other hand, the disappointment at this thought was neutralized by the reflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famous philosophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule bestowed upon my theory.  I wrote to Mr. Lathrop, begging him to refer me to the volume and page of Hegel’s numerous works where I could find the passage in question.  He promptly replied that I should find it in the second volume of the Aesthetik (178-182).  No doubt I ought to have known that Hegel had written on this subject; but the fact that of more than two hundred American, English, and German reviewers of my book whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped my research, consoled me somewhat.  Hegel, indeed, might well have copied Burton’s epitaph.  His Aesthetik is an abstruse, unindexed, three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since 1843, and is practically forgotten.  Few know it, though all know of it.

After perusing Hegel’s pages on this topic I found, however, that Mr. Lathrop had imputed to him a theory—­my theory—­which that philosopher would have doubtless repudiated emphatically.  What Hegel does is simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul.  He does not generalize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly never dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had been gradually and slowly developed from the coarse and selfish passions of our savage ancestors to the refined and altruistic feelings of modern civilized men and women.  He lived long before the days of scientific anthropology and Darwinism, and never thought of such a thing as looking upon the emotions and morals of primitive men as the raw material out of which our own superior minds have been fashioned.  Nay, Hegel does not even say that sentimental love did not exist in the life of the Greeks and Romans; he simply asserts that it is not to be found in their literature.  The two things are by no means identical.

Professor Rohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the Greeks, expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature may indicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and pure love; and the eminent American psychologist, Professor William James, put forth the same opinion in a review of my book.[2] Indeed, this view was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author, Basil von Ramdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history, entitled Venus Urania.  His first two volumes are almost unreadably garrulous and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interesting account of various phases through which love has passed in literature.  Yet he declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that “the nature [Wesen] of love is unchangeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it and the effects we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration.”