PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



possibly more logical, would still have been inexact, for 

 if sexual selection has any aim it can be but conservation. 

 Fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated ele- 

 ments into a unique element, a perpetual return to 

 the unity. 



It is not particularly interesting to consider human 

 acts as the fruits of evolution, for upon animal branches 

 as clearly separate as those of insect and mammifer one 

 finds sexual acts and social customs sensibly analogous, 

 if not identical in many points. 



If insects and mammifers have any common ancestor, 

 save the primordial jelly, there must indeed have been 

 very different potentialities in its amorphous contours 

 to lead it here into being bee and there into being 

 giraffe. An evolution leading to such diverse results has 

 interest only as a metaphysical idea, psychology can 

 get from it next to nothing of value. 



We must chuck the old ladder whose rungs the evo- 

 lutionists ascended with such difficulty. We will imagine, 

 metaphorically, a centre of life, with multiple lives di- 

 verging from it; having passed the unicellular phase, we 

 will take no count of hypothetic subordinations. One 

 does not wish to deny, one wishes rather not to deny, 

 either general or particular evolutions, but the genealo- 

 gies are too uncertain and the thread which unites them ^^ * 

 too often broken :<what, for example, is the origin of 

 birds, organisms which seem at once a progress and a 

 retrogression from the mammifer?; On reflection, one 

 will consider the different love-mechanisms of all the 

 dioicians as parallel and contemporary. 



Man will then find himself in his proper and rather 

 13 



<jy 



