and in one swift turn of the ultimate wheel, the
whole situation is transformed.

The physical pain seems to have no longer any hold upon the soul.
The mental misery and trouble falls away from it like an
unstrapped load. And a deep, cool, tide--calm and still and full of
infinite murmurs--rolls up around it, and pours through it, and
brings it healing and peace. The emotion of love in which
personality, and therefore in which the universe, finds the secret of
its life, has not the remotest connection with sex. Sexual passion
has its place in the world'; but it is only when sexual passion
merges itself in the sort of love we are now considering that it
becomes an instrument of real clairvoyance.

There is a savage instinct of cruel and searching illumination in
sexual passion, but such an instinct is directed towards death
rather than towards life, because it is dominated, through all its
masks and disguises, by the passion of possession.

Like the passion of hate, to which it is so closely allied, sexual
passion has a kind of furious intensity which is able to reveal
many deep levels of human obliquity. But one thing it cannot
reveal, because of the strain of malice it carries with it, and that is
the spring of genuine love. "Like unto like" is the key to the
situation; and the deeper the clairvoyance of malice digs into the
subterranean poison of life, the more poison it finds. For in finding
poison it creates poison, and in finding malice it doubles malice.

The great works of art are not motivated by the clairvoyance of
malice; they are motivated by the clairvoyance of love. It is only
in the inferior levels of art that malice is the dominant note; and
even there it is only effective because, mixed with it, there is an
element of destructive hatred springing from some perversion of
the sexual instinct. Whatever difficulty we may experience in
finding words wherewith to define this emotion of love, there is
not one of us, however sceptical and malign, who does not
recognize it when it appears in the flesh. Malice displays its
recognition of it by a passion of furious hatred; but even this
hatred cannot last for ever, because in every personality that exists
there must be a hidden love which answers to the appeal of love.

The feeling which love has, at its supreme moments, is the feeling
of "unity in difference" with all forms of life. Love may
concentrate itself with a special concentration upon one person or