Love, in the sexual sense, is, summarily considered, a synthesis of lust (in the primitive and uncolored sense of sexual emotion) and friendship.  It is incorrect to apply the term “love” in the sexual sense to elementary and uncomplicated sexual desire; it is equally incorrect to apply it to any variety or combination of varieties of friendship.  There can be no sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of lust in the organism have been so irradiated as to affect other parts of the psychic organism—­at the least the affections and the social feelings—­it is not yet sexual love.  Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men.  But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into the exquisite and enthralling flower of love.  We may call to mind what happens among plants:  on the one hand we have the lower organisms in which sex is carried on summarily and cryptogamically, never shedding any shower of gorgeous blossoms on the world, and on the other hand the higher plants among whom sex has become phanersgamous and expanded enormously into form and color and fragrance.

While “lust” is, of course, known all over the world, and there are everywhere words to designate it, “love” is not universally known, and in many languages there are no words for “love.”  The failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected.  We may find it where we least expect it.  Sexual desire became idealized (as Sergi has pointed out) even by some animals, especially birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements of life to a degree which is rare even among the most civilized men.  Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion of love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it, while, on the other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient Peruvians, there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verb munay, to love.  Among some peoples love seems to be confined to the women.  Letourneau (L’Evolution Litteraire, p. 529) points out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading part in creating erotic poetry.  It may be mentioned in this connection that suicide from erotic motives among primitive peoples occurs chiefly among women (Zeitschrift fuer Sozialwissenschaft, 1899, p. 578).  Not a few savages possess love-poems, as, for instance, the Suahali (Velten, in his Prosa und Poesie der Suahali, devotes a section to love-poems reproduced in the Suahali language).  D.G.  Brinton, in an interesting paper on “The Conception of Love in Some American Languages” (Proceedings American Philosophical Society, vol. xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words