int of view of our friend Hitchcock:
"Desire and love are almost synonymous terms, for we love and seek what we
desire, and so also we desire and seek what we love; yet neither love nor
desire is by any necessary connection directed to one thing rather than
another, but either under conditions suitable to it may be directed to
anything. From which it follows that it is possible to make God as the
Eternal, its object, or call it truth and we may see that its enjoyment
must partake of its own nature. Now we read that it is not common for man
to love and pursue the good and the true because it is the good and true;
but we call that good which we desire and there lies the great mistake of
life. From all which we may see that vast consequences follow from the
choice of an object of desire, which as we have said, may as easily be an
eternal as a transient one. We should be on guard against a too mechanical
conception of these things. By so doing we should depart too greatly from
the point of view of the true alchemists. One author tells of the
significant advance that he made from the time when he discovered that
nature works 'magically.' " (H. A., Hitchcock's Remarks upon Alchemy, pp.
294 ff.)

Aversion and hate, the opposites of desire and love, are not independent
affections but depend upon the latter. There is only the one impulsion of
demand that strives for what satisfies it and repulses what conflicts with
it. "If then desire is turned to one only eternal thing, then, since the
nature of man takes its character from his leading or chief desire, the
whole man is gradually converted to, or, as some think, transmuted into
that one thing." (H. A., pp. 295 ff.)

The doctrine naturally presupposes the possibility, already mentioned, of
a schooling of the will, yet it will still be necessary to fix it upon a
definite object. The love of the transitory finds itself deceived because
the objects vanish, while the desire itself, the conation (or in
psychoanalytic language the libido), continues forever. For this
everlasting desire only an everlasting object is suitable. An object of
that kind is not to be found in the external world. We can only withdraw
the outer object and offer ideals in exchange. The moment that this
withdrawal of external objects takes place the libido begins, as it were,
to eject itself as an object; in the ideal we give it a nucleus for this
process, in order that it may form the new object around it and w