hat it cannot be gratified, it
may lead to madness or even suicide. Besides these unconscious
considerations which are the source of passionate love, there must be
still others, which we have not so directly before us. Therefore, we
must take it for granted that here there is not only a fitness of
constitution but also a special fitness between the man's _will_ and the
woman's _intellect_, in consequence of which a perfectly definite
individual can be born to them alone, whose existence is contemplated by
the genius of the species for reasons to us impenetrable, since they are
the very essence of the thing-in-itself. Or more strictly speaking, the
will to live desires to objectivise itself in an individual which is
precisely determined, and can only be begotten by this particular father
and this particular mother. This metaphysical yearning of the will in
itself has immediately, as its sphere of action in the circle of human
beings, the hearts of the future parents, who accordingly are seized
with this desire. They now fancy that it is for their own sakes they are
longing for what at present has purely a metaphysical end, that is to
say, for what does not come within the range of things that exist in
reality. In other words, it is the desire of the future individual to
enter existence, which has first become possible here, a longing which
proceeds from the primary source of all being and exhibits itself in the
phenomenal world as the intense love of the future parents for each
other, and has little regard for anything outside itself. In fact, love
is an illusion like no other; it will induce a man to sacrifice
everything he possesses in the world, in order to obtain this woman, who
in reality will satisfy him no more than any other. It also ceases to
exist when the end, which was in reality metaphysical, has been
frustrated perhaps by the woman's barrenness (which, according to
Hufeland, is the result of nineteen accidental defects in the
constitution), just as it is frustrated daily in millions of crushed
germs in which the same metaphysical life-principle struggles to exist;
there is no other consolation in this than that there is an infinity of
space, time, and matter, and consequently inexhaustible opportunity, at
the service of the will to live.

Although this subject has not been treated by Theophrastus Paracelsus,
and my entire train of thought is foreign to him, yet it must have
presented itself to him, if even