ife.[66]

Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to
deception or disappointment with the larger question of a
metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent
this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by
Renouvier and Prat in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ (pp. 216 _et
seq._). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they
answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not,
dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential
error which presided over the creation of the _idol_, for the
idol is only what in all things the _ideal_ is. But to realize
the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the
great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in
casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is
true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty
of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a
degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim
so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must
admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the
prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws,
are far greater than we deserved.

We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the
passions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of
Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare
(in the _Tempest_) and of Calderon (in _La Vida es Sueno_), who felt that
ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream. But short of that
large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that
love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other
cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of
realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the
attraction of sex. If we admit the action of sexual selection--as we can
scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential
accretions[67]--love has moulded the precise shape and color, the
essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.

If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the
physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure--our social
feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art--are, in some
degree at least, also built up on the im