l
recuperation, the animal regains his independence, his peace, and his
impartial curiosity. You might think him on the way to becoming
intelligent; but the renewed nutrition and cravings of the sexual
machinery soon engross his attention again; all his sprightly
indifference vanishes before nature's categorical imperative. That
fierce and turbid pleasure, by which his obedience is rewarded, hastens
his dissolution; every day the ensuing lassitude and emptiness give him
a clearer premonition of death. It is not figuratively only that his
soul has passed into his offspring. The vocation to produce them was a
chief part of his being, and when that function is sufficiently
fulfilled he is superfluous in the world and becomes partly superfluous
even to himself. The confines of his dream are narrowed. He moves
apathetically and dies forlorn.

Some echo of the vital rhythm which pervades not merely the generations
of animals, but the seasons and the stars, emerges sometimes in
consciousness; on reaching the tropics in the mortal ecliptic, which the
human individual may touch many times without much change in his outer
fortunes, the soul may occasionally divine that it is passing through a
supreme crisis. Passion, when vehement, may bring atavistic sentiments.
When love is absolute it feels a profound impulse to welcome death, and
even, by a transcendental confusion, to invoke the end of the
universe.[B] The human soul reverts at such a moment to what an
ephemeral insect might feel, buzzing till it finds its mate in the noon.
Its whole destiny was wooing, and, that mission accomplished, it sings
its _Nunc dimittis_, renouncing heartily all irrelevant things, now that
the one fated and all-satisfying good has been achieved. Where parental
instincts exist also, nature soon shifts her loom: a milder impulse
succeeds, and a satisfaction of a gentler sort follows in the birth of
children. The transcendental illusion is here corrected, and it is seen
that the extinction the lovers had accepted needed not to be complete.
The death they welcomed was not without its little resurrection. The
feeble worm they had generated bore their immortality within it.

The varieties of sexual economy are many and to each may correspond, for
all we know, a special sentiment. Sometimes the union established is
intermittent; sometimes it crowns the end of life and dissolves it
altogether; sometimes it remains, while it lasts, monogamous; sometimes
th