Such love may also reach the highest state of passion, but in distinction from sensual love, it seeks its own happiness in the felicity of the other, and conscious of its own disinterested purity, considers its desires as noble and above general motives of human action. Such emotions can only exist between men and women of pure souls.
True love is, therefore, rational, conscious, unselfish, deep, enduring, constant, refined, self-denying, and is willing to make the greatest sacrifices for the sake of the happiness of another. It is conscious altruism, never faltering in its ethical sense of duty. It is love tested and purified in the fire of the intellect; it comes slowly, but it endures; it gives more than it takes, and has a tinge of tender gratitude for a thousand kind actions. It is, therefore, an ideal sentiment which has hitherto been reached only by a very few select.
But if we look at love in the light of evolution, when we find how cell-division developed into sexuality, conjugation, permanent mating, sensual love and, finally, into sentimental love, there is reason for hope that the still rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the race have been privileged to gather, will some day, when humanity has reached the state of Nietzsche’s Superman, become the universal food of the human race.
Development of love in the individual.—The evolutionary trend in this world can be detected not only in the mere preservation, but also in increasing perfection. Not only the preservative instinct, i. e., the will to live and the will to reproduce, has contributed to the advancement of organic life to higher forms, but the two perfective human instincts, i. e., the will to act and the will to rule, have also served as a means for the evolution of human activities, as science, art, economics, etc.[AJ] One of such activities is sentimental love which had to pass through all the different stages of evolution before it reached the complexity of its present structure. Evolution is a truly universal principle. The meaning of life is its advance towards higher forms. There is not a trait, physical, psychical or spiritual that is wholly finished. The higher emotions as love and hate, fear and shame, etc., are not born with the child; they are evolved slowly by degrees.
According to Nordau every individual is in love with his own ideal, throughout his entire life. Every man and woman falls in love with the representative identical with, or at least most resembling, his or her ideal. The craving for love is the desire to possess the organic ideal.
The ideal of the mate begins to be distinctly evolved by the organism at the time of puberty and is complete only late in life. The ideal, except in its general features, is not stationary; it grows with the individual’s physical and mental development. With the beginning of the material growth of the centre of generation, the imagination begins to receive from the mysterious depths of the cells and tissues the conception of the image of the mate. The organism hears indistinctive voices, all telling the tale of the future partner in life. In this way the image of the ideal grows up in the brain during the individual’s amatory life.
Higher eroticism requires, then, the beloved to be a vehicle of a projected personality. Love for a man or a woman is the attempt to realize one’s ideal in the man or the woman. The impulse to love is the search after the incarnation of the inward ideal, and falling in love is the instinctive conviction that the ideal has been found. The lower and simpler the individual himself, the simpler will be the qualities of his ideal in corporate form. Among people of a low state of civilization the qualities required of the ideal are so few that almost every individual of one sex represents the ideal of the other sex. They may both be paired like animals, and love does not yet exist. The more cultivated a person becomes, the more complicated become the qualities demanded of his ideal, and the harder it is for him to find the same. A person looking for physical qualities in his ideal or for external beauty only, will easily find them, and a case of love at first sight, about which romantic dreamers go into such raptures, is naturally possible. But such love is only sensual and does not deserve to be thus extolled. For true love among men and women of a higher state of culture is an ideal symphony of tones of all kinds.
Generally bodily perfection and a retiring, tender, beneficent, confiding nature in woman constitute an attractive ideal for the man, while mental superiority in man constitutes the attractive power for the cultured woman. In her love the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient. The woman, says Kant, has an exquisite feeling for the beautiful, so far as she herself is concerned, but for the noble so far as it is found in the man. The man, on the contrary, has a decided feeling for the noble, which belongs to his own qualities, but for the beautiful so far as it is met with in the woman. Hence it follows that the aims of nature are directed through love upon making men still nobler and women more beautiful.
The masculine virtues which impress true women are physical strength, courage, nobility of mind, chivalry and self-confidence. These virtues constitute the beauty which arouses the woman’s love, these are the conspicuous features of her ideal. The female virtues that impress the man are beauty, tenderness, goodness, refinement, truth and patience. These are the virtues his ideal possesses. The more highly cultivated mentally and physically he or she are, the more complex and differentiated are the qualities of their ideals. Hence refined and complex natures experience a great deal of difficulty in meeting with their ideals or any one closely approximating them. But when two happen to perfectly compliment each other, when each happens to represent the ideal of the other, then there is true and lasting love. Such people know their ideal when they meet it and have been given time to study it, and they also know that they will never find another one in this world; they know that only this being and no other is suited to them as one triangle is to its congruent.
This knowledge can only be gained after a long study of the qualities of the person found, as to whether they really coincide with the mental qualities of the ideal; and it takes such noble beings longer to fall in love. Coarser natures are readily able to fall in love. The sensual qualities which attract a man or a woman to a paramour are easily discovered. When the affections mount no higher than mere feeling, a true communion of hearts is not indispensable. When the union of the man and the woman is regarded only from the physical basis, when the object is only self-gratification, the finer phases may be and really are ignored. Mere sensual enjoyment can be experienced by two persons who otherwise despise each other.[AK] But true love has far nobler aspirations than sensual enjoyment, and promises a union of heart and soul.