t really affects the
character of love is the lover's temperament, age, and experience. The
objects that appeal to each man reveal his nature; but those
unparalleled virtues and that unique divinity which the lover discovers
there are reflections of his own adoration, things that ecstasy is very
cunning in. He loves what he imagines and worships what he creates.

[Sidenote: Machinery regulating choice.]

Those who do not consider these matters so curiously may feel that to
refer love in this way chiefly to inner processes is at once ignominious
and fantastic. But nothing could be more natural; the soul accurately
renders, in this experience, what is going on in the body and in the
race. Nature had a problem to solve in sexual reproduction which would
have daunted a less ruthless experimenter. She had to bring together
automatically, and at the dictation, as they felt, of their
irresponsible wills, just the creatures that by uniting might reproduce
the species. The complete sexual reaction had to be woven together out
of many incomplete reactions to various stimuli, reactions not
specifically sexual. The outer senses had to be engaged, and many
secondary characters found in bodies had to be used to attract
attention, until the deeper instinctive response should have time to
gather itself together and assert itself openly. Many mechanical
preformations and reflexes must conspire to constitute a determinate
instinct. We name this instinct after its ultimate function, looking
forward to the uses we observe it to have; and it seems to us in
consequence an inexplicable anomaly that many a time the instinct is set
in motion when its alleged purpose cannot be fulfilled; as when love
appears prematurely or too late, or fixes upon a creature of the wrong
age or sex. These anomalies show us how nature is built up and, far from
being inexplicable, are hints that tend to make everything clear, when
once a verbal and mythical philosophy has been abandoned.

Responses which we may call sexual in view of results to which they may
ultimately lead are thus often quite independent, and exist before they
are drawn into the vortex of a complete and actually generative act.
External stimulus and present idea will consequently be altogether
inadequate to explain the profound upheaval which may ensue, if, as we
say, we actually fall in love. That the senses should be played upon is
nothing, if no deeper reaction is aroused. All depends on th