and of appearances.

And what is maternal love but compassion for the weak, helpless,
defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and the comfort of her
breast? And woman's love is all maternal.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus
enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their
own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly
opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are
miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied
them and loved them.

Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man
wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows. The
roadside beggar's exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is
something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True
alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material
hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to
him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to
him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not
pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter.
Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved
by the story of them. He desires to be pitied, to be loved.

Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in
its essence--maternal. Woman yields herself to the lover because she
feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon
Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say:
"Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is
her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more
enduring.

Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is
conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the
love, in a word, of a rational person. Love pities, and pities most when
it loves most.

Reversing the terms of the adage _nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, I
have told you that _nihil cognitum quin praevolitum_, that we know
nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it
may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save
what we pity.

As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to
the innermost, so it con