Love--or the Life and Death of a Value

I

IN one of those popular phrases too generally current to be attributed to any particular person, and hence seeming to have been uttered by a whole and united folk, our Victorian ancestors were accustomed to say that ‘love is best.’ Perhaps no other cultural group had ever set itself more resolutely to discipline this most unruly of passions by laying down the conditions under which one might permissibly indulge in it, and perhaps no other had expressed a more inflexible disapproval of any violation of the taboos with which it was surrounded; but, for all the strictness of its definition, it gave to ‘ virtuous love’ the highest place in its hierarchy of values.

The age was, though we sometimes forget the fact, an age of many skepticisms, during which many things were called in question, but it never doubted the worth of that which we are accustomed to call, in a phrase whose downrightness would have shocked it profoundly, ‘sublimated sex.’ It looked with loathing and fear at any of the cruder manifestations of the sexual instincts, but when those instincts had been adorned with poetry, and submitted to the discipline of society, it regarded them as the source not only of the most admirable virtues, but of the most intrinsically valuable of human experiences as well. In theory, at least, a successful love crowned all other successes and obliterated all other failures. It made all men equal because all men were capable of it, and it stood between man and any ultimate pessimism because, so long as love was possible, life could not be either meaningless or not worth the living. Nor was this evaluation questioned by the leaders in any school of thought, for upon this point even Gladstone and Huxley would have agreed. Whether man were son of God or great-grandson of the ape, it was in love that he fulfilled himself. If he were the former, then love brought him nearer than anything else to the divine state from which he had fallen; if he were the latter, then at least love carried him to the highest level of which he was capable.

Now faiths such as this lie deeper than religious or political creeds. The Christian knows that he is a Christian and that other people are not; the Democrat is aware of theories of government other than his; but such tacit evaluations as that set upon love are accepted as matters of fact, almost as something established by the scheme of nature. These Victorians knew that they were, in the literal sense of the word, puritans here as elsewhere. They knew, that is to say, that they had insisted upon a soberness in love as well as in religion, and that they looked upon the antisocial tendencies of extravagant passion in the same way that they looked upon the antisocial tendencies of extravagant religion; but that it was in love that the meaning of life must inevitably be sought they never stopped to doubt. They did not much consider the fact that the ability to live for love in any form was a relatively recent accomplishment on the part of the human race; that the tacit assumption which lay behind all their literature and all their thinking was not, after all, part of the unchangeable nature of man, but merely an assumption, seemingly inevitable because it had been handed on and accepted by one generation after another, which had changed the rules of the game, but never doubted that it was worth the playing. And it was in part because love seemed to them so inevitably valuable that they were able to hold so firmly to their belief in its supreme importance.

We, however, have specialized in origins, and it requires no more than a glance at the past to show that the high values set upon love are not inevitable. Certainly the savage — the American Indian, for example — knows little of what we call romance. When he sings his songs or addresses his gods, when, that is to say, his consciousness reaches the intensest level of which he is capable, it is upon thoughts of agriculture and of war that he dwells. These are the activities which seem to him to be most worthy to be realized or adorned in contemplation, because they are the ones which seem to bring him closest to the meaning of life; and when he thinks of wooing he does so chiefly not because he regards love as the most significant of human emotions, but because his wife will bear him sons to help guide the destiny of the tribe or to slay its enemies. Like all human beings, the savage considers certain experiences as ends in themselves, but he still regards the act of sexual union as a relatively simple process, important chiefly because of its biological function; it is only somewhere between savagery and civilization that love is born.

At first it holds, no doubt, a relatively low place in the hierarchy of values. The stories which deal with it are at first fewer than those which deal with the struggle against the elements and warfare with neighboring tribes; the lover is still far less than the warrior the type of the hero; and soft emotions are still a matter for surprise, almost for shame. But, once these emotions have been accepted into song and story, they reveal an amazing capacity to elaborate and complicate themselves. They come to be regarded with respect and awe; a mythology quite as elaborate as that concerning the combats of warriors grows up around them; and tacitly it is assumed that a great love is a subject hardly less worthy, hardly less near the divine, than a great heroism.

Perhaps the sterner members of the society set themselves up against it and shake their heads when amorous songs or poems win more applause than warlike ones, but at least the romantic view of life has come to set itself against what, for want of a better name, we must call the heroic one, and a value is born.

Love is, then, not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination; and this is true not only when we think of the word as implying some complicated system of attitudes like that of the Victorians, but even when we think of it as referring to no more than a mere physical act to which considerable importance is attached. The very singling out of this particular desire as one more significant than others must precede any attribution of transcendental values to it, and even this singling out took place recently enough for us to be aware of it. If mere lust cannot play any very large part in human life until the imagination has created it, how much more conspicuously is it true that we must regard as purely a creation of the human mind so complex a system of emotional attitudes — interwoven with all sorts of æsthetic sociological and mystical conceptions — as that which was implied by the Victorian in the word ‘love.’ Behind the simple phrase ‘love is best’ lies a history — half of social organization, half of human imagination which volumes could not adequately trace.

Yet, artificial as is this system of values, and fundamentally illogical as arc the associations which lead us to centre the chief human experiences around love, they tend strongly to perpetuate themselves, both because the young of a nation become habituated to an acceptance of them long before any critical sense is developed and because, so far as they are the result of any biologically transmutable evolution, the development of the race is recapitulated in that of the individual. As a child, the normal individual is, like the savage on all but special occasions, either almost unaware of sex or inclined to regard it as something between the ludicrous, the forbidden, and the obscene. He is ashamed of any unexpected emotion which he feels in the presence of his complement, and he is inclined to jeer at those slightly older than himself who show any tendency to abandon the — to him — rational preoccupations of childhood. But then, as he reaches adolescence, a change no less surprising to himself than to others takes place. Much that, as a child, he had heard without understanding becomes suddenly meaningful to him, and he realizes that he is capable of participating in experiences which have hitherto been known to him only by the words applied to them. All his daydreams now centre around exploits which a little before would have seemed to him silly, and if he happens to have been born into one of those highly developed societies, like our own, where love is often regarded as the supreme human privilege, he will invest thoughts of that which had been, a short time before, both ridiculous and obscene with a religious awe.

Not only will his thoughts be constantly busy with it, but he will tend to centre around it even those of his aspirations which do not seem to be actually related. He will plan to become virtuous, brave, and successful in order to please some member of the opposite sex; he will achieve wealth, power, or fame in order to lay them at her feet. Even those things which earlier— and perhaps also later — seem to him quite worth having for themselves must now borrow their value from her. The ramifications of a simple biological act have come to fill the universe, and it, with all that it involves, has come to be not merely one of the things which make life worth while, but the thing which at all justifies or makes it meaningful. For him, as for his race, love has, in a word, become a value,— perhaps the supreme one, — something indubitably worth while in itself and something capable by its own magic of making other things valuable either as means or as adornments.

Such a youth has come into an inheritance of illusions as important and perhaps as valuable as anything else which his ancestors have transmitted to him. He accepts it as part of nature, but it is, as surely as the government under which he lives or the house which shelters him, a human creation, and one which is more fundamental than any other, because it is not something which enables him to live, but something which endows living with a meaning and a purpose. It is an illusion to which centuries of existence have been necessary before it could assume the form and the apparent solidity with which to him it seems endowed, a value which was gradually created while other values faded away.

To the savage who knew nothing of romantic love the world was not so barren without it as it would seem under similar circumstances to the average Latin or Teuton of our day. The experiences of the hunt, still lingeringly delightful to many, were to him passionately absorbing and intrinsically as worth while as love-making later came to be. In the celebration of the spring festival he had as ecstatic a sense of a mystical initiation into the meaning of the universe as the modern young romantic for the first time in the arms of his mistress. But the possibility of these experiences has passed away.

While love was gradually being created, other values vanished; for such, for all their apparent inevitability to those who feel them, is their way; and to know this is to know that even the complex of illusions called ’love’ is one which might also, under certain circumstances, pass away. Certain peoples, it is obvious, have never had it. Consider, for example, the mental and social organization not only of the savage, but of, let us say, the Chinese, whose entire spiritual life is fundamentally incomprehensible to us, largely because of the fact that, having always regarded sexual passion as a relatively trivial thing, they have set the highest value upon filial rather than upon marital love, and about this latter have centred not only their social structure, but the most important of their moral and emotional groupings as well, so that, for example, they would not be, like us, inclined to think of love as the chief source of virtue or the chief reward of fortitude.

Nor do we need, in order to get some faint idea how love might come to be less for us than it was for our ancestors, go so far afield as savagery or China, since we may observe in the lives of our own not too remote forefathers how certain self-justifying and intrinsically worth-while activities came to lose their magic. From certain pursuits — war, for example — they got satisfactions which, at least so far as the more advanced part of mankind is concerned, we find it difficult to understand. Of it, of chivalric honor, of national glory, of noble birth, and of various other things, they spoke in a way which indicates that these things had for them an emotional content which is rapidly becoming as nearly extinct as that which is embodied for the savage in the spring festival, and which it is almost as hard for us to understand as it would be for a Chinese sage to understand what we mean when we speak of a ‘world well lost for love.’

Values of this kind seem so inevitably natural to those who accept them, and pass so insensibly away, that their rise and fall are only imperfectly recorded, but the changes which take place in their status are, perhaps, the most momentous events in the life of the human race. They have a far more profound effect upon man than any mere changes of government, for they are, in effect, changes of God, and they involve a change both in his whole conception of the meaning of the universe and in the thing for which he lives. Every time a value is born, existence takes on a new meaning; every time one dies, some part of that meaning passes away.

II

Most of the faiths which we received from the Victorians had already by then been shaken. Certainly the Church which they left us was already weakened and despoiled, and the majority of their dogmas had become gradually so much attenuated that it needed only the resolute ‘ Pooh!’ uttered by the new generation to make them vanish away. Yet their religion of love, or at least the value which they attached to that passion, reached us almost intact. With no subject has the contemporary mind been more persistently busy, but it did not, in the beginning, think of questioning the fundamental premise.

If one reads the novels of H. G. Wells — which will stand as perhaps the best expression of the minds of the ‘liberal’ mass — one will see that, for all their social iconoclasm, they imply a tacit acceptance of the assumption that ‘love is best’ quite as complete as that of any Victorian novel; and if one reads the six volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex — which will stand perhaps as the completest and most characteristic of those works which made a rationalist attitude toward sex an important feature of the spirit of the age — one will see that to Ellis, too, love has its element of transcendental value. Neither the scientist nor the romancer dreamed of questioning the fact that love was the most significant of human experiences and that in it men might find the ultimate justification of life. If both were frequently concerned with an attack upon what were beginning to be called, even in popular language, the ‘taboos’ which surround the theory and the practice of love, both were so concerned because they thought of love as too obviously the supreme privilege of man to be burdened with irrational proscriptions; and their ultimate purpose was, in a word, not to cheapen or tarnish, but merely to free it.

The Victorians, for all their romantic system of values, had accepted the frustrations and the sacrifices entailed by their social code with a complacency which seemed to the new generation hardly less than heartless. They had seemed to take even a sort of perverse satisfaction in contemplating the bowed head with which people were supposed to acknowledge the inviolability of the rules and which Matthew Arnold had celebrated in two of his most characteristic stanzas: —

They had, moreover, visited their punishments mercilessly, and they had even — witness George Eliot in Adam Bede — persuaded themselves that the punishments visited by society upon those who violated its taboos were the result of a law of nature, and the new generation was merely anxious to avoid the commoner tragedies of love which it regarded as avoidable. It looked forward to an individual who, free from a corroding sense of sin, should live in a society which placed no unnecessary restrictions upon emotional fulfillment, and, far from anticipating any cynical devaluation of love itself, it hoped only for an age in which men should love more freely, more fully, and more perfectly.

Yet it requires no more than a casual acquaintance with either contemporary life or its reflection in contemporary literature to enable one to perceive that this life hardly corresponds to the anticipation.

Freedom has come, but with it a certain lessened sense of the importance of the passions that are thus freely indulged; and, if love has come to be less often a sin, it has come also to be less often a supreme privilege. If one turns to the smarter of those novelists who describe the doings of the more advanced set of those who are experimenting with life, — to, for example, Mr. Aldous Huxley or Mr. Ernest Hemingway, — one will discover in their tragic farces the picture of a society which is at bottom in despair because, though it is more completely absorbed in the pursuit of love than in anything else, it has lost the sense of any ultimate importance inherent in the experience which preoccupies it; and if one turns to the graver of the intellectual writers, — to, for example, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, Mr. T. S. Eliot, or Mr. James Joyce, — one will find both explicitly and implicitly a similar sense that the transcendental value of love has become somehow attenuated, and that, to take a perfectly concrete example, a conclusion which does no more than bring a man and woman into complete possession of one another is a mere bathos which does nothing except legitimately provoke the comment, ‘Well, what of it?’ One can hardly imagine them concerned with what used to be called, in a phrase which they have helped to make faintly ridiculous, ‘the right to love.’ Individual freedom they have inherited and assumed as a right, but they are concerned with something which their more restricted forefathers assumed — with, that is to say, the value of love itself. No inhibitions either within or without restrain them, but they are asking themselves, ‘What is it worth?’ and they are certainly no longer feeling that it is obviously and in itself something which makes life worth the living.

To Huxley and Hemingway — I take them as the most conspicuous exemplars of a whole school — love is at times only a sort of obscene joke. The former in particular has delighted to mock sentiment with physiology, to place the emotions of the lover in comic juxtaposition with quaint biological lore, and to picture a romantic pair ‘quietly sweating palm to palm.’ But the joke is one which turns quickly bitter upon the tongue, for a great and gratifying illusion has passed away, leaving the need for it still there. His characters still feel the physiological urge, and, since they have no sense of sin in connection with it, they yield easily and continually to that urge; but they have also the human need to respect their chief preoccupation, and it is the capacity to do this that they have lost. Absorbed in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction, they never find love and they are scarcely aware that they are seeking it, but they are far from content with themselves. In a generally devaluated world they are eagerly endeavoring to get what they can in the pursuit of satisfactions which are sufficiently instinctive to retain inevitably a modicum of animal pleasure, but they cannot transmute that simple animal pleasure into anything else. They themselves not infrequently share the contempt with which their creator regards them, and nothing could be less seductive, because nothing could be less glamorous, than the description of the debaucheries born of nothing except a sense of the emptiness of life.

Now it is gratifyingly appropriate that this Huxley should be the grandson of the great Victorian exponent of life rationally conducted in the light of natural knowledge, since the predicament which he recognizes is a direct result of the application of the principles advocated by the grandfather. It is true, of course, that Thomas Henry Huxley felt too strongly the influence of Victorian taboos ever to indulge in any extended naturalistic consideration of the problems of sex, but the Ellises and the Wellses, whom we have taken as the type of those who have concerned themselves with such an effort, did little more than apply the principles which he laid down. They used analysis in an effort to clarify an illusion, and the result, which now seems as though it might have been foretold, was to destroy that illusion.

They were, to be sure, successful in the immediate objects which they proposed to themselves; they did, that is to say, succeed in freeing love, both by relaxing somewhat the ferocity with which society had punished conduct which deviated from even the mere letter of its code and by lifting from mankind the burden of that sense of guilt which had oppressed so many and not infrequently poisoned what would have been otherwise a mighty and perfect experience. But when the consequences of love were made less momentous, then love itself became less momentous too, and we have discovered that the now-lifted veil of mystery was that which made it potentially important as well as potentially terrible. Sex, we learned, was not so awesome as once we had thought; God does not care so much about it as we had formerly been led to suppose; but neither, as a result, do we. Love is becoming gradually so accessible, so unmysterious, and so free that its value is trivial.

That which the Victorians regarded as possessed of a supreme and mystical value was, as we have already pointed out, a group of related ideas and emotional aptitudes whose elements had, during a long period of time, been associated by means of connections not always logical. Analysis can dissociate them and has indeed done so, but in so doing it destroys the importance which only as a group they possessed. We know that the social consequences which once followed a surrender to love need no longer do so, and hence the nexus between the sexual act and those elements of the love complex which are predominantly social has disappeared. More important yet, we know, or rather we feel, that this act is a simple biological one which sends no reverberations through a spiritual universe, and so it no longer has any transcendental implications. With vertiginous rapidity it is being reduced to that which it was in savage or prehuman society, and threatens to become again no more than a simple physiological act with no more than a simple physiological act’s importance or value.

For many generations the adolescence of the individual has repeated the miracle achieved in the first place by the human race as a whole; it has, that is to say, associated the new impulses suddenly discovered in itself with various duties to society and with all the other aspirations of which it is capable; but this miracle is one which is becoming constantly more difficult of performance. Certain individuals have always and for different reasons failed to achieve it, and they have been compelled in consequence to lead jangled lives; but more and more people find themselves victims of a disharmony which results from the fact that they cannot escape a continual preoccupation with a passion which seems to their intellect trivial, and it would not be wholly fanciful to say that this sense of disharmony, of the unworthiness of their aims, is the modern equivalent of the conviction of sin.

It is not to be supposed, I take it, that any mood so disrupted as this is destined to endure. It represents an unstable equilibrium of forces in which one or the other is bound sooner or later to yield; for if the passion of love is to be devaluated, then it must be made to play in human life a part as small as our slight estimate of its importance makes appropriate. Such was the position to which the early Church Fathers attempted to reduce it, and they were unsuccessful because the conflict which they felt between their instincts and their intellectual convictions was resolved in the religion of love; but the modern consciousness is surely destined either to evolve some equally mighty fiction or, while surrendering the erotic instinct as a source of important values, to dispose of it in some fashion involving a minimum of inconvenience and distraction. Nor is the fact that the ferocious and deliberate nastiness of some current writers suggests that of the Fathers, that, for example, Huxley has even in the midst of one of his novels quoted in the Latin from which he hardly dared translate it one of the most brutally scornful of their comments upon the flesh, merely an accident, since there is a certain similarity between the early saint and the contemporary sophisticate which is due to the fact that, however different their experiences may be, each rejects love for the same reason — each, that is to say, has refused to surround it with mystical implications, and each, looking at it as a mere biological fact, has found it ridiculous and disgusting. Certainly the nastiness of, let us say, James Joyce’s Ulysses is the nastiness of an ascetic reviling the flesh in order that he may be free of it.

Now, if we set aside the ascetic ideal which in the past, at least, has generally proved itself radically impracticable, and if we set aside also the romantic ideal which the rationalizing tendencies of the human mind seem certain to destroy, there is only one way in which the artist — by which term is here meant whoever is distinctly human enough to have a plan for his life which he sets up in opposition to the simple plan of nature — may deal with sex, and that way is the one in which it is accepted as something ineluctable, perhaps, but nevertheless uncomplex and trivial. The man who follows it may feel no need to battle against the flesh; he may have no desire to waste his energies in a futile struggle against the inclinations of the natural man, and he may preach no stern denials; but he makes of love a game, a joke, a ribaldry even, in order that, since it no longer seems really significant, it may be reduced to a mere incident.

And if, leaving the Huxleys and the Hemingways, who are concerned with characters still in the midst of confusion, we turn to certain other novelists, poets, and critics, we shall find them at least adumbrating such a solution, as may be illustrated by the words put into the mouth of a by no means ascetic painter in one of the most powerful of contemporary novels. ‘ The tendency of my work,’ he remarks, ‘is, as you may have noticed, that of an invariable severity. Apart from its being good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and divorced from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in that.’

Such a character is merely the novelist’s projection of a type which logically results from the effort to think one’s way through the confusions just outlined. This painter — Tarr is his name — represents the direction in which we are moving, and he explains the growing popularity of abstract design in the plastic arts and of pure intellectualism in literature, since both represent a reaction from that diffusion of sublimated sex through all the arts which is one of the chief characteristics of romanticism. But however logical and inevitable such a tendency may be, and however preferable it is to an absorption in things which can no longer be respected, it must be remembered that it is, nevertheless, based upon a complete surrender of something which we have been accustomed to regard as one of the chief values in human life, and that it leaves a mighty blank in existence.

Whatever else love may still be, — game, puerility, or wry joke played by the senses and the imagination upon the intellect, — it no longer is the ultimate self-justifying value which once it was. We may still on occasion surrender to it, but surrender is no longer a paradoxical victory and the world is no longer well lost for love. Many other things we have come to doubt, — patriotism, self-sacrifice, respectability, honor, — but in the general wreck the wreck of love is conspicuous and typical. Rationalism having destroyed the taboos which surrounded it, and physiology having rudely investigated its phenomena upon the same level as other biological processes, it has been stripped of the mystical penumbra in whose shadow its transcendental value seemed real, though hid; and somehow, in the course of the very process of winning the right to love, love itself has been deprived of its value.

Such, in outline, is the process by which is accomplished what has here been called the death of a value. Many of us, not yet old, were born at a time when the religion of love was all but unquestioned, when it seemed to stand more firmly than even the religion of the Church, whose foundations science was already known to have slowly undermined. But if we have followed the course of modern thought we have seen it rapidly disintegrate. We have seen how works, of which Havelock Ellis’s magnum opus is a type, claimed love as a legitimate subject for rationalistic consideration, and how, though Ellis himself believed that the superstructure of poetry would remain after its foundations had been subject to rational examination, just as Thomas Huxley believed that the superstructure of Christian morality would stand after the supernatural props had been removed from under it, the mystical values lingered as ghosts for only one generation after rationalism had attacked the mythology upon which they rested.

We have seen the rise of an atheism quite as significant in the history of the human soul as that which has regard to religion in the more conventional sense, and one whose result may be summed up by a consideration of the fact that, though the phrase ' love is best ’ meant to our grandfathers more things than a volume could describe, it is to us so completely denuded that we can only repeat it as we repeat one of those formulæ of theology which, though once rich with meaning, are to us only words, words, words.

III

Others who have described, though perhaps in somewhat different terms, the disintegration of the love complex have been concerned chiefly with its effect upon human society. They have stressed their fear that, for example, the progressive tendency to dissociate love from family life would involve the most thoroughgoing reconstruction of our social organization, even if it did not destroy the possibility of any stable society, and in general they have thought of modified sexual customs in terms of their effect upon the race. We, however, are here concerned with the individual and with the consequences which the process we have been describing may have for the intimate emotional life of the separate soul — with, in a word, the changes involved by the death of love in the character of what we may call the experience of living.

We will, if we must, give up the illusion of love. The time may come when it will mean to us even less than it now means to the philosophical Chinese and no more than it did to the savage; when, to state the case somewhat differently, romance will be, either as a motive in art or an aim in living, as fundamentally incomprehensible to us as it is to the American Indian, and when it will be so, not because we have not yet developed the complex system of associations upon which it depends, but because the analytical tendencies of our intelligence forbid our imagination to create the values once deemed so precious.

We may realize now that the effort to develop the possibilities of love as an adornment of life by understanding it more completely wrecks itself upon the fact that to understand any of the illusions upon which the values of life depend inevitably destroys them; but we realize that fact too late, and even if we should convince ourselves that we have paid too high a price for our rationality, that we should willingly reassume all the taboos of the Victorian if we could feel again his buoyant sense that the meaning of life had been revealed to him through love, we could no more recapture his illusions by means of an intellectual conviction than we could return to the passionate faith of the Middle Ages merely because, having read Ruskin, we should like to build a cathedral.

Nor is human life so rich in values as to justify us in surrendering any one of them complacently. At bottom, life is worth living only because certain of our conscious activities allowed themselves to be regarded as though they were possessed of some importance or significance in themselves, and even the number of such conscious activities is too strictly limited to permit us to accept without foreboding the reduction of so important a one as that of sexual union to the status of a mere triviality. Many of the life processes — and by no means the least important — are carried on without the accompaniment of any awareness whatsoever. The beating of the heart and the slow churning of the stomach, to say nothing of the infinitely complicated activities with which the glands are busy, are as little a part of that consciousness which we know of as ourselves as is the shifting of the earth upon its axis or the explosive disintegration of an atom of radium. In one sense man cannot either ‘know himself’ or ‘live completely,’ for the simple reason that only a fragment of his total organism is connected with that part of the brain wherein resides all that he is accustomed to call his ego or self. The body keeps itself alive by processes which we neither will nor recognize, and death may be preparing itself for months before a warning finally bursts its way into that relatively small mass of cells to which our awareness and hence our emotions confine themselves. When the life of any individual rises above the dim level of the mere toiler whose existence is scarcely more than a round of duties, and reaches that distinctly human level upon which contemplation in some form or other furnishes the motive for living, it does so because he has attributed a meaningfulness to some aspect of consciousness, but the possibilities for such attribution are limited.

Eating, because it is a conscious and not an unconscious process, because the taste buds of the tongue happen to be connected by nerves with the cerebrum and not the cerebellum, can be made into one of the ceremonies by which life is elaborated and can pass as a symbol into poetry and philosophy. So, for the same reason, can the act of sexual union; but both digestion and gestation, because they are controlled without the intervention of consciousness, are destined to remain merely unadorned processes of nature. Man has wanted to live in order to love or even in order to eat, but hardly in order either to gestate or to digest. Yet it is merely an accident of our nervous organization that this is so.

Thus it is that of the infinitely complicated processes of life, in the biological sense, only a few are subject to that elaboration and poetization which make them even potentially a part of significant human experience. Just as the ears can hear only a certain limited class of the innumerable kinds of waves which roll incessantly through the air, and the eyes can see only a certain few of those vibrations in the ether which, after ranging from red to violet, pass on into invisibility, so, too, only a few of the processes of life furnish materials available to the mind. From a limited number of colors we must paint our pictures, from a limited number of sounds compose our symphonies, and from a limited number of conscious processes construct our ‘good life.’ But we are no more aware through our minds of the totality of what living involves than we are through our sense of the entire natural world. To ultra-violet light we are as blind as a man without eyes, and, similarly, most of our biological existence is as meaningless to us as the life of an insect is to it. Whatever does not happen within a few square inches upon the surface of our forebrain does not, so far as we are concerned, happen at all. It cannot be made the source of any human value, because it is a part of us which lives as the plant lives, without any knowledge of itself.

Nature, then, has imposed a certain rigid selection upon us. Grudgingly, perhaps, she has permitted us to be aware of certain of her activities, and has bid us do what we may by way of contemplating or elaborating them until they seem to become not, as to her all things are, merely the means by which life is kept going, but ends to be enjoyed or valued in themselves. Within the limits which she has set we have, moreover, made certain choices of our own. Certain of the available conscious processes have seemed to us more suitable than others for this contemplation or elaboration, and we have devoted ourselves to them, leaving the others merely upon the fringe of awareness. Thus we made mere animal combativeness into chivalry, surrounded lair-making with all the association which belongs to the idea of home, and created a sense of the presence of God out of the fears for our security; but the greatest and most elaborate of our creations was love, and the process by which it is stripped of its meaning is a process by which man is dehumanized and life is made to sink back to a level nearer that of the animal, for whom life is a phenomenon in which there is no meaning except the biological urge.

At the very least it means that a color has faded from our palette, a whole range of effects dropped out of our symphony. Intellectually we may find romantic people and romantic literature only ridiculous, intellectually we may convince ourselves that we regret the passing of love no more than the passing of the spring festival or even the disappearance of those passionate convictions which made civil war seem to the Middle Ages intrinsically worth while; but we cannot deny that life is made paler and that we are carried one step nearer to that state in which existence is seen as a vast emptiness which the imagination can no longer people with fascinating illusions.

For the more skeptical of the Victorians, love performed some of the functions of the God whom they had lost. Faced with it, many of even the most hard-headed turned, for the moment, mystical. They found themselves in the presence of something which awoke in them that sense of reverence which nothing else claimed, and something to which they felt, even in the very depths of their being, that an unquestioning loyalty was due. For them love, like God, demanded all sacrifices; but like Him, also, it rewarded the believer by investing all the phenomena of life with a meaning not yet analyzed away. We have grown used — more than they — to a Godless universe, but we are not yet accustomed to one which is loveless as well, and only when we have so become shall we realize what atheism really means.