om the absence of personal barriers;
(9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes,
"fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary
excitations of which we are capable."

It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual love, or even to
analyze its components, is by no means to explain its mystery. We seek to
satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the
gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be
incommensurable and impassable. "There is no word more often pronounced
than that of love," wrote Bonstetten many years ago, "yet there is no
subject more mysterious. Of that which touches us most nearly we know
least. We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love."
And however expert we have become in detecting and analyzing the causes,
the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same
confession to-day. We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a
form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a
kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital
tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing
to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.

What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the
seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the
necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final
goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it
seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous
membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the
riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the
artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play _L'Escalade_, makes a cold
and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which
can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love
himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of
night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that
touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing
so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which
poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that
such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy
merely because it