n of the intellectual platonist, the will to possession of the
sex-maniac, the will to voluptuous cruelty of the sex-pervert, the
maternal instinct, the race-instinct, the instinct towards
fetish-worship, the instinct towards art, towards nature, towards the
ultimate mystery--all these things have been called "love" that we
should follow them and pursue them; all these things have been
called "love" that we should avoid them and fly from them.

The emotion of love in which we seem to detect the ultimate
creative force is not precisely any of these things. Of all normal
human emotions it comes nearest to passionate sympathy. But it is
much more than this. The emotion of love is not a simple nor an
easily defined thing. How should it be that, when it is one aspect
of the outpouring of the very stuff of the soul itself? How should it
be that when it is the projection, into the heart of the objective
mystery, of the soul's manifold and complicated essence?

The best definition of love is that it is the creative apprehension of
life, or of the objective mystery, under the form of an eternal
vision. At first sight this definition might seem but a cold and
intellectual account of love; an account that has omitted all
feeling, all passion, all ecstasy.

But when we remember that what we call "the eternal vision" is
nothing less than the answer of love to love, nothing less than the
reciprocal rhythm of all souls, in so far as they have overcome
malice, with one another and with the mystery which surrounds
them, it will be seen that the thing is something in which what we
call "intellect" and what we call "feeling" are both transcended.
Love, in this sense, is an ecstasy; but it is an ecstasy from which
all troubling, agitating, individual exactions have been obliterated.
It is an ecstasy completely purged of the possessive instinct. It is
an ecstasy that brings to us a feeling of indescribable peace and
calm. It is an ecstasy in which our personal self, in the fullest
realization of its inmost identity, loses itself, even at the moment
of such realization, in something which cannot be put into
words. At one moment our human soul finds itself harassed by a
thousand vexations, outraged by a thousand miseries. Physical
pain torments it, spiritual pain torments it; and a great darkness
of thick, heavy, poisonous obscurity wraps it round like a
grave-cloth. Then, in a sudden movement of the will, the soul cries
aloud upon love;