Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

HERBERT SPENCER ON LOVE

For the sake of comparison I may cite Mr. Spencer’s summary of the elements which he thinks compose Love: “Round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole there are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. All these, each excited in the highest degree, and severally tending to reflect their excitement on each other, form the composite psychical state which we call Love. And as each of these feelings is in itself highly complicated, uniting a wide range of states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into an immense aggregation, nearly all the elementary excitations of which we are capable; and that from this results its irresistible power.”

Let us now see how many of the characters of true Romantic Love are to be found in the courtship of animals and savages.