PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



where they fall. And Gourmont has the phrase "fecun- 

 dating a generation of bodies as genius fecundates a 

 generation of minds." 



Man is the sum of the animals, the sum of their in- 

 stincts, as Gourmont has repeated in the course of his 

 book. Given, first a few, then as we get to our own con- 

 dition, a mass of these spermatozoic particles withheld,- 

 in suspense, waiting in the organ that has been built 

 up through ages by a myriad similar waitings. 



Each of these particles is, we need not say, conscious 

 of form, but has by all counts a capacity for formal 

 expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing 

 and form-combining? 



That is to say we have the hair-thinning "abstract 

 thought" and we have the concrete thought of women, 

 of artists, of musicians, the mockedly "long-haired," who 

 have made everything in the world. We have the form- v 

 making and the form-destroying "thought," only the 

 first of which is really satisfactory. I don't wish to be 

 invidious, it is perfectly possible to consider the "ab- 

 stract" thought, reason, etc., as the comparison, regimen- 

 tation, and least common denominator of a multitude of 

 images, but in the end each of the images is a little spoiled 

 thereby, no one of them is the Apollo, and the makers of 

 this kind of thought have been called dry-as-dust since 

 the beginning of history. The regiment is less interesting 

 as a whole than any individual in it. And, as we are 

 being extremely material and physical and animal, in the 

 wake of our author, we will leave old wives' gibes about 

 the profusion of hair, and its chance possible indication 

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