wildly in love."
Instinct is a primitive and general instigation, coeval and conterminous
with life. Love is a specific emotion, exclusive in selection, more or
less permanent in duration and due to a mental fermentation in itself
caused by a law of attraction, which Plato called imeros and Voltaire the
myth of happiness invented by Satan for man's despair.

Imeros is the longing for love. The meditation which Schopenhauer
described may enter there, and usually does, whether or not the parties
interested are aware of it. But it need not necessarily do so. When
Heloise was in her convent there could have been no such meditation, yet,
she loved Abailard as fervently as before. Moreover, when the work of
nature is accomplished, disenchantment does not, as Schopenhauer insisted,
invariably ensue. Disenchantment results when the accomplishing is due to
instinct but not when sentiment is the cause. Had instinct alone prevailed
humanity would hardly have arisen from its primitive state. But the
evolution of the sentiment of love, in developing the law of attraction,
lifted men from animality, angels from the shames of Ishtar, and
heightened the stature of the soul.

The advance effected is as notable as it is obvious, but its final term is
probably still remote. Ages ago the sphinx was disinterred from beneath
masses of sand under which it had brooded interminably. In its simian
paws, its avian wings, in its body which is that of an animal, in its face
which is that of a sage, before Darwin, before history, in traits great
and grave, the descent of man was told.

There remains his ascent. Future monuments may tell it. Meanwhile
evolution has not halted. Undiscernibly but indefatigably its advance
proceeds. Its culmination is not in existing types. If humanity descends
from apes, from humanity gods may emerge. The story of Olympus is but a
tale of what might have been and what might have been may yet come to
pass. Even now, if the story were true and the old gods could return, it
is permissible to assume that they would evaporate to ghostland eclipsed.
The inextinguishable laughter which was theirs is absent from the prose of
life. Commerce has alarmed their afflatus away. But the telegraph is a
better messenger than they had, the motor is surer than their chariots of
dream. In contemporary homes they could have better fare than ambrosia and
behold faces beside which some of their own might seem less divine. The
prodigies of