Thus Empedokles, “the Greek Darwin,” was the originator of a theory of evolution based on the alternate predominance of cosmic Love and Hate; Love being the attractive, Hate the repulsive force.
In the preface to the first volume of Don Quixote, Cervantes refers those who wish to acquire some information concerning Love to an Italian treatise by Judah Leo. The full title of the book, which appeared in Rome in the sixteenth century, is Dialoghi di amore, Composti da Leone Medico, di nazione Ebreo, e di poi fatto cristiano. There are said to be three French translations of it, but it was only after long searching that I succeeded in finding a copy, at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It proved to be a strange medley of astrology, metaphysics, theology, classical erudition, mythology, and mediæval science. Burton, in the chapter on Love, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, quotes freely from this work of Leo, whom he names as one of about twenty-five authors who wrote treatises on Love in ancient and mediæval times.
Like Empedokles, Leo identifies cosmic attraction with Love. But he points out three degrees of Love—Natural, Sensible, and Rational.
By Natural Love he means those “sympathies” which attract a stone to the earth, make rivers flow to the sea, keep the sun, moon, and stars in their courses, etc. Burton (1652) agrees with Leo, and asks quaintly, “How comes a loadstone to draw iron to it ... the ground to covet showers, but for love? ... no stock, no stone, that has not some feeling of love. ’Tis more eminent in Plants, Hearbs, and is especially observed in vegetals; as betwixt the Vine and Elm a great sympathy,” etc.
“Sensible” Love is that which prevails among animals. In it Leo recognises the higher elements of delight in one another’s company, and of attachment to a master.
“Rational” Love, the third and highest class, is peculiar to God, angels, and men.
But the inclination to confound gravitation and other natural forces with Love is not to be found among ancient and mediæval authors alone. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is the “gross materialist,” Dr. Ludwig Büchner, who exclaims rapturously: “For it is love, in the form of attraction, which chains stone to stone, earth to earth, star to star, and which holds together the mighty edifice on which we stand, and on the surface of which, like parasites, we carry on our existence, barely noticeable in the infinite universe; and on which we shall continue to exist till that distant period when its component parts will again be resolved into that primal chaos from which it laboriously severed itself millions of years ago, and became a separate planet.”
Büchner carries on this anthropopathic process a step farther, by including all the chemical affinities of atoms and molecules as manifestations of love: “Just as man and woman attract one another, so oxygen attracts hydrogen, and, in loving union with it, forms water, that mighty omnipresent element, without which no life nor thought would be possible.” And again: “Potassium and phosphorus entertain such a violent passion for oxygen that even under water they burn—i.e. unite themselves with the beloved object.”
Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities, which was inspired by a late and hopeless passion of its author, is based on this chemical notion that no physical obstacle can separate two souls that are united by an amorous affinity. But the practical outcome of his theory—that the psychic affinity of two persons suffices to impress the characteristics of both on the offspring of one of them—has nothing to support it in medical experience; while the chemical analogy, with all due deference to Goethe’s reputation as a man of science, is against his view. His notion was that the children of two souls loving one another will inherit their characteristics. But what distinguishes a chemical compound (based on “affinity”) from a mere physical mixture, is precisely the contrary fact that the compound does not in any respect resemble the parental elements! Read what a specialist says in Watts’s Dictionary of Chemistry:—
“Definite chemical compounds generally differ altogether in physical properties from their components. Thus, with regard to colour, yellow sulphur and gray mercury produce red cinnabar; purple iodine and gray potassium yield colourless iodide of potassium.... The density of a compound is very rarely an exact mean between that of its constituents, being generally higher, and in a few cases lower; and the taste, smell, refracting power, fusibility, volatility, conducting power for heat and electricity, and other physical properties, are not for the most part such as would result from mere mixture of their constituents.”