Rosenkranz finds in nature only an empire of love, of a love that penetrates all things and leads them to a common end. Gravitation is love dominating nature. Organic life is a continued phenomenon of love. Even in inorganic nature the combination of substances, one with the other, is a trait of love. The appearance of heat and the flash of light that accompany the chemical process are, in a manner, the heralds of lust felt by the substances while uniting. Love of the sexes is a love for things that is ignored and unknown and which is not yet even in existence. The lovers must perish that love may continually rise to new life; the individual dies that the species may live. Love is not the aim but the means, serving life and development.
Love is the joy at another’s existence and is stronger than the delight at one’s own existence. Love transforms the nuptials into a jubilee even where it is the eve of death. It is hence as strong as death. There exists not only a natural love, but also a spiritual love which is stronger than death. Natural love is not the true love, but only a stepping-stone. True love is no longer blind and necessary, but conscious and free.
Teichmüller says: In sensual love, Nature makes use of the individual only incidentally, by making the propagation of the species a personal concern of the individual. She gains her end by a mystification. The individuals, by virtue of the innate impulse, consider the external aim of nature as their own personal concern, for which they voluntarily hazard everything, even life itself. Teichmüller further claims that in physical love only the state of irritability and the sensibility of the nerves of the subject are important. The object is only concerned as a soliciting casualty. The natural impulse cannot aim at lust, for lust is not an end, but only expresses the coördinate state of the subject during the actions. Every desire aims at a specific action as its end. The musician does not long for lust but for music. The pleasure connected with it ensues coördinately with the success of the performance.
Of sentimental love, Teichmüller says, the individual loves an ideal which it has itself created in its thoughts and fancy and with which the actual need not harmonize at all. For that reason the “treasure” (in German the lovers call each other “Schatz” or treasure) lies not without but within the lover. The beloved person outside is only the key that understands to unlock the treasure. The key is not able to create the wealth. Whoever is poor and desolate within, for him no key can unlock the treasure of love.
Schopenhauer sees in amorousness an individualized sexual impulse. The growing affection of the two lovers is, in reality, already the will for life of the new individual, which they could and might beget. The species has a prior, nearer and greater claim upon the individual than the frail individuality itself. The exact destiny of the individuals of the future generation is a much higher and worthier end than the extravagant and transient bubbles of the enamored. The beauty or the ugliness of the mate has nothing to do with the gratification itself, so far as it is a sensual pleasure depending upon a pressing necessity of the individual. Yet beauty is a matter of great consideration, because it represents the will of the species. Every lover finds himself deceived after the accomplished great work. For the delusion has vanished by which the individual was deceived by the species.
In defining human love, Schopenhauer says that every individual exercises a sexual attraction proportionate to the moral and physical perfection it possesses which we attribute to the ideal of the human species. The attraction of two individuals will be the more energetic the more the deficiencies of the one will be counterbalanced by the virtues of the other, and the union of the two promises a child more conforming to the type of the species. Thus the greater the disparity the stronger will be the attraction.
Danville, on the other hand, finds that alliances are more generally concluded among individuals of the same education and of a similar intellectual development. He, therefore, claims that love is the most differentiated modality of the instinct of reproduction. Intellectual development, education and culture, however, have carried it so far away from its origin as to be entirely hidden.
Rousseau says: The physical desire is the one which drives one sex to unite with the other. The moral one is that which determines the desire and fixes it upon a single object exclusively, or at least gives a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easily seen that the moral element in love is a factitious sentiment born of the usage of society and glorified with assiduity and care by women to establish their dominion.
Delboeuf looks for the basis of love in the chemical action by which the female sex cells or ova exercise an attraction, magnetic in nature, upon the spermatozoa, and vice versa.
Spinoza defines love as “laetitia concomitante idea externae causae,” a pleasure accompanied by the thought of its external cause.