It shares with the purely spiritual love the eagerness of man to
raise and glorify the beloved woman, without ulterior motive or desire.
This distinction may be called hair-splitting, and I admit that it is
frequently impossible to make it in practice, but it is important in
principle because it goes back to origins and finds in the metaphysical
climax of the third stage, the love-death, its practical anti-generic
proof. But with all this it is of common occurrence that spiritual and
sensual love are at different times projected on one and the same woman.
Schopenhauer's instinct of philoprogenitiveness has to-day become an
article of faith with the learned and unlearned. Schopenhauer was the
first, probably, to conceive the idea that love was the consciousness of
the unconscious instincts in the service of the species, and had no
other content or purpose than the will of the species to produce the
best possible offspring. In a chapter of his principal work, entitled
_The Metaphysics of Love_, he essayed to promulgate and prove his theory
in detail.
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