is the body of one particular woman--what insanity! And
yet that is what I feel."[64]

That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual
is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation
that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.
That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer. When a
youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the ecstacy of love they
imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said
Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief
that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to
effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The
intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness
they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing
offspring. In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious
prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of
selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature. As
Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion. The lovers
thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal
happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were deceived not because
the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more;
instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were
carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as
Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully
recognized.[65]

It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be,
and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive himself, or be deceived
by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she
possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such
deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and
inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur. This kind of
deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of
love--and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond--is
liable to occur in any relation of life. For most people, however, and
those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation
of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains
as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts
of l