he emotion of love towards any
human soul, our attitude towards the physical form of such a soul
must of necessity be profoundly penetrated by pity and by a tender
and humorous recognition that such a physical form only
expresses a very limited portion of the unfathomable soul which
we love.

If, with a desperate craving to contradict the essential nature of
love, we insist upon regarding the physical body as the complete
expression of the soul, we fall into the same fatal weakness as that
into which those fall who demand a physical incarnation of the
"companions of men," and along with such as these we are false to
love's true craving for the "eternal idea of flesh and blood."

In other words, this craving of love for "the eternal idea of the
body" does not imply that we are false to love when we are unable
to change our natural repugnance in the presence of the repulsive
and the offensive into attraction to these things. Love certainly
does not mean a morbid attraction to what is unattractive. The
sexual emotion, the emotion which we call "being in love," does
sometimes include this morbidity, just because, by reason of its
physiological origin, it tends to remain the slave of the
physiological. But although love does not imply a morbid
attraction to the repulsive and the offensive, and although the
presence of the repulsive and offensive in connection with those
we love is a proof to us that "the eternal idea of the body," is not
realized in the actual body, it is clear that "love is not love" when
it allows itself to be diminished or destroyed by the presence of
these things.

What love really demands, both with regard to the universe and
with regard to any individual soul in the universe, is not so much
the retention of the physiological aspect of these things, _as we
know them now_, but of the physiological aspect of them implied
in such a phrase as "the eternal idea of matter" or "the eternal idea
of flesh and blood."

It may be put still more simply by saying that what love demands
is the existence of something in what we call "matter" or the
"body" which guarantees the eternal reality of these aspects of life.
It does not demand that we should love the repulsive, the
offensive, the false, or the evil, because these exist in the bodies
and the souls of those we love.

Everything in the universe partakes of the eternal duality. The
hideous, the false and the evil are not confined to what we call
"mind" b