It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be, and frequently is, a delusion.  A man may deceive himself, or be deceived by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she possesses or fails to possess.  In first love, occurring in youth, such deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur.  This kind of deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of love—­and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond—­is liable to occur in any relation of life.  For most people, however, and those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts of life.[66]

Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to deception or disappointment with the larger question of a metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer’s sense.  To some extent this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by Renouvier and Prat in La Nouvelle Monadologie (pp. 216 et seq.).  In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not, dominated by selfishness and injustice.  “It was not an essential error which presided over the creation of the idol, for the idol is only what in all things the ideal is.  But to realize the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the great difficulty.  We are never justified,” they conclude, “in casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim so great a prize.”  And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws, are far greater than we deserved.

We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the passions and desires of men are illusions.  In that sense the Gospel of Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare (in the Tempest) and of Calderon (in La Vida es Sueno), who felt that ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream.  But short of that large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men’s other cravings and aspirations escape.  On the contrary, it is the most solid of realities.  All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex.  If we admit the action of sexual selection—­as we can scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential accretions[67]—­love has moulded the precise shape and color, the essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.