say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and
that which remains is the delight, the _passione impressa_, the
emotional, the irrational--in a word, the corporeal.

What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but
delight, bodily happiness. The other happiness, the rationalist
_beatitude_, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can
only--I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it
ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion of his
_Ethic_, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part, Spinoza,
affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that
the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with
which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far
as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind,
considered under the form of eternity--that is to say, that the
intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love
with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating
propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book,
that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the _Ethic_,
that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that
our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of
virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to
repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this
intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter
sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a
love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse--a pure metaphor, but a
tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that
saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves
of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!--tragedy,
tragedy, tragedy!

And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual
love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant
by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love
in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of
the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion
something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the
Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of
the tree of the knowledge of good an