What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, “the mucous membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the riches of the infinite.”  It is a mystery before which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome.  Donnay, in his play L’Escalade, makes a cold and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love himself.  He forces his way into the girl’s room, by a ladder, at dead of night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech:  “Everything that touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred.  Ah! to think that a thing so well known as a woman’s body, which sculptors have modelled, which poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy merely because it is the body of one particular woman—­what insanity!  And yet that is what I feel."[64]

That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.  That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer.  When a youth and a girl fall into each other’s arms in the ecstacy of love they imagine that they are seeking their own happiness.  But it is not so, said Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to effect a far greater impersonal end:  the creation of the future race.  The intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing offspring.  In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature.  As Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion.  The lovers thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal happiness; they were probably deceived.  But they were deceived not because the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more; instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully recognized.[65]