risk his life; in fact, if his love is absolutely rejected, he will sacrifice his life into the bargain.  The Werthers and Jacopo Ortis do not only exist in romances; Europe produces every year at least half-a-dozen like them:  sed ignotis perierunt mortibus illi:  for their sufferings are chronicled by the writer of official registers or by the reporters of newspapers.  Indeed, readers of the police news in English and French newspapers will confirm what I have said.

Love drives a still greater number of people into the lunatic asylum.  There is a case of some sort every year of two lovers committing suicide together because material circumstances happen to be unfavourable to their union.  By the way, I cannot understand how it is that such people, who are confident of each other’s love, and expect to find their greatest happiness in the enjoyment of it, do not avoid taking extreme steps, and prefer suffering every discomfort to sacrificing with their lives a happiness which is greater than any other they can conceive.  As far as lesser phases and passages of love are concerned, all of us have them daily before our eyes, and, if we are not old, the most of us in our hearts.

After what has been brought to mind, one cannot doubt either the reality or importance of love.  Instead, therefore, of wondering why a philosopher for once in a way writes on this subject, which has been constantly the theme of poets, rather should one be surprised that love, which always plays such an important role in a man’s life, has scarcely ever been considered at all by philosophers, and that it still stands as material for them to make use of.

Plato has devoted himself more than any one else to the subject of love, especially in the Symposium and the Phaedrus; what he has said about it, however, comes within the sphere of myth, fable, and raillery, and only applies for the most part to the love of a Greek youth.  The little that Rousseau says in his Discours sur l’inegalite is neither true nor satisfactory.  Kant’s disquisition on love in the third part of his treatise, Ueber das Gefuehl des Schoenen und Erhabenen, is very superficial; it shows that he has not thoroughly gone into the subject, and therefore it is somewhat untrue.  Finally, Platner’s treatment of it in his Anthropology will be found by every one to be insipid and shallow.

To amuse the reader, on the other hand, Spinoza’s definition deserves to be quoted because of its exuberant naivete:  Amor est titillatio, concomitante idea causae externae (Eth. iv., prop. 44).  It is not my intention to be either influenced or to contradict what has been written by my predecessors; the subject has forced itself upon me objectively, and has of itself become inseparable from my consideration of the world.  Moreover, I shall expect least approval from those people who are for the moment enchained by this passion, and in consequence try to express their exuberant feelings in the most sublime and ethereal images.  My view will seem to them too physical, too material, however metaphysical, nay, transcendent it is fundamentally.