has been
constantly the theme of poets, rather should one be surprised that love,
which always plays such an important _role_ in a man's life, has
scarcely ever been considered at all by philosophers, and that it still
stands as material for them to make use of.

Plato has devoted himself more than any one else to the subject of love,
especially in the _Symposium_ and the _Phaedrus_; what he has said about
it, however, comes within the sphere of myth, fable, and raillery, and
only applies for the most part to the love of a Greek youth. The little
that Rousseau says in his _Discours sur l'inegalite_ is neither true nor
satisfactory. Kant's disquisition on love in the third part of his
treatise, _Ueber das Gefuehl des Schoenen und Erhabenen_, is very
superficial; it shows that he has not thoroughly gone into the subject,
and therefore it is somewhat untrue. Finally, Platner's treatment of it
in his _Anthropology_ will be found by every one to be insipid and
shallow.

To amuse the reader, on the other hand, Spinoza's definition deserves to
be quoted because of its exuberant naivete: _Amor est titillatio,
concomitante idea causae externae_ (_Eth._ iv., prop. 44). It is not my
intention to be either influenced or to contradict what has been written
by my predecessors; the subject has forced itself upon me objectively,
and has of itself become inseparable from my consideration of the world.
Moreover, I shall expect least approval from those people who are for
the moment enchained by this passion, and in consequence try to express
their exuberant feelings in the most sublime and ethereal images. My
view will seem to them too physical, too material, however metaphysical,
nay, transcendent it is fundamentally.

First of all let them take into consideration that the creature whom
they are idealising to-day in madrigals and sonnets would have been
ignored almost entirely by them if she had been born eighteen years
previously.

Every kind of love, however ethereal it may seem to be, springs entirely
from the instinct of sex; indeed, it is absolutely this instinct, only
in a more definite, specialised, and perhaps, strictly speaking, more
individualised form. If, bearing this in mind, one considers the
important _role_ which love plays in all its phases and degrees, not
only in dramas and novels, but also in the real world, where next to
one's love of life it shows itself as the strongest and most active of
all motives; if one