, and sincerity. This spectrum of true love shows the same elements as does that of genuine friendship. True love, therefore, can only be acquired in the same way as true friendship, namely, after a long probationary interval. Then only will the true love supply the universal need of friendship. Marriage is no barrier to the existence of unselfish and sexless love, which is the essence of the truest and purest friendship. If a husband be truly the friend of his wife, his love for her as a friend would be just as strong, just as tender, just as permanent and unswerving as if she were not his wife, nor ever might be. Nay, it may be said with Tolstoy that unless married people have been united by pure love, without a mixture of animal passion, the time must come when they will become weary of each other.
Duboc had only sensual love in mind when he said: To be adored and admired is, in distinction from friendship, the criterion of love, while the criterion of friendship, in distinction from love, is to be understood and esteemed; the latter is delighted in its illusions, the former harbors an element inimical to all illusions. Sentimental love is also an enemy to illusions. Sentimental love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent upon sexual differentiation. Pure oxygen would burn the lungs after a very short time, pure nitrogen suffocates every animal, but “both combined maintain life,” says Ellen Key. Mere sensual attraction is not love, nor is friendship love; in combination they are the air of life. When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither desire nor friendship, it is a new feeling. The only distinction between true love and pure friendship is that the most ideal relation between man and man in friendship is transferred to man and woman in love. Hence these two relationships must possess the same qualities. Paternal, filial and fraternal love partake each, in some degree, of instinct and are, to that extent, impulsive and blind. But in true love, instinct and sensuality have no place. “She is sacred to me,” says Goethe’s Werther, “all desire is silent in her presence.” A gleam of such wedded friendship transcends all other kinds of love. Wherever there is a pure and unselfish love for another for that other’s own sake, a love contingent neither on its return nor on its recognition, there is true friendship.
Sentimental love, like its comrade friendship, furthers the display of nobility and native virtues of the human soul. To love one’s soul for its beauty, grace and truth, to be inspired by the charm of its character to an affection which is pure and chaste, is to open the way to appreciate all beautiful and true and gracious souls. It offers the most refined of the pleasures which make life worth living. Joy demands that its joy should be shared.AI We need sympathy; hence we crave friendship and love. By the devotion of the other we feel our own power, our own value enhanced. Love tends to make man kinder and better through his complete identification with the existence of another. In the beauty of a loving attachment, man learns to comprehend all his fellowmen and to value and look at all the world by the glorious light of an inner community of emotions.
Such love must be proved and purified by the fire of reasoning. It is only possible after a thorough study of the character. The subtle elective affinity, of which we hear so much praised on the lecture platform, on the stage, in the magazines and in the papers, cannot be relied upon; its thrill is uncertain and needs to be tested and corrected by a long trial, whether it is really spiritual kinship or only emotional impulse. If after the veil of fantasy has been removed, the beloved object is still found worthy of the highest and warmest esteem, the emotion will be far nobler than, and different from, the unconscious fondness which overlooks the exact estimation of the beloved. In all love, considered as a virtue or grace, there must always be the conscious will, which is also the foundation of morality.
Such love may also reach the highest state of passion, but in distinction from sensual love, it seeks its own happiness in the felicity of the other, and conscious of its own disinterested purity, considers its desires as noble and above general motives of human action. Such emotions can only exist between men and women of pure souls.
True love is, therefore, rational, conscious, unselfish, deep, enduring, constant, refined, self-denying, and is willing to make the greatest sacrifices for the sake of the happiness of another. It is conscious altruism, never faltering in its ethical sense of duty. It is love tested and purified in the fire of the intellect; it comes slowly, but it endures; it gives more than it takes, and has a tinge of tender gratitude for a thousand kind actions. It is, therefore, an ideal sentiment which has hitherto been reached only by a very few select.
But if we look at love in the light of evolution, when we find how cell-division developed into sexuality, conjugation, permanent mating, sensual love and, finally, into sentimental love, there is reason for hope that the still rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the race have been privileged to gather, will some day, when humanity has reached the state of Nietzsche’s Superman, become the universal food of the human race.
Development of love in the individual.—The evolutionary trend in this world can be detected not only in the mere preservation, but also in increasing perfection. Not only the preservative instinct, i. e., the will to live and the will to reproduce, has contributed to the advancement of organic life to higher forms, but the two perfective human instincts, i. e., the will to act and the will to rule, have also served as a means for the evolution of human activities, as science, art, economics, etc.AJ One of such activities is sentimental love which had to pass through all the different stages of evolution before it reached the complexity of its present structure. Evolution is a truly universal principle. The meaning of life is its advance towards higher forms. There is not a trait, physical, psychical or spiritual that is wholly finished. The higher emotions as love and hate, fear and shame, etc., are not born with the child; they are evolved slowly by degrees.
According to Nordau every individual is in love with his own ideal, throughout his entire life. Every man and woman falls in love with the representative identical with, or at least most resembling, his or her ideal. The craving for love is the desire to possess the organic ideal.
The ideal of the mate begins to be distinctly evolved by the organism at the time of puberty and is complete only late in life. The ideal, except in its general features, is not stationary; it grows with the individual’s physical and mental development. With the beginning of the material growth of the centre of generation, the imagination begins to receive from the mysterious depths of the cells and tissues the conception of the image of the mate. The organism hears indistinctive voices, all telling the tale of the future partner in life. In this way the image of the ideal grows up in the brain during the individual’s amatory life.
Higher eroticism requires, then, the beloved to be a vehicle of a projected personality. Love for a man or a woman is the attempt to realize one’s ideal in the man or the woman. The impulse to love is the search after the incarnation of the inward ideal, and falling in love is the instinctive conviction that the ideal has been found. The lower and simpler the individual himself, the simpler will be the qualities of his ideal in corporate form. Among people of a low state of civilization the qualities required of the ideal are so few that almost every individual of one sex represents the ideal of the other sex. They may both be paired like animals, and love does not yet exist. The more cultivated a person becomes, the more complicated become the qualities demanded of his ideal, and the harder it is for him to find the same. A person looking for physical qualities in his ideal or for external beauty only, will easily find them, and a case of love at first sight, about which romantic dreamers go into such raptures, is naturally possible. But such love is only sensual and does not deserve to be thus extolled. For true love among men and women of a higher state of culture is an ideal symphony of tones of all kinds.
Generally bodily perfection and a retiring, tender, beneficent, confiding nature in woman constitute an attractive ideal for the man, while mental superiority in man constitutes the attractive power for the cultured woman. In her love the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient. The woman, says Kant, has an exquisite feeling for the beautiful, so far as she herself is concerned, but for the noble so far as it is found in the man. The man, on the contrary, has a decided feeling for the noble, which belongs to his own qualities, but for the beautiful so far as it is met with in the woman. Hence it follows that the aims of nature are directed through love upon making men still nobler and women more beautiful.
The masculine virtues which impress true women are physical strength, courage, nobility of mind, chivalry and self-confidence. These virtues constitute the beauty which arouses the woman’s love, these are the conspicuous features of her ideal. The female virtues that impress the man are beauty, tenderness, goodness, refinement, truth and patience. These are the virtues his ideal possesses. The more highly cultivated mentally and physically he or she are, the more complex and differentiated are the qualities of their ideals. Hence refined and complex natures experience a great deal of difficulty in meeting with their ideals or any one closely approximating them. But when two happen to perfectly compliment each other, when each happens to represent the ideal of the other, then there is true and lasting love. Such people know their ideal when they meet it and have been given time to study it, and they also know that they will never find another one in this world; they know that only this being and no other is suited to them as one triangle is to its congruent.
This knowledge can only be gained after a long study of the qualities of the person found, as to whether they really coincide with the mental qualities of the ideal; and it takes such noble beings longer to fall in love. Coarser natures are readily able to fall in love. The sensual qualities which attract a man or a woman to a paramour are easily discovered. When the affections mount no higher than mere feeling, a true communion of hearts is not indispensable. When the union of the man and the woman is regarded only from the physical basis, when the object is only self-gratification, the finer phases may be and really are ignored. Mere sensual enjoyment can be experienced by two persons who otherwise despise each other.AK But true love has far nobler aspirations than sensual enjoyment, and promises a union of heart and soul.
Among intellectual persons mere instinct becomes more and more powerless until it is almost totally extinguished. True love among them is, then, a voluntary act. The plans for its accomplishment are elaborated in the mind slowly and intelligently. It has then all the qualities of true friendship, combined with an affection in which sensual desire is working to a greater or less extent only unconsciously. As fusing body and mind it may become one of the strongest, deepest and most influential of the passions of our nature. It opens up horizons above and beyond the earth so vast that this mundane sphere dwindles into insignificance.
Woman’s love.—In emotional natures love exerts a predominant and frequently even supreme influence upon the whole consciousness of the individual. It produces effects upon his judgment, his fantasy and his will. It excites conceptions borrowed from the domain of sex and gives to all the work of the brain an erotic tendency and a sexual polarity.
Now, the woman lives more by her emotions than the man. The part she plays in the propagation of the kind is also by far the more important one. She has to supply the whole material for the formation of the new being; the man only supplies the stimulation to this heroic work. The woman’s centre of sexual activity is, therefore, more developed. The activity of the generative centres occupies an important position in the activity of her brain as a whole. Sexual life concerns her more nearly, more deeply and more lastingly than the man. She is able to do nothing else but love. Sexual matters imperiously mingle with all her motives and influence all her aims. To her love is life. Marriage is her highest ideal, and domestic happiness is and ever will be her ultimate aim.AL
Women, even maidens, says Hume, take more offence at satires upon matrimony than taunts upon their sex. Woman knows the attraction her sex has upon the other, and smiles at the insincerity of sex-criticism. But matrimony is holy to her. She has a natural tendency to regard wedded love as the single aim and substance of the life of human beings. Sexual consciousness is stronger in her than in man, and her need of true love is greater. She lives largely in her affections, and her constant desire is to attract and please.
In her natural state the woman, therefore, possesses a more distinctly developed ideal. On dissecting and analyzing the female heart at any age, and however married, we should probably find that the original ideal is still lingering there. Woman is constantly groping and making experiments, whereby she attempts to realize the ideal of her dreams in the actual men of her acquaintance. The instinct of selection is very important to her. By it she recognizes her affinity, the man best fitted by nature to father her children. She unconsciously feels the need of a partner who will organically compliment her. She possesses an instinctive sensation of what is organically necessary to her for the continuation and intensification of her qualities in the offspring.
For the woman the step of choosing a partner is the most important act of her life. She has an instinctive sensation that she ought not to make a mistake, and is extremely careful to avoid the least likelihood of error. She instinctively feels that her mistakes cannot be corrected. She is monoandric in character. She is aware that purely sensual love cannot last. Hence she looks more for mental merits, and has a high appreciation of a fine character. She is looking for qualities that will outlive the freshness of physical charms. Her innate solicitude is to continue the love-charm all through married life. Hence she is governed by ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Only a man endowed with such qualities can inspire in her true love and its unsurpassed pleasure and joy in life. When so inspired, she surrounds the object of her love with the halo of perfection.
The man, says Dessoir, is able to accomplish and find pleasure in sex activity without his soul partaking in it, but the woman does not find gratification in this activity if the soul has not been first excited by the beauty, strength and personality of her partner.
Love to a woman is an exalted and noble thing; she stakes her life upon it. She has, therefore, to be more fastidious in her choice of a consort than the man. This partly explains the mystery of modesty and coyness. She remains passive while she is wooed for her favor. Love, says Walker, is the empire of woman. The consciousness of weakness in woman leads her instinctively to her dissimulation, her finesse, her little contrivances, her manners, her graces and her coquetry. By these means she simultaneously endeavors to create love, and not to show what she feels, while by means of modesty she feigns to refuse what she desires to grant.
By an imperious power and charming tyranny she tries to prevent the man she loves from stirring from her side. She is ever desirous to fascinate and bewitch him. She feels herself to be a powerful centre of love and attraction around which everything ought to revolve. The woman, says Kant, has from early girlhood the confidence in her ability to please; the youth, the fear to displease. He is, therefore, shy in the presence of women. His desire is to be governed—before marriage—hence the chivalry of youth, while the woman’s desire is to rule. She wants man to surround her with an insatiable desire. She wishes to be loved and yearns to evoke man’s admiration for her by all her womanly qualities. She gives herself up entirely and irrevocably and never forgives the chosen possessor for examining too little the value of his treasure.
Obstructions of love’s development.—Healthy and natural love is always clearly conscious of its purpose, the ideal is always in existence, waiting for the opportunity to meet the materialized duplicate. Men and women have an unconscious sensation of the qualities of their ideals of the other sex, that by their union their respective qualities may be transmitted in an intensified degree to their offspring. Hence if the instinct has not become dulled by monetary considerations, if social reasons, religious prejudices or customs do not rise to confuse and pervert the instinct, men and women will, should there be many from whom to choose, select with unerring certainty the one who most closely approximates the psychic ideal which they have elaborated within themselves at the moment of sexual maturity.
But true love is only possible if the natural development has not been disturbed nor the natural course interrupted, and the young people have been given the opportunity to develop their ideals. If the development is arrested, if the growth of the erotic instinct is disturbed, at the time of restlessness and nerve-irritability, then the image of the ideal in the mind is confused and the discovery of its organic counterpart is impossible. Now, the whole nervous system is under great tension during the formation period. Inquietude, vague unrest and dissatisfaction disturbs the boy’s equanimity. His heart is tremulous with emotion and represents a volcano of agitation in perpetual eruption. He exudes intense feeling and passion. The mind of the girl is confused with vague dissatisfaction and vaguer desires which she vainly endeavors to define even to herself. Her heart is wildly stirred and issues from its chrysalis to renewed dreams of chimerical bliss. Joy and sorrow, exultation and depression alternate like dawn and dusk. All the complex subtleties of the feminine heart give rein to a single emotion. She lives in the realm of romance, her soul keeps soaring in the land of glamor. Hence the least disturbance will be fatal to the development of a clear and distinct image of the ideal.
Such disturbances are ever present in our advanced civilization. The early intimate association with the other sex, among the poorer classes, gives palpable suggestions of the libido connected with the functions of reproduction, at a time when mystery ought to shroud its object. Animal passion, especially in great cities, obtrudes itself upon the attention of young children, and they become conscious of the greatest of all human needs through the desire of the flesh, and not by a gradual growing sympathy for a noble being, possessing lasting gifts of sentiment and thought. The sentiments are, therefore, not of true love but of lust; and to transform lust into love is a difficult task.
Besides the unfavorable environment, certain radical doctrines, widely spread among the laboring classes, also prevent true love from taking root. In the literature, often read by these classes, excuses are readily made for the supremacy of the passions. Dithyrambs are sung upon the crudest emotions. The rational ethics of these radical moralists teach that “love worketh no evil.” True love may really do no evil, but gross passion, which these teachers of the new sex-morality call love, is capable to do all the harm in the world. Temporary sexual attraction, which is sensuality pure and simple, is called by the name of love and is made the basis of the new morality. The name of the sublimest emotion which appeals to the grandest impulses, to the noblest sentiments of men and women, which makes chivalrous, gentle, refined and helpful all who are touched by its magic wand, which informs its disciples with the spirit of honor (Walker), the name of this noble emotion is conferred upon the coarse emotion of sensuality, as if sensuality ever possessed all these ennobling qualities. The greater part of humanity is declared to be polygamous in nature. According to these radical doctrines only few men and women possess the instinct of exclusiveness, all other are naturally varietists. Consequently promiscuity is the ordained order of nature, and the monogamic marriage is decried as forced upon humanity by priest and tyrant.AM
Among the cultured and exclusive classes there is another danger lurking to the development of true sentimental love. It is the literary fiction of our time which is thoroughly imbued with the most unwholesome forms of love. The first knowledge of the world and of life is usually derived by the children of these classes from novels, and these novels deal from the first line to the last with nothing but love. The heroes and heroines in these novels are usually the creations of pathological brains, in different stages of degeneration, and are represented as worthy of emulation. These heroes change with every novel, and the children admire every day another ideal, imposed upon them from without, before their imaginations had the time for the conception of an ideal from the mysterious depths of the cells of the growing centre of generation. Besides, the authors of these novels are, as a rule, dealing with a perverted kind of love, which they call holy, beneficent, infallible, and which they consider above all laws. Their teachings are to obey the impulse of love with a fanaticism that disregards all bounds and barriers, codes and warnings of the sages. All obstacles, such as duty, modesty, honor, respect for the family and the rights of fellow men, that weave around everyone of us a firm and massy weft, all of them are treated like cobwebs that love tears away and treads upon to gain its end.
The eroding operations carried on by these mongrel degenerated brains cannot help but have a poisonous effect, especially upon the minds of young girls. While in the literature of half a century ago the heroine represented the fundamental type of woman, who is a mother of men, calling out men’s sacrifice and sacrificing herself for them, without calculation or barter, the heroine of the contemporary novel gives herself up to voluptuous excesses. The absence of chastity is considered a sign of the warmth of her feeling, moral decrepitude is called by the doubtful name “self-assertion,” and the exaggerated taste for self-indulgence is termed “self-expression.” Feminine selfishness is represented as an enviable instead of a base quality. Under such circumstances true love must, indeed, be a rare occurrence.
More fatal even to true love are the activities of the immoral plays, because they are so deceptive and disingenuous and sail under the guise of moral reforms. There are first the comic plays, nowadays filling most of the stages, which treat immorality as a subject for jocularity, and where an unchaste situation is made the subject of a jest. Then there are some serious plays where sin and the life of immorality are idealized. The career of the courtesan is pictured as a life of gentleness, refinement and renunciation. (La Dame aux Camélias.) In recent times a third kind of immoral plays has made its appearance upon the stage where immoral situations are portrayed, without regard to time-honored conventionalities, with such exactness that the warnings against the evils fail to fulfill their purpose.
Another blow fatal to true love, caused by the reading of contemporary literature, is the increase of the young girl’s natural vanity.AN The constant descriptions in most modern novels of the struggle over women and the enthusiasm felt at gaining her, says Nordau, increase her natural tendency to regard love as the single aim and substance of the life of human beings and intensify her natural partiality for herself to the degree of ambitious mania and self-deification. She actually imagines that the possession of her would be providential of more than earthly bliss. The pampered overcivilized modern woman finds in this pseudo-literature only lovers who are sacrificing to the divinity of beauty and who are constantly listening to the music of the stars, and she imagines that she also ought to be wooed by gods and spend her life in an earthly paradise. When after the wedding the mirage, she once thought was the eternal land of promise, has faded, she remains permanently shocked at finding only a man where she was looking for an angel as mate. When the longing for sensual satisfaction has been appeased, both lovers find that they have no more to discover and grow fickle and hunger for a change.
Another part of contemporary literature which is continually undermining the foundation of true love is the feministic branch. These writers are not satisfied to preach equality of the sexes. They constantly emphasize the superiority of the female sex. From this notion to the sermon of sex-antagonism is only one step, and this has been quickly enough made. Mutual admiration, trust and love have given place to the duel of the sexes. Even the father has been thrown overboard. These modern daughters act as if they had come to this world by the way of parthenogenesis. The sermon of the enmity of the sexes thus destroys not only true love, but the entire conception of the family and serves to blight the brightest and sweetest flowers, springing in the garden of the human heart. No wonder that the girl who has been influenced by such ideas has been made unfit for true love. Her judgment has become confused by overestimating her own worth and valuing the man solely for his capacity to supply the luxuries of life and to satisfy sensual desires. She has little love even for the man of her choice, and is not reluctant to show it on every occasion. A bride objecting to the word “obey” in the wedding ceremony—even granted that such a word does not and never did belong there—reveals at once her lack of true love. A girl truly in love with the man laughs at the word, because she feels that she would rather be his slave than any other man’s queen. To the lover the bride’s promise to obey seems mere folly, for he is determined that she should always remain the autocratic queen of his heart and actions. But when love is absent, and the wedding represents nothing more than a contract to legalize sensuality, which is otherwise considered immoral, every objection to the wording of the contract is justified and perfectly natural.
The female sex, says Kant, may be characterized by two inclinations, the desire to dominate, and the desire for pleasure. These two tendencies may be mitigated by true love. The truly loving woman will gladly and voluntarily share material misfortune and social degradation with her lover. She will overcome her egotism, she will labor hard to overcome her old faults and cheerfully give up what she once looked upon as necessaries for the love of a true man. But the modern woman looks upon the man only as a slave to provide for her, and as a thing affording her enjoyment. Hence she regards the miserable weakling, whose imbecile brain has not the power of resistance, as touching and charming, while vigorous strength of character, which is schooled in self-control and which places as high a value on the affection afforded as on that received, seems to her repulsive roughness. This blending of her judgment becomes fatal to her love, so important to the female heart.
Love, in its ideal form, must be founded on mental qualities. In man the mental qualities are of the greatest value. The supreme survival value for man is his intelligence. The possessors of artistic or literary composition, of mechanical skill, of calculating ability, of energy or general mental ability are seldom or never endowed at the same time with physical qualities. It was brain not brawn that saved man in his struggle for existence. The cult of the muscle as against intelligence would destroy man. The physically fittest is not always the best of men. Even the animals, in their natural surroundings, live by their wits rather than by force of bone and muscle; and it was man’s wits and will that enabled him to increase and multiply as no other animal. Physical weapons of defense and offense have disappeared in man because his intelligence makes them superfluous. In the human species mind is master of matter. Man has staked his all upon mind. The emergence and dominance of mind have enabled the human species to ascend through struggle and internecine war to the highest scale of animal life, although it is physically one of the feeblest among the species of the higher animals. The increasing dominance of mind over matter is the reason that nowadays mental qualities dominate all else in man’s living activities. Hence ideal love must also be based upon mental qualities. Then it will be everlasting. The soul once allied with its mate can change no more. One of the mysteries of true love is the absolute impossibility to duplicate the lover. The soul is thus the essential part in true love. But when in the selection of the mates the physical factors only, such as stature, beauty, strength and health, play the most important rôle, when the senses form the chief part of the compound feeling, love will not long survive possession, and matrimonial happiness, founded upon monetary or social considerations, will pass like a shadow. The idol is soon destroyed. When, thereupon, the heart is disillusioned by the contact with the grim realities of existence, when it is deadened by the habitude of a fixed affection, coupled with incompatibility of tastes, when hardened by experience with the meanness of the world, then men and women attempt to find elsewhere a soul which they hope will desire to know more of their own, and in which they trust to discover a greater and more lasting happiness. But not being able to ask their own hearts, and guided only by the contradictory ideals they have been imbued with in their youth, the second choice and all the others, following the same, will generally turn out to be also delusions in which the perfect communion of hearts will again be absent. Men will then try to bury their unsatisfied longing for true affection in the exaggerated occupation with business or to drown their vehement unrequited love-yearnings in drink and other narcotics. The fate of the woman is even more tragic. Woman’s idea of happiness is a sort of ecstatic bliss. She is looking for perennial joy and beauty, for a joy as only the angels know. Hence when she learns to know the illusory nature of the heart’s greatest desire, when she makes the discovery of the futility of this desire, the wine of life grows sour. She becomes self-centered and selfish. The fountain ordained to yield such perennial sweets is soon drained and she bestows all her feminine faculties upon mere inanities. Hence the astonishing aspect of restlessness, and agitation which we now behold in her mania for dress, her indulgence in drink and nerve-deadening drugs, and in her quest of other vain luxuries in which she desires to drown the emptiness of her heart and her spiritual isolation.