“Already the great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a terrible obstacle to human progress.  The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mill.”

It is significant that this opinion should have emanated from a man whose idea of femininity was as masculine as that of the Greeks—­an ideal which, by eliminating or suppressing the secondary and tertiary (mental) sexual qualities, necessarily makes love synonymous with lust.

There is another large class of persons who likewise consider love a disease, but a harmless one, like the measles, or mumps, which it is well to have as early as possible, so as to be done with it, and which seldom does any harm.  Others, still, regard it as a sort of juvenile holiday, like a trip to Italy or California, which is delightful while it lasts and leaves pleasant memories thoughout life, but is otherwise of no particular use.

It shows a most extraordinary ignorance of the ways of nature to suppose that it should have developed so powerful an instinct and sentiment for no useful purpose, or even as a detriment to the race.  That is not the way nature operates.  In reality love is the most useful thing in the world.  The two most important objects of the human race are its own preservation and improvement, and in both of these directions love is the mightiest of all agencies.  It makes the world go round.  Take it away, and in a few years animal life will be as extinct on this planet as it is on the moon.  And by preferring youth to age, health to disease, beauty to deformity, it improves the human type, slowly but steadily.

The first thinker who clearly recognized and emphatically asserted the superlative importance of love was Schopenhauer.  Whereas Hegel (II., 184) parroted the popular opinion that love is peculiarly and exclusively the affair of the two individuals whom it directly involves, having no concern with the eternal interests of family and race, no universality (Allgemeinheit).  Schopenhauer’s keen mind on the contrary saw that love, though the most individualized of all passions, concerns the race even more than the individual.  “Die Zusammensetzung der naechsten Generation, e qua iterum pendent innumerae generationes”—­the very composition and essence of the next generation and of countless generations following it, depends, as he says, on the particular choice of a mate.  If an ugly, vicious, diseased mate be chosen, his or her bad qualities are transmitted to the following generations, for “the gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children,” as even the old sages knew, long before science had revealed the laws of heredity.  Not only the husband’s and the wife’s personal qualities are thus transmitted to the children and children’s children, but those also of four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on; and when we bear in mind the tremendous differences in the inheritable ancestral traits of families—­virtues or infirmities—­we see of what incalculable importance to the future of families is that individual preference which is so vital an ingredient of romantic love.