Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/97

 sexual system, from various causes, and I believe these diseases affect the human soul and spirit on both sides of the eternal gulf, and for that reason alone I make these disclosures. True, I am grateful when orders come for them, and I gladly shut myself up in my laboratory to compound and fill them; but if never a dollar came, I should still give my knowledge, and thank God for the opportunity of saving hundreds, and, perhaps, by God's mercy, thousands of insane, nervous, and exhausted people of both sexes, — unfortunate victims of amative extremism and inverted passional appetite, — people now robbed, poisoned, and irreparably injured by the rampant quackery of the times in which we live, to say nothing of the relief that by these means may be given to the vast armies now rapidly marching on to irremediable ruin under the baleful influence of the three great fiends of modern civilization, — alcohol, opium, and tobacco, — all of which I not only believe, but absolutely know, to be not merely destructive to physical health, but deeply injurious to man's immortal interests after the passage over the river of death, injurious to a degree only less than that of solitary pollution, — the crime against God, and beyond all doubt the worst a man can commit against himself.

Teachers innumerable, male and female, have asserted that love is in no wise connected to, associated with, or influenced by, amorous desire. So far as my long-continued observations go, they are both right and wrong; right, when they elevate the sentiment of friendship and call it love; wrong, when they confound the amicive or friendly feeling with the amative passion.

Affection is an attribute of the soul, per se, and in one of its moods or phases is altogether independent of magnetic attraction, personal appearance, sex, or condition; and yet it is impossible for a really fine soul to fully love a brutal or coarse one; and when such anomalies present themselves, as occasionally they do, the passion is unhealthy, abnormal, and must be set down to the score of insanity. Intensification of friendship undoubtedly constitutes one of the supreme blisses of our post-mortem existence; and yet it would be a poor heaven, in my judgment, in which there were no reciprocal play of the purely nerval sexual forces of the human soul; for that love, above all other phases of the master-passion, is, after all, the attractive chord, chain, motive, substance, or principle, which connects the two universal sexes