hunger was done away with, and I will say that
you are giving an Arabian Nights' entertainment.

Love is of a piece with life, like hunger, like joy, like death. Your
progress cannot leave it behind; your civilisation must become the
exponent of it.

Your last letter is formal and elaborate, and--equivocal. In it you
remind me, menacingly, of the possibilities of progress, you posit that
love is at best artificial, and you apotheosise the brain. As an
emancipated rationality, you say you cut yourself loose from the
convention of feeling. Progress cannot affect the need and the power to
love. This I have already stated. "How is it under our control to love
or not to love?" Life is elaborate or it is simple (it depends upon the
point of view), and you may call love the paraphernalia of its
wedding-feast or you may call it more--the Blood and Body of all that
quickens, a Transubstantiation which all accept, reverently or
irreverently, as the case may be.

I can more readily conceive the existence of a central committee elected
for the purpose of regulating the marriages of a community, than of a
community satisfied with such a committee. There is no logic in social
events. The world persists in not taking the next step, and what to the
social scout looked a dusty bypath may prove to be the highway of
progress for the hoboing millions. Side issues are constantly cropping
up to knock out the main issues of the stump orator; so let us be
humble. For this reason I refuse to discuss possibilities in infinity.
You and I cannot have become products of an environment which is not in
existence. It is safe to suppose that our needs are like those of the
race and that in us nothing is vestigial that is active in others. You
cannot have become too rational to love. The device has not yet been
formed.

You think I should take your word for it? But why? Have you never found
yourself in the wrong, never disobeyed your best promptings never meant
to take the good and grasped the bad? Is it not possible that you are
not yet awake, or, God pity you, that you are hidebound in the dogmatism
of your bit of thinking.

It is for the second point of your letter that I called you equivocal.
Earlier in our discussion, I remember, you laid stress on the fact that
love is an instinct common to all forms of life; now you go to great
lengths in order to show that it is artificial.

How do you differentiate between the artificial and nature? Sure