§ 94
In the non-fecundating periods in the lives of the lower animals they spend their energies in either seeking food or hibernating. We humans, after the work of providing food and shelter is finished, have a surplus of energy to work off. After procreating our children we need to develop, in a sense to create, ourselves as humans advancing above the animals, not as humans descending to animal levels. This development has been tried in various ways by different men and women in different ages. Some have given their energies to religion, to philanthropy, to charity, to arts, to commerce. Few have seen the importance of developing the proper human emotions.
At the present stage of civilization all objects of study, except the last, have been worked over so thoroughly that there is nothing new under the sun. Religions have been analyzed, codified, classified; philanthropy and charity have been endowed, institutionalized and organized. There seems no longer any development possible in the technique of the various arts comparable to what was done centuries ago. Commerce and applied science are already elaborated into an almost incomprehensible complexity. Human emotions, however, and par excellence love, have only just begun to be sensed as a new field and source of human welfare.
It would seem a strange prophecy to make (yet all prophecies are strange) that, inside of five hundred years, or even fifty years, men’s excess energies would be devoted to love-making, instead of almost exclusively to the pursuit of egoistic-social ends. And yet that is what the renaissance of the erotic values of life will certainly bring about. Tarde says that “if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or European millionairism once seemed nobler, love now more and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men and the politicians and will one day succeed in driving them back. That surely will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution; the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover’s side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been the problem of love.”