Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/12

6 course not. These various forms are not identical, and never can be. To which some who entertain different, if not higher, conceptions, might answer, Love is a tree; its roots are in matter—body, and underlie and create the amative instinct; its limbs reach out, variously, to dogs, horses, children, friends, parents;—its trunk is the wifely, husbandly; and its top or crown stretches up to heaven and to God! Love, in another aspect, is perfect health. Phrenologists generally, Buchanan excepted, affirm in substance that the thing we call love is but lust refined; that its great function is the propagative; and that its cerebral organ lies at the base of the lower brain; in other words, they take the root for the tree itself. They are mistaken.

Since the first three editions of this work appeared, of which editions nearly nine thousand were sold, much new light has been thrown upon the subjects of Love and Passion, and they have even been formulated mathematically. Science now weighs a human passion as readily as she does planetary bodies. She resolves all things into heat and magnetism, declares these are but modes of motion, that motion is the divine mode of existence, and itself the Grand Idea. That my readers may have some notion of the advance made, I submit the following sketch of two lectures on the subject by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe,—the ablest woman I ever listened to, and I have heard a hundred. I cut it from the "Boston Post."

"Mrs. Julia Ward Howe concluded a course of two lectures, under the auspices of the New England Women's Club, at Chickering's Hall last evening, with an essay upon the subject, 'Polarity; a Study of Sex.' The hall was well filled with a select and discriminating audience, who gave the speaker their closest attention throughout. The lecture was one of considerable length, occupying about an hour of rapid reading, and in the brief synopsis given below we find it impossible to convey to the reader so adequate an idea as we could wish of its completeness and beauty as a literary and philosophic production.

"Mrs. Howe began by saying that 'Polarity,' as she supposed