.
And Man is supreme, only when he is the proper exponent of Nature, and
spirit, and God: the three divine sources from which he issues, in
which he is sustained, and to which he must return. Nature and the
spiritual, without this embodied intelligence, this somatic being,
called man or angel or ape, are as ermine on a wax figure. The human
factor, the exponent intelligence, the intellective and sensuous
faculties, these, my Brothers, are whole, sublime, holy, only when, in
a state of continuous expansion, the harmony among themselves and the
affirmative ties between them and Nature, are perfect and pure. No,
the spiritual ought not and can not be free from the sensuous, even
the sensual. The true life, the full life, the life, pure, robust,
sublime, is that in which all the nobler and higher aspirations of the
soul AND THE BODY are given free and unlimited scope, with the view of
developing the divine strain in Man, and realising to some extent the
romantic as well as the material hopes of the race. God, Nature,
Spirit, Passion--Passion, Spirit, Nature, God--in some such panorama
would I paint the life of a highly developed being. Any of these
elements lacking, and the life is wanting, defective, impure.

"I have no faith in men who were conceived in a perfunctory manner,
on a pragmatical system, so to speak; the wife receiving her
husband in bed as she would a tedious guest at an afternoon tea.
Only two flames uniting produce a third; but a flame and a name,
or a flame and a spunge, produce a hiff and nothing. Oh, that the
children of the race are all born phoenix-like in the fire of noble
and sacred passion, in the purgatory, as it were, of Love. What a
race, what a race we should have. What men, what women! Yes, that is
how the children of the earth should be conceived, not on a
pragmatical system, in an I-don't-care-about-the-issue manner. I
believe in evoking the spirit, in dreaming a little about the gods
of Olympus, and a little, too, about the gods of the abysmal depths,
before the bodily communion. And in earnest, O my Brother, let us do
this, despite what old Socrates says about the propriety and
wisdom of approaching your wife with prudence and gravity...."

And thus, if we did not often halloo, Khalid, like a huntsman pursuing
his game, would lose himself in the pathless, lugubrious damp of the
forest. If we did not prevent him at times, holding firmly to his
coat-tail, he would desperately pursue the gho