On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks (as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in World’s Work and Play, Dec., 1906):  “That word ‘love’ has been hitherto a word unknown among our girls, in the foreign sense.  Duty, submission, kindness—­these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to bring to the husband who had been chosen for her—­and many happy, harmonious marriages were the result.  Now, your dear sentimental foreign women say to our girls:  ’It is wicked to marry without love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an outrage against nature and Christianity.  If you love a man you must sacrifice everything to marry him.’”

When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best sense of that word, becomes merely a cooerdinated element among many other elements.  Herbert Spencer, in an interesting passage of his Principles of Psychology (Part IV, Ch.  VIII), has analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important elements:  (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the feeling for beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5) love of approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8) extended liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers; (9) exaltation of the sympathies.  “This passion,” he concludes, “fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which we are capable.”

It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual love, or even to analyze its components, is by no means to explain its mystery.  We seek to satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be incommensurable and impassable.  “There is no word more often pronounced than that of love,” wrote Bonstetten many years ago, “yet there is no subject more mysterious.  Of that which touches us most nearly we know least.  We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love.”  And however expert we have become in detecting and analyzing the causes, the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same confession to-day.  We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.