Of romantic love affection obviously could not become an ingredient till minds were cultured, women esteemed, men made altruistic, and opportunities were given for youths and maidens to become acquainted with each other's minds and characters before marriage; as Dr. Abel says, affection "comes slowly—but it endures." The love of which affection forms an ingredient can never change to hatred, can never have any murderous impulses, as Schuré and Goethe believed. It survives time and sensual charms, as Shakspere knew:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
* * * * *
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:—
If this be error, and upon me proved;
I never writ nor no man ever loved.
XIII. MENTAL PURITY
Romantic love has worked two astounding miracles. We have seen how, with the aid of five of its ingredients—sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection—it has overthrown the Goliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome another formidable foe of civilization—sensualism—by means of two other modern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (to distinguish it from bodily purity or chastity) and the other esthetic admiration of personal beauty.
GERMAN TESTIMONY
Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and verse, to the purity and nobility of true love and its refining influence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way in which
"love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life, has, under the repressing influence of centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, supersensual, ethereal character, so that to a lover every thought of naturalia seems indelicate and improper." "I feel it deeply that love must ennoble, not crush me,"