Bain finds the cause of love in the charm of dissimilarity.
Mantegazza defines love as a desire for a particular beauty.
Hartman says: Man is moved by instinct to look for an individual of the other sex to satisfy his physical necessity, imagining that in this way he will enjoy a pleasure he would look for in vain elsewhere. This pleasure, one lover dreams to find in the arms of the other, is only a delusion. Subconsciousness uses these deceiving means to oppose the egotistic reflection and to dispose the individual to sacrifice its own interest to the interest of the future generation.
Spencer says that the passions which unite the sexes are the most complex and the most powerful of all feelings. Admiration, respect, reverence, love of approbation, emotion of self-esteem, pleasure of possession, love of freedom, love of sympathy, they all unite in the one powerful feeling of love. They represent a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but have an organized relation to the amatory feelings. The complex sentiment, termed affection, can, therefore, exist between those of the same sex, but it is greatly exalted in love.
Sidney declares love to be the most intense desire to enjoy beauty, and where it is reciprocal, is the most entire and exact union of hearts. The instinct, on the other hand, is absolutely sensual; it makes the exterior its object and has no other end than sensual pleasure. Every individual, therefore, loves more or less spiritually or sensually in proportion as it approaches to the spiritual or bestial nature.
Hegel says: Love is the complete surrender of the “ego” to another “ego” or to an ideal. Not the sacrifice of the possession or wealth of the ego, but the “I” itself must be given away.
Finally, Janet declares love to be complete madness in its origin as well as in its development and mechanism.
The same sentiment is expressed in a poem by Heine:
“Love’s madness! tautology, love is itself a madness.”
[AF] This common every-day kind of love, which is nothing else but a refined sexuality, pure and simple, has been elevated to a fetich by the modern so-called intellectuals and extolled in and out of season. The advocates of the new love-morality show by the attributes, as love at first sight, that what they understand by love is sensual love. Yet upon this prosaic attachment they try to build up their new system of sexual ethics.