1886.] Obi [Brinton. 



were this investigation extended to embrace numerous other 

 tongues, we should find that in them all the principal expressions 

 for the sentiment of love are drawn from one or other of these 

 fundamental notions. A most instructive fact is that these 

 same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words 

 for love in the great Aryan family of languages. They thus 

 reveal the parallel paths which the human mind everywhere pur- 

 sued in giving articulate expression to the passions and emo- 

 tions of the soul. In this sense there is a oneness in all lan- 

 guages, which speaks conclusively for the oneness in the sentient 

 and intellectual attributes of the species. 



"We may also investigate these categories, thus sho^n to be 

 practically universal, from another point of view. We may in- 

 quire which of them comes the nearest to the correct expression 

 of love in its highest philosophic meaning. Was this meaning 

 apprehended, however dimly, by man in the very infancy of his 

 speech-inventing faculty ? 



In another work, published some years ago, I have attempted 

 a philosophic analysis of the sentiment of love. Quoting from 

 some of the subtlest dissectors of human motive, I have shown 

 that they pronounce love to be " the volition of the end," or 

 " the resting in an object as an end." These rather obscure 

 scholastic formulas I have attempted to explain by the defini- 

 tion : " Love is the mental impression of rational action whose 

 end is in itself."* As eveiy end or purpose of action implies 

 the will or wish to obtain that end, those expressions for love 

 are most truly philosophic which express the will, the desire, 

 the yearning after the object. The fourth, therefore, of the 

 above categories is that which presents the highest forms of ex- 

 pression of this conception. That it also expresses lower forms 

 is true, but this merely illustrates, the evolut on of the human 

 mind as expressed in language. Love is ever the wish; but 

 while in lower races and coarser natures this wish is for an ob- 

 ject which in turn is but a means to an end, for example, sensual 

 gratification, in the higher, this object is the end itself, be3 7 ond 

 which the soul does not seek to go, in which it rests, and with 

 which both reason and emotion find the satisfaction of boundless 

 activity without incurring the danger of satiety. 



* The Religious Sentiment, Us Source and Aim ; a Contribution to the Science 

 and Philosophy of Religion, p. 60, (Xew York, 1876). 



