ich serves reproduction thus
finds kindred but higher uses, as every organ does in a liberal life;
and what Plato called a desire for birth in beauty may be sublimated
even more, until it yearns for an ideal immortality in a transfigured
world, a world made worthy of that love which its children have so often
lavished on it in their dreams.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: The wide uses of the English word love add to the
difficulty. I shall take the liberty of limiting the term here to
imaginative passion, to being in love, excluding all other ways of
loving. It follows that love--like its shadow, jealousy--will often be
merely an ingredient in an actual state of feeling; friendship and
confidence, with satisfaction at being liked in return, will often be
mingled with it. We shall have to separate physiologically things which
in consciousness exist undivided, since a philosophic description is
bound to be analytic and cannot render everything at once. Where a poet
might conceive a new composite, making it live, a moralist must dissect
the experience and rest in its eternal elements.]

[Footnote B: One example, among a thousand, is the cry of Siegfried and
Bruenhilde in Wagner:

Lachend lass' uns verderben
Lachend zu Grunde geh'n.
Fahr hin, Walhall's
Leuchtende Welt!...
Leb' wohl, pragende
Goetter Pracht!
Ende in Wonne,
Du ewig Geschlecht!]

CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY

[Sidenote: The family arises spontaneously.]

Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the
impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless
only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins
presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship
into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half
plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its
consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclinations we
have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices,
bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once
seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal
career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in
accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He
sails henceforth for one point of the compass.

[Sidenote: It harmonises natural interests.]

The family is one of nature's masterpieces. It would be hard to conceive