pulse of sex, and would have been,
if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual
methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that
we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The
whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long
since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon
love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of
a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life
is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to
refuse to accept the fact of love.

It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the
world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own
proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few
expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have
pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of
the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the
heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote
Helvetius long since in _De l'Esprit_. "The activity of the mind
depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period
of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or
forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or
of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre
of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of
others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues
(_Psychological Review_, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love
which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the
altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods
Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution,"
_Monist_, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was
not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all
morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an
absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious
longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were
man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that
spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his
_Physiology of Mind_, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps
also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One
seems to