PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to 

 him because he is intelligent. In itself the hand is noth- 

 ing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their 

 hands only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack 

 nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broad- 

 cast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the 

 saurians have them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. 

 It is without fingers, without hands, without members that 

 the larvae of insects construct for themselves marvellous 

 mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk-floss, exer- 

 cise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter. But 

 this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior 

 to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine 

 it, complicate it, in order to obtain obedience to the in- 

 creasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the 

 hand created machines? Man's intelligence immeasure- 

 ably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it de- 

 mands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the 

 railway, the telegraph, the microscope and everything 

 which multiplies the power of organs which have become 

 rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the brain 

 being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual 

 organs more than they were able to give: it is to satisfy 

 these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with 

 so many dreams and rose-leaves. 



It is difficult to make people understand that the eye 

 sees, not because it is an eye, but because it is situated 

 at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive 

 tc light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the 

 eye would hear. Doubtless it is adapted to its function, 

 as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an effect, 

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