oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete;
one _is_ more complete," says Nietzsche (_Der Wille zur Macht_,
p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it
inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the
greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes
the feeling of values: the lover _is_ worth more, is stronger. In
animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors,
and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive
music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is
opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and
sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left
over in poetry and music? _L'Art pour l'art_ perhaps, the
quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All
the rest is created by love."

It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many
diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love
(including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is
the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are
justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to
inquire.

It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic
and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words
for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for
experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of sexual
exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still
subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the
refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite
commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the
intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the
people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's
thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the
individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the
greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual
labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in
his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his conviction that, even
from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing
in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an