y."

All this may carry to certain minds an ambiguous and even
distasteful association; but I think it will only do so to such minds
as are reluctant to analyse, to the furthest limit, their own capacity
for the kind of "love" I have attempted to describe; and possibly
also such minds as are debarred, by some sub-conscious element
of "malice" in them, from even desiring to develop such a
capacity.

The ambiguity and unsatisfactory vagueness in what I have been
attempting to indicate may perhaps be in a measure dissipated by a
direct appeal to concrete experience. When one analyses this
emotion of love in relation to any actual human object I think it
becomes clear that in our attitude to the physical body of the
person we love there is a profound element of pity.

The sexual emotion may destroy this pity; and any emotion which
is sensual as well as sexual may not only destroy it but turn it into
a very different kind of pity; into the "pity," namely, of a torturer
for his victim. But I feel I am not wrong in my analysis of the kind
of "love" I have in my mind, when I say that the element of pity
enters profoundly into our attitude towards the body of the person
we love.

It enters into it for this reason; namely because the physical body
of the person we love does so inadequately and so imperfectedly
express the beauty of such a person's soul. "Love is not love"
when the blemishes and defects and maladies of the physical form
of the person loved interfere with our love and cause it to
diminish. And such blemishes and defects and maladies _would_
interfere with love if love were not in its essence profoundly
penetrated by pity.

It may be asked--"how can love, which is naturally associated with
beauty and nobility, endure for a moment in the presence of such
lamentable hideousness and repulsiveness and offensiveness, as
exists in some degree in the physiological aspects of us all?" It is
able to endure because in the presence of this what it desires is, as
I have said, not so much the actual physical body of the object of
its love as the "eternal idea" of such a body.

When the individual soul allows itself to demand with too
desperate a craving the actual incarnation of these "sons of the
universe" it is in reality false to its desire for the "eternal idea of
the body," because no actual incarnation of these immortal ones
could realize in any complete sense this "eternal idea."

In the same way when we feel t