sort of juvenile
holiday, like a trip to Italy or California, which is delightful while
it lasts and leaves pleasant memories thoughout life, but is otherwise
of no particular use.

It shows a most extraordinary ignorance of the ways of nature to
suppose that it should have developed so powerful an instinct and
sentiment for no useful purpose, or even as a detriment to the race.
That is not the way nature operates. In reality love is the most
useful thing in the world. The two most important objects of the human
race are its own preservation and improvement, and in both of these
directions love is the mightiest of all agencies. It makes the world
go round. Take it away, and in a few years animal life will be as
extinct on this planet as it is on the moon. And by preferring youth
to age, health to disease, beauty to deformity, it improves the human
type, slowly but steadily.

The first thinker who clearly recognized and emphatically asserted the
superlative importance of love was Schopenhauer. Whereas Hegel (II.,
184) parroted the popular opinion that love is peculiarly and
exclusively the affair of the two individuals whom it directly
involves, having no concern with the eternal interests of family and
race, no universality (Allgemeinheit). Schopenhauer's keen mind on the
contrary saw that love, though the most individualized of all
passions, concerns the race even more than the individual. "Die
Zusammensetzung der naechsten Generation, e qua iterum pendent
innumerae generationes"--the very composition and essence of the next
generation and of countless generations following it, depends, as he
says, on the particular choice of a mate. If an ugly, vicious,
diseased mate be chosen, his or her bad qualities are transmitted to
the following generations, for "the gods visit the sins of the fathers
upon the children," as even the old sages knew, long before science
had revealed the laws of heredity. Not only the husband's and the
wife's personal qualities are thus transmitted to the children and
children's children, but those also of four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, and so on; and when we bear in mind the tremendous
differences in the inheritable ancestral traits of families--virtues
or infirmities--we see of what incalculable importance to the future
of families is that individual preference which is so vital an
ingredient of romantic love.

It is true that love is not infallible. It is still, as Browning put