n so many adventitious and somewhat permanent organs. In vegetables
soul and seed go forth together and leave nothing but a husk behind. In
the human individual love may seem a mere incident of youth and a
sentimental madness; but that episode, if we consider the race, is
indispensable to the whole drama; and if we look to the order in which
ideal interests have grown up and to their superposition in moral
experience, love will seem the truly primitive and initiatory passion.
Consciousness, amused ordinarily by the most superficial processes,
itself bears witness to the underlying claims of reproduction and is
drawn by it for a moment into life's central vortex; and love, while it
betrays its deep roots by the imperative force it exerts and the silence
it imposes on all current passions, betrays also its ideal mission by
casting an altogether novel and poetic spell over the mind.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in describing love.]

The conscious quality of this passion differs so much in various races
and individuals, and at various points in the same life, that no account
of it will ever satisfy everybody.[A] Poets and novelists never tire of
depicting it anew; but although the experience they tell of is fresh
and unparalleled in every individual, their rendering suffers, on the
whole, from a great monotony. Love's gesture and symptoms are noted and
unvarying; its vocabulary is poor and worn. Even a poet, therefore, can
give of love but a meagre expression, while the philosopher, who
renounces dramatic representation, is condemned to be avowedly
inadequate. Love, to the lover, is a noble and immense inspiration; to
the naturalist it is a thin veil and prelude to the self-assertion of
lust. This opposition has prevented philosophers from doing justice to
the subject. Two things need to be admitted by anyone who would not go
wholly astray in such speculation: one, that love has an animal basis;
the other, that it has an ideal object. Since these two propositions
have usually been thought contradictory, no writer has ventured to
present more than half the truth, and that half out of its true
relations.

[Sidenote: One-sided or inverted theories about it.]

Plato, who gave eloquent expression to the ideal burden of the passion,
and divined its political and cosmic message, passed over its natural
history with a few mythical fancies; and Schopenhauer, into whose
system a naturalistic treatment would have fitted so easily, allowe