A METAniYSIC OF LOVE. 425 



themselves afford the surest evidence of the lack of 

 unity in their longing for union, and that the desire 

 of perfect love of transcending its self and " at one 

 with that it loves in one undivided Beino- blendincr"^ 

 is the metaphysical ideal of which vulgar passion Is 

 but a feeble reflexion and caricature. It may be 

 that this desire for the merging of one personality 

 In another [Verschmelzungs-sehnsiickt^ as v. Hart- 

 mann calls It) is the specific differentia which, by the 

 consentaneous testimony of poets and philosophers, 

 distinguishes love from other forms of affection, and 

 that It is the emotional Impulse which foreshadows 

 the formation of coalesced existences of a higher 

 order than our present partial and Imperfect selves. 

 It may be that there Is truth in such speculations, 

 and even that they explain points which would 

 otherwise have remained obscure, such as, e.g., the 

 great development of romantic love at the very time 

 when the growth of reason might have been sup- 

 posed to render Its stimulus even more unnecessary 

 than it is among animals and savages for the main- 

 tenance of the race, and to make its essential Illusion, 

 the fusion of two spirits into one, seem more of an 

 impossibility. On all these points there will be 

 great differences of opinion, arising largely from the 

 facts that most people feel even more confusedly 

 than they think, that they mean very different things 

 by the term love, and that love is generally, and 

 perhaps necessarily, a very mixed feeling (Including 

 very often, e.g., an element of that aesthetic feeling 

 which in Its purity manifests itself as the worship of 

 the Beautiful) ; but It will hardly be profitable here 



1 Fitzgerald's translation of Jami's Salaman and Absal. We 

 have quoted from an Oriental, because he is perhaps the least 

 likely to be suspected of taking too idealist a view. 



