hould consider that I bought you for a trifle."

To adduce more historical evidence of modern love would serve no
purpose; in the next chapter I shall discuss its metaphysical
consummation, the love-death. But I will briefly point out the not quite
obvious difference between synthetic love and sexuality projected on a
specific individual. In several of the higher animals the sexual
instinct is to some extent individualised, but nevertheless it is no
more than instinct, seeking a suitable mate for its gratification. All
the well-known theories of "sexual attraction," from Schopenhauer to
Weininger, accounting love as nothing but a mutual supplementing of two
individuals for the purpose of the best possible reproduction of the
species, do not apply to love in the modern sense, but to the sexual
impulse; they completely disregard the individual, and are only aware of
the species; they apprehend individualisation as an instrument in the
service of the race. But genuine personal love is not kindled by
instinct; it is not differentiated sexual impulse; it embraces the
psycho-physical unity of the beloved without being conscious of sexual
desire. It shares with the purely spiritual love the eagerness of man to
raise and glorify the beloved woman, without ulterior motive or desire.
This distinction may be called hair-splitting, and I admit that it is
frequently impossible to make it in practice, but it is important in
principle because it goes back to origins and finds in the metaphysical
climax of the third stage, the love-death, its practical anti-generic
proof. But with all this it is of common occurrence that spiritual and
sensual love are at different times projected on one and the same woman.

Schopenhauer's instinct of philoprogenitiveness has to-day become an
article of faith with the learned and unlearned. Schopenhauer was the
first, probably, to conceive the idea that love was the consciousness of
the unconscious instincts in the service of the species, and had no
other content or purpose than the will of the species to produce the
best possible offspring. In a chapter of his principal work, entitled
_The Metaphysics of Love_, he essayed to promulgate and prove his theory
in detail. "All love, however ethereal it may pretend to be, is rooted
solely in the sexual instinct; it is nothing more nor less than
specialised, strictly speaking individualised, sexual desire."
Schopenhauer's conception of love does not rise abov