LOVE AND THE SOCIAL IDEAL. 429 



of the most solemn social obligations as a desecra- 

 tion of Its sacred rights ? 



§ 25. The above discussion of the metaphysic 

 of love may be taken as in some sort the supple- 

 ment of the physical treatment which was so con- 

 ducive to Pessimism (ch. iv. § 17) ; but whether we 

 regard the subject in its highest or in its lowest 

 aspects, the result is the same. From either point 

 of view It is a momentous fact ; from neither point of 

 view Is it the road to happiness or the ideal of life. 



It is not fitted to be the ideal of life because it 

 cannot be made to include all existences, because 

 a pair of lovers as the culmination of the world- 

 process would be a conclusion equally bizarre and 

 impossible. We cannot abandon for such amorous 

 fancies the ideal which has been our lode-star in the 

 pursuit of truth, the ideal which first revealed itself 

 to us in the search for an adequate formulation of 

 the world's process, the ideal of a harmonious inter- 

 action of individual existences ; for it is an ideal 

 which all our subsequent progress has only con- 

 firmed and deepened. The conception of a com- 

 munity of perfect persons was the efficient cause of 

 the wondrous evolution of individual existence (ch. 

 vili. §§ 6-19), the final cause of the material universe 

 (ch. ix. §§ 26-31), and the formal ground of our plural- 

 istic answer to the ultimate questions of ontology 

 (ch. x. § 23). And now it has successfully stood the 

 severest of its tests : in spite of the most powerful 

 objections, it has been shown that there is nothing 

 impossible in the continuance of personality ; in 

 spite of our strongest feeling, it has been shown 

 that friendship is a more universal principle than 

 love, that the concord of harmony is a higher ideal 

 than the ecstasy of love. 



