d his
metaphysics to carry him at this point into verbal inanities; while, of
course, like all profane writers on the subject, he failed to appreciate
the oracles which Plato had delivered. In popular feeling, where
sentiment and observation must both make themselves felt somehow or
other, the tendency is to imagine that love is an absolute, non-natural
energy which, for some unknown reason, or for none at all, lights upon
particular persons, and rests there eternally, as on its ultimate goal.
In other words, it makes the origin of love divine and its object
natural: which is the exact opposite of the truth. If it were once seen,
however, that every ideal expresses some natural function, and that no
natural function is incapable, in its free exercise, of evolving some
ideal and finding justification, not in some collateral animal, but in
an inherent operation like life or thought, which being transmissible in
its form is also eternal, then the philosophy of love should not prove
permanently barren. For love is a brilliant illustration of a principle
everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the
friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. There can be
no philosophic interest in disguising the animal basis of love, or in
denying its spiritual sublimations, since all life is animal in its
origin and all spiritual in its possible fruits.

[Sidenote: Sexual functions its basis.]

Plastic matter, in transmitting its organisation, takes various courses
which it is the part of natural history to describe. Even after
reproduction has become sexual, it will offer no basis for love if it
does not require a union of the two parent bodies. Did germinal
substances, unconsciously diffused, meet by chance in the external
medium and unite there, it is obvious that whatever obsessions or
pleasures maturity might bring they would not have the quality which men
call love. But when an individual of the opposite sex must be met with,
recognised, and pursued, and must prove responsive, then each is haunted
by the possible other. Each feels in a generic way the presence and
attraction of his fellows; he vibrates to their touch, he dreams of
their image, he is restless and wistful if alone. When the vague need
that solicits him is met by the presence of a possible mate it is
extraordinarily kindled. Then, if it reaches fruition, it subsides
immediately, and after an interval, perhaps, of stupor and vita