and it is because he is made one with her that he is able to reveal her inmost secrets.  “Man,” said Fichte, “can will nothing but what he loves; his love is the sole and at the same time the infallible spring of his volition, and of all his life’s striving and movement.”  It is only when we have identified ourselves with an ideal, and made its realization our own interest, that we strive to attain it.  Love is revelation in knowledge, inspiration in art, motive in morality, and the fulness of religious joy.

But, although in this sense love is greater than knowledge, it is a grave error to separate it from knowledge.  In the life of man at least, the separation of the emotional and intellectual elements extinguishes both.  We cannot know that in which we have no interest.  The very effort to comprehend an object rests on interest, or the feeling of ourselves in it; so that knowledge, as well as morality, may be said to begin in love.  We cannot know except we love; but, on the other hand, we cannot love that which we do not in some degree know.  Wherever the frontiers of knowledge may be it is certain that there is nothing beyond them which can either arouse feeling, or be a steadying centre for it.  Emotion is like a climbing plant.  It clings to the tree of knowledge, adding beauty to its strength.  But, without knowledge, it is impossible for man.  There is no feeling which is not also incipient knowledge; for feeling is only the subjective side of knowledge—­that face of the known fact which is turned inwards.

If, therefore, the poet’s agnosticism were taken literally, and, in his philosophical poems he obviously means it to be taken literally, it would lead to a denial of the very principles of religion and morality, which it was meant to support.  His appeal to love would then, strictly speaking, be an appeal to the love of nothing known, or knowable; and such love is impossible.  For love, if it is to be distinguished from the organic, impulse of beast towards beast, must have an object.  A mere instinctive activity of benevolence in man, by means of which he lightened the sorrows of his brethren, if not informed with knowledge, would have no more moral worth than the grateful warmth of the sun.  Such love as this there may be in the animal creation.  If the bird is not rational, we may say that it builds its nest and lines it for its brood, pines for its partner and loves it, at the bidding of the returning spring, in much the same way as the meadows burst into flower.  Without knowledge, the whole process is merely a natural one; or, if it be more, it is so only in so far as the life of emotion can be regarded as a foretaste of the life of thought.  But such a natural process is not possible to man.  Every activity in him is relative to his self-consciousness, and takes a new character from that relation.  His love at the best and worst is the love of something that he knows, and in which he seeks to find himself made rich with new sufficiency.  Thus love can not “ally” itself with ignorance.  It is, indeed, an impulse pressing for the closer communion of the lover with the object of his love.