Philosophy teaches that the two fundamental principles of thought are
self-preservation and the preservation of the species. Every idea that has
existed or does exist in the human mind is the result of the permutations
and combinations of these two principles and their derivatives. Of the two
the second is the stronger. Its basis is a sentiment which antiquity
deified, primitive Christianity scorned, chivalry nimbused and the
Renaissance propelled over the paths easy or perilous which it has since
pursued. But into the precise nature of that sentiment metaphysics alone
has looked. Plato was the first that analyzed it. For the few thereafter
the rich courses of his Banquet sufficed. They regaled themselves on it.
But for humanity at large, to whom the feast was Greek, there was only the
descriptions of poets and the knowledge, agreeable or otherwise, which
personal experience supplied. In either case the noumenon, the Ding an
sich, the thing in itself, escaped. It was too tenuous perhaps for
detention or else too obvious. Plato himself did not grasp it.

The omission Schopenhauer discerned. Schopenhauer was an idealist. The
forms of matter and of man he arranged in two categories, which he called
Representation and Will. In his system of philosophy everything not
produced by the one is the result of the other. Among the effects of the
latter is love.[76]

This frivolity--the term is Schopenhauer's--is, he declared, a
manifestation of the Genius of the Species, who, behind a mask of
objective admiration, deludes the individual into mistaking for his own
happiness that which in reality concerns but the next generation. Love is
Will projecting itself into the creation of another being and the precise
instant in which that being emerges from the original source of whatever
is into the possibilities of potential existence, is the very moment in
which two young people begin to fancy each other. The seriousness with
which on first acquaintance they consider each other is due to an
unconscious meditation concerning the child that they might create. The
result of the meditation determines the degree of their reciprocal
inclinations. That degree established, the new being becomes comparable to
a new idea. As is the case with all ideas it makes an effort to manifest
itself. In the strength of the effort is the measure of the attraction.
Its degrees are infinite while its extremes are represented by Venus
Pandemos and Venus Urania-