Analytical Studies eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 609 pages of information about Analytical Studies.

Analytical Studies eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 609 pages of information about Analytical Studies.
result, and shortness of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence.  Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the other hand, refuses absolutely to grant the excess which our imagination sometimes craves in love.  It is, therefore, the last of our needs, and the only one which may be forgotten without causing any disturbance in the economy of the body.  Love is a social luxury like lace and diamonds.  But if we analyze it as a sentiment, we find two distinct elements in it; namely, pleasure and passion.  Now analyze pleasure.  Human affections rest upon two foundations, attraction and repulsion.  Attraction is a universal feeling for those things which flatter our instinct of self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise of the same instinct when it tells us that something is near which threatens it with injury.  Everything which profoundly moves our organization gives us a deeper sense of our existence; such a thing is pleasure.  It is contracted of desire, of effort, and the joy of possessing something or other.  Pleasure is a unique element in life, and our passions are nothing but modifications, more or less keen, of pleasure; moreover, familiarity with one pleasure almost always precludes the enjoyment of all others.  Now, love is the least keen and the least durable of our pleasures.  In what would you say the pleasure of love consists?  Does it lie in the beauty of the beloved?  In one evening you may obtain for money the loveliest odalisques; but at the end of a month you will in this way have burnt out all your sentiment for all time.  Would you love a women because she is well dressed, elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit?  Do not call this love, for it is vanity, avarice, egotism.  Do you love her because she is intellectual?  You are in that case merely obeying the dictates of literary sentiment.”

“But,” I said, “love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls, their lives—­”

“Oh dear, dear!” cried the old man, in a jeering tone.  “Can you show me five men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman?  I do not say their life, for that is a slight thing,—­the price of a human life under Napoleon was never more than twenty thousand francs; and there are in France to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave men who would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while seven men have sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which they might have slept in solitude for a whole night.  Dubreuil and Phmeja are still rarer than is the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke.  These sentiments proceed from an unknown cause.  But you have brought me thus to consider love as a passion.  Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all and the most contemptible.  It promises everything, and fulfils nothing.  It comes, like love, as a need, the last, and dies away the first.  Ah, talk to me of revenge, hatred,

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Analytical Studies from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.