in the particular
creatures it may produce.

[Sidenote: Priority of the latter]

Reproduction is accordingly primary and more completely instrumental
than nutrition is, since it serves a soul as yet non-existent, while
nutrition is useful to a soul that already has some actuality.
Reproduction initiates life and remains at life's core, a function
without which no other, in the end, would be possible. It is more
central, crucial, and representative than nutrition, which is in a way
peripheral only; it is a more typical and rudimentary act, marking the
ideal's first victory over the universal flux, before any higher
function than reproduction itself has accrued to the animal. To nourish
an existing being is to presuppose a pause in generation; the nucleus,
before it dissolves into other individuals, gathers about itself, for
its own glory, certain temporal and personal faculties. It lives for
itself; while in procreation it signs its own death-warrant, makes its
will, and institutes its heir.

[Sidenote: Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeply
ideal.]

This situation has its counterpart in feeling. Replenishment is a sort
of delayed breathing, as if the animal had to hunt for air: it
necessitates more activity than it contains; it engages external senses
in its service and promotes intelligence. After securing a dumb
satisfaction, or even in preparing it, it leaves the habits it employed
free for observation and ideal exercise. Reproduction, on the contrary,
depletes; it is an expense of spirit, a drag on physical and mental
life; it entangles rather than liberates; it fuses the soul again into
the impersonal, blind flux. Yet, since it constitutes the primary and
central triumph of life, it is in itself more ideal and generous than
nutrition; it fascinates the will in an absolute fashion, and the
pleasures it brings are largely spiritual. For though the
instrumentalities of reproduction may seem gross and trivial from a
conventional point of view, its essence is really ideal, the perfect
type, indeed, of ideality, since form and an identical life are therein
sustained successfully by a more rhythmical flux of matter.

It may seem fanciful, even if not unmeaning, to say that a man's soul
more truly survives in his son's youth than in his own decrepitude; but
this principle grows more obvious as we descend to simpler beings, in
which individual life is less elaborated and has not intrenched itself
i