e this specialised
impulse. He calmly ignores all phenomena such as those I have described
because they do not fit his theory. With the exception of his cheap
observation that contrasts attract each other (which is the pith of all
his "truths") he does not adduce the smallest evidence for the truth of
his myth of "the genius of the species spreading his wings over the
coming generation." However much the results of breeders may be
applicable to the human species, they have nothing to do with love, and
the believers in the theory of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness are
silent on the subject of the best and most suitable subject for the
purpose; is it the law-abiding citizen? the restless reformer? or the
artist and thinker? Strange to say, the legend of the instinct of
philoprogenitiveness, intuitively conscious of the right way, is to-day
accepted even by scientists who are in sympathy neither with
Schopenhauer's nor with any other metaphysic. It is taken for granted
that love can only serve the purpose of the species; the fact that this
theory is both metaphysically and scientifically unsound is ignored. For
even leaving the genius of the species out of the question, his
intelligent comprehension of the "composition of the next generation" is
nevertheless devoutly believed in. Even Nietzsche, that
arch-individualist, was completely under the spell of this dogma, as is
proved by many of his utterances, for instance, by the well-known
socialistic definition of marriage as "the will of twain to create that
which is higher than its creators," and also by his theory that man is
not an end in himself but a bridge to something else. Nietzsche's
pronouncement that he has not yet found the woman whom he would like to
be the mother of his children, echoes the philosophy of Schopenhauer,
the superstition of the genius of philoprogenitiveness. The intrinsic
worth of love without any ulterior motive, without a view to pleasure or
to offspring, seems to have been unknown to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's
hero puts the purport of love not in the actual individual, but in a
conception, and annihilates the value of the individual and the unique.
Every great emotion is an end in itself, and whatever we may read into
it of "purposes" and "expediencies," is an invention, and independent of
the emotion itself. The aim of the purely spiritual love of the second
stage was not propagation, and yet it was an emotion whose loftiness
cannot easily