Whoever wishes to understand the developmental tendencies of love as they manifest themselves at the present day in the course of human history, whoever desires to grasp how remarkably love has been developed, enriched, and ennobled in the course of civilization, must at the outset gain a clear understanding of this apparently dualistic, but in reality thoroughly monistic, nature of the passion.
The matter may be expressed also in this way—that he who has scientifically investigated love, who has based his conception of it philosophically, and has personally experienced it, will become a convinced monist in relation to life, at least, and to the organic world, and will be compelled to regard every dualistic division into a physical and a spiritual sphere as something quite artificial. In love above all is manifested this mystery of the life force, as for centuries the poets, the artists, and the metaphysicians have declared, and more especially as the great natural philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have proved—above all Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. There is, indeed, no more happily chosen metaphor, none that better describes the fundamentally monistic nature of love, than the saying of the old æsthetic J. G. Sulzer—that love is a tree, that it has its roots in the physical sphere, but that its branches extend high above the physical world, expanding more and more, branching more and more abundantly into the sphere of the spiritual.[1] It is certainly impossible to find a more appropriate comparison. Thereby we show clearly the intimate organic connexion between the physical and spiritual phenomena of love; it is rooted for ever in Mother Earth, but it grows always upwards into the subtle ether. Just as the arborescence of the tree has a richer, more manifold, more extensive development than the root, so also it is in the spiritual form that love is first capable of extending upwards and in all directions, compared with which its physical capacity for development is minimal and strictly limited. But just as the arborescence of the tree grows from, and is supplied with nutriment by, the root, so also the higher love is inevitably founded upon a sensory basis. Even while love becomes spiritually richer, it remains as irrevocably as ever dependent upon the physical.[2]
To put the matter briefly, the future developmental possibilities of human love rest purely in the spiritual sphere, but they are inseparably connected with the far less variable physical phenomena of sexuality.
Upon the development, the configuration, and the differentiation, of the spiritual elements of sexual love are alone based the intimate relations of love with the process of civilization. This fact is again reflected in the manifold phases of the evolution of the sentiment of love.
For the human spirit in the course of its development has become not merely lord of the earth and of the elementary forces of Nature: it has become also lord and master, interpreter and guide, of the sexual impulse; for this impulse owes to the human spirit its new and peculiar life, its life capable of further development as manifested in the history of human love. The history of love is the history of mankind, of civilization. For love manifests a continual progress, which can be denied by those only who have failed to understand the deep significance of human love in the entire civilized life of all times, and who, observing the persistence of the primeval and ever-active sexual impulse, elemental in its nature, are led only to a hopeless doubt as to the possibility of all love, and thus justify the pessimism with which Schopenhauer has condemned the significance of human sexual love. Undoubtedly this elemental impulse persists for ever, and to follow it alone leads to death, to utter desolation, to nothingness, as Tolstoi, Strindberg, and Weininger, the bitter opponents of modern “love,” have so vehemently declared. But did these men know true love? Had they become conscious of the inevitable necessity with which civilization in the course of ages and generations had transformed the human sexual impulse into love as it now exists, transformed it in so manifold and so wonderful a way? Had they any idea of the development of love, and of its place and its significance in history?
Let them believe this, these doubting and despairing souls—nothing has been destroyed of all the spiritual relations, of all the wonderful possibilities of development, which have manifested themselves in the course of the long and varied history of the evolution of love. To describe this evolution, it is necessary to draw attention to all those elements of civilization which remain at present influential in love, but it is further indispensable to forecast their future development. Once again we stand at an important turning-point in the history of love. The old separates itself from the new, the better will once more be the enemy of the good. But love regarded, as it must now be regarded, in its inner nature, as a sexual impulse most perfectly and completely infused with a spiritual content, will remain the inalienable gain of civilization; it will stand forth ever purer and more promotive of happiness, like a mirror of marvellous clearness, wherein is reflected a peculiar and accurate picture of the successive epochs of civilization.
[1] The natural philosopher Kielmeyer, the teacher of Cuvier, also compared the genital organs with the root, the brain with the arborescence, of a tree. Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, “New Paralipomena” (Grisebach’s edition, p. 217).
[2] Eduard von Hartmann points out very effectively that “an assumed love without sensuality is merely a fleshless and bloodless phantom of the creative imagination” (“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” sixth edition, p. 196; Berlin, 1874).