ng to concern oneself with is the
question, "which of these makes the nearer approach to the truth?" You
have been asking me, "What is love worth?" And you have answered your
question often enough and to your satisfaction, "In itself it is worth
nothing, being but the catspaw to scheming forces." With your denial of
any intrinsic beauty in the emotion, with your acceptance of it as an
unfortunate incident in human affairs, comes a vague hope that the race
will outgrow this force. Here is your rift in the cloud. You picture a
scientific Utopia where there are no lovers and no back-harkings to the
primitive passion, and you appoint yourself pioneer to the promised land
of the children of biology.

Ah! I speak as if I were vexed instead of simply being sure I am in the
right. I wish to help you to see that there is another reading to your
facts. If love is essentially the same from protoplasm to man, it does
not for this reason become worthless. By virtue of being universal it is
enhanced and most divinely humanly binding. You tell me that love is
involuntary, compelled by external forces as old as time and as binding
as instinct, and I say that because of this, life is finally for love.
What! The cavemen, and the birds, too, and the fish and the plants,
forsooth! What! The inorganic, perhaps, as well as the organic, swayed
by this force which is wholly physical and yet wholly psychical! And
does it not fire you? You are not caught up and held by this giant fact?
You find that love is not sporadic, not individual, that it does not
begin with you or end with you, that it does not dissociate you, and you
do not warm to the world-organic kinship, you do not hear the overword
of the poets and philosophers of all times, you do not see the visions
that gladdened the star-forgotten nights of saints?

The same surprise sweeps over the mind in reading Ecclesiastes. Is it a
sorry scheme of things that one generation goes and another comes and
the world abides forever? If the same generation peopled the earth for a
million years, the dignity of life would not be increased. It is not
necessary to have the assurance of eternal life as the dole for having
come to be, in order to live under the aspect of eternity. It is larger
to be short-lived, to be but a wave of the sea rolling for one sunful
day and starry night towards a great inclusiveness. It is a higher
majesty to be inalien and a part--a ringed ripple in the Vastness--than
to l