CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
| Introduction: General Physiology of Love | [13] | |
| CHAPTER | ||
| I | Love in Plants and Animals | [29] |
| II | Morning Crepuscules of Love—The Good and Evil Sources of Love | [41] |
| III | The First Weapons of Love—Courtship | [64] |
| IV | Modesty | [72] |
| V | The Virgin | [79] |
| VI | Conquest and Voluptuousness | [89] |
| VII | How Love is Preserved and How It Dies | [94] |
| VIII | The Depths and the Heights of Love | [107] |
| IX | Sublime Puerilities of Love | [118] |
| X | Boundaries of Love—Their Relations to the Senses | [122] |
| XI | Boundaries of Love—Their Relations to Other Sentiments—Jealousy | [133] |
| XII | Boundaries of Love—Their Relations to Thought | [145] |
| XIII | Chastity in its Relations to Love | [155] |
| XIV | Love in Sex | [158] |
| XV | Love and Age | [165] |
| XVI | Love in Relation to Temperaments—of the Ways of Loving | [175] |
| XVII | The Hell of Love | [186] |
| XVIII | The Degradations of Love | [198] |
| XIX | The Faults and Crimes of Love | [211] |
| XX | The Rights and Duties of Love | [219] |
| XXI | The Covenants of Love | [227] |
FOREWORD
Mantegazza is to Physiology what Flammarion is to Astronomy. The two great masters head a brilliant galaxy of modern writers on natural phenomena who draw their material from science and mould it in an esthetic form. After the most skilful analysis of the scientific elements to their minutest components, they proceed to an ideal synthesis in which the various elements retain their substance, yet change their outward appearance. It seems as if these elect minds, having once satisfied their scientific curiosity as to physical and human phenomena, had been fascinated and inspired by an irresistible love of creation, and rising above the facts and laws of nature to the evanescent and melodious world of imagination, they offer us their work in a harmonious unity of two seemingly opposite and irreconcilable elements—the real and the ideal, Science and Poetry.
And thus, I dare say, it is as if, by a generous law of reaction and equilibrium, while our generation seems to gravitate toward a life of facts and order, barren of idealism, Science would teach us that she herself does not benumb or kill sentiment, but, on the contrary, discloses to the minds of the elect the flowery slopes of an unknown and infinite world of wonders and sentiment.
So it must be that those who have attained a high place in intellectual life will gladly replace the old conception of physical and human phenomena with a new and more intense representation, which, measured in the finitude of our reason, is loved in the infinity of our sentiment. To the uninitiated mind most beautiful is the representation of the sun in the image of Phœbus crossing the heavens in his flaming chariot drawn by fiery horses; but still more beautiful for the intellectual mind is it to think of the immense body of fire, of the energy darting from a star more than a hundred million miles distant from our planet, more than a hundred million times larger than the earth, and yet a star millions of times smaller than millions of other celestial bodies to our naked eye unknown, unknown to our most powerful telescopes, and whose existence and fantastic speed in the space of the heavens are divined only by the abstraction of our faculties in an infinite representation of the laws of physics. Poetical is the vision of a goddess of Olympus descending to earth and carrying to a man asleep the message or the image of a dear, distant person; but immensely more poetical is the conception of a telepathic force within us, made of us, consciously or unconsciously created by us, an integral part of our psychical organism, and by which we instantly communicate over hills and dales, mountains and valleys, oceans and deserts, with another human being whose spirit is harmoniously attuned to ours.
The impersonation of hatred and love by Fury and Cupid is much less poetical than the conception of an explosion of psychical forces, powerful and antagonistic, in millions of men at the same time.