itation about
the fate of their souls.

Love never so much as even considers the question of the fate of
the soul. Love finds, in the mere act of loving, a happiness so
profound that all such problems seem tiresome and insignificant.
The purpose of life is to attain the rhythmic ecstasy of all love's
intrinsic potentialities. This desire for personal immortality is not
one of love's intrinsic potentialities. When a human soul has lost
by death the one person it has loved, the strength of its love is
measured by the greater or less emphasis it places upon the
problem of the lost one's "survival."

The disgust which the aesthetic sense experiences when it
encounters a certain sort of mystical and psychic agitation over the
question as to whether the lost one "lives still somewhere" is a
disgust based upon our instinctive knowledge that this particular
kind of inquiry would never occur to a supreme and self-forgetful
love. For this enquiry, this agitation, this dabbling in "psychic
evidences," is a projection of the baser nature of the soul; is, in
fact, a projection of the "possessive instinct," which is only
another name for the original inert malice.

In the "ave atque vale" of the Roman poet, there is much more of
the absolute quality of great love than in all these psychic
dabblings. For in the austere reserve of that passionate cry there is
the ultimate acceptance, by Love itself, of the tragedy of having
lived and loved at all. There is an acceptance of that aspect of the
"vision of the immortals" which implies that the possessive
instinct has no part or lot in the eternal.

The inhuman cruelties which have been practised by otherwise
"good" men under the motive of "saving" other people's souls, and
the inhuman cruelties which have been practised by otherwise
"good" men under the motive of saving their own souls, have,
each of them, the same evil origin. Love sweeps aside, in one great
wave of its own nature, all these doubts and ambiguities. It lifts the
object of its love into its own eternity; and in its own eternity the
ultimate tragedy of personal separation is but one chord of its
unbroken rhythm.

The tragedy of personal separation is not a thing which love
realizes for the first time when it loses the object of its love. It is
a thing which is of the very nature of the eternity in which love
habitually dwells. For the eternity in which love habitually dwells
is its vision of the tragedy of all life.