t
occurs solely in man. Love, adhering to the common understanding of the
term, is an emotional excitement which does not obtain among the lower
animals. The lower animals lack the stimulus of imagination, and with
them the passion for perpetuation remains a mere passion. But man has
developed imagination. The pure sexual passion is glossed over and
obscured by a cloud of fancies, mistaken yearnings, and distorted
dreams. And so well is the real intent of the function obscured, that it
is actually lost to him, especially during the period of love madness,
so that there seems an apparent divorce between the parts which go to
make up love, between passion and imagination.

The romantic lover of to-day (expressing sensation in terms of
sentiment, and fondly imagining that he is reasoning) cannot reconcile
his soul-exaltation with bodily grossness, cannot conceive that soul can
turn body, and in the embrace of body tell out all the wonder of soul.
To all sensitive and spiritual men and women come times of anguish and
tears and self-revolt, when they are confounded and heart-broken by the
physical aspect of love. Poor men and women! they suffer keenly and
sincerely through lack of something more than a sentimental concept of
love. To them, body and soul appear things apart, to be kept apart, lest
the one contaminate the other. And in the end, loving well and truly,
they prove their love by enduring, though unable ever quite to shake off
the sense of sin and shame and personal degradation. They do not
understand life, that is the trouble. The beast, lacking imagination,
needs no rational rightness for the various acts of living, such as they
need, and which they do not possess. Because of their unchecked and
unbalanced imagination they mistake the half of life for the whole, and
when forced to face the whole are affrighted and shocked. They do not
reason that the need for perpetuation is the cause of passion; and that
human passion, working through imagination and worked upon by
imagination, becomes love.

And while I am in this vein, I may as well deny that a greater spiritual
dowry than affection is required for marriage. (For that matter, I fail
to see anything so spiritual in erotic phenomena.) If a man may achieve
affection for a woman, without undergoing pre-nuptial madness,--if a man
may take the short cut, as it were,--then I see no reason why he should
not marry that woman. He is certainly justified, since affection