From the elementary physics of generation you may jump to the most ardent sympathies, to the juxtaposition of human characters in the nest of love, and you will see that the same law rules all and each of these facts. Neither too similar nor too dissimilar. Love is the sum of analogous but not identical forces; it is the complement of complements; it is the square of squares; it tolerates neither subtractions nor divisions.
We shall see at every step of our studies the same laws which govern generation, or the so-called physical love, re-appear in the high spheres of love. For us, love is simply one function which, to be understood, must not be barbarously mutilated and disrupted so as to have one part of its limbs sent to the laboratory of physiology, and the other left in the library of the philosopher. Love is such energy that from the lowest grades of the most automatic instinct it ascends to the highest regions of the suprasensible, and perhaps no other psychical element reaches to more distant poles.
Think of the shepherd of the high Apennines who loves a goat, and of Heine, who in the clutches of death wants to be brought to the Louvre to see the Venus of Milo once more, and you will have a pallid idea of the frontiers which this ardent, tenacious, violent, multiform passion called love seeks to conquer.
While in the field of chemical facts generation marks the highest point of molecular chemistry, in the psychological field love reaches the loftiest summits of the ideal. Love is the force of forces; it makes its appearance when man is strongest; it vanishes when age has weakened him. Love is the joy of joys, it is at the bottom of every desire, of all riches, on every horizon of pleasure; it is always the highest aim. If we except men who were born without gentle feelings, in every human sky love is the brightest star; it is the sun of every firmament. It is the strongest, the most human, the richest of passions.
In all forms of generation, whether agamous or sexual, by scission or by endogenesis, whether we consider the son in comparison with the father, or with far Adam, we behold the generated preserve a part of the last or of the first generator, so that the motion communicated from the first to the last generation is transmitted without interruption. Take as the starting-point the Adam of the Bible or the Adam of progressive evolution, the clay breathed into by a God or the Darwinian ascidia: each one of us has still within himself a material part belonging to the first man or first father of all men, so that an immense brotherhood unites all living beings. To the divination of the poet who, beholding the flowery meadows, the forests, the swarming of animals, cries out with emotion: "O Mother Nature!" science answers in accord, as it contemplates a quantity of matter and a quantity of life pass from one to the other of those organisms called individuals. For every life extinguished a new life is born, and within us, who occupy the loftiest place among all the living beings on this planet, quiver and vibrate the molecules which have passed through thousands and thousands of existences and thousands and thousands of loves.
If love is the warmest and the most human of passions, it is also the richest. To its altar every faculty of the mind carries its tributes, every throb of the heart carries its fire. Every vice and every virtue, every shame and every heroism, every martyrdom and every lewdness, every flower and every fruit, every balm and every poison may be brought to the temple of love. Everything human can be carried away in the whirlwind of love; and more than once man regrets that he possesses but one life to offer as a holocaust to this god. And yet this gigantic force is the least governed of all the passions. It would seem that before it man feels too small and too weak; and just as the savage falls on his knees before the lightning and weeps, or flees, the civilized man, even today, is terrified before the unexplored hurricane of this sovereign force, and acknowledges his powerlessness and his ignorance. In the delirium of voluptuousness and in the storm of desperation, he lets himself be carried away by a force which he considers superior to reason, too powerful in comparison with his weakness. In his codes he writes, timidly, laws which he violates every day; opprobrious punishments which the juries always cancel; and a dense fog of ignorance surrounds the temple of love, which he enters nearly always as a thief and from which he emerges nearly always as an outcast. Our legislation on love is a wretched connubiality of hypocrisy and lechery, and as we know not how to look love in the face, we disguise it with the garments of the buffoon and the prostitute. Our laws are so perfect that many must not love, and very many cannot love; and while we all weep over the few victims of hunger, we shrug our shoulders at the hundreds of thousands who die in celibacy for not having been able to gather the straw for their nests, and we laugh at the millions of celibates who know nothing of love save masturbation and prostitution. In the presence of love we are still more or less savage—the basest brutishness before the most powerful of human forces!
Yet love also should be conquered like all other forces of nature; and without losing a fraction of its energy, or a flower of its garden, it also must be governed by science, which understands and directs all things. The lightning which prostrates the savage in the dust of fear is guided by us on the small wire of the conductor, gilds the ornaments of our women and transmits our thoughts from one hemisphere to the other. This other lightning, also, which, more powerful and more dangerous, explodes in the hurricanes of the human heart, must be studied, guided and reduced to a live force that can be measured, weighed and governed. Love should be the dearest, the most precious, the most powerful of civilized forces. No other passion can claim supremacy where it appears; no other can solve the sublime problem of combining the greatest voluptuousness with the greatest virtue, of generating the good of future beings through the joy of the living ones, of transmitting civilization to posterity in the spasm of an embrace.
LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS