But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.
The first essay is called Nature. It quotes freely from Peter Bell, and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and Thoreau. Toward the end is this:
Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.
Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to Sex, hoping something from the vitality of the theme, and come to this:
To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point of danger from spiritual diabetes.
Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful lesson to man:
... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.
Here is boldness,—
I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.
Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.