Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/78

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has requested of me an answer to the following questions:


 * 1. "Is jealousy an inborn or an inbred passion?"
 * 2. "Can a human being love several persons at once, and if he believes himself able to do this, can this capacity be called love?"

Logic demands that I answer the second question first, for jealousy must be looked at as a concomitant of love, not love as a concomitant of jealousy.

What is love? In simple words: a passionate attachment to a person of the other sex, in whom a man (or woman) delights in the highest degree, and for whom he feels the highest degree of appreciation, confidence, and good-will. Through the highest degree of appreciation, etc., we place the person on an ideal standpoint. The conception of the ideal, however, excludes every second ideal. By the side of an ideal we can as little have another ideal of the same kind as the believer can have another God besides the well-known Universal One.

If we conceive of love as a passionate enthusiasm and devotion to a thereby idealized person, it is self-evident that its object can never be more