(ML) - Wisdom's Delight in Marriage Love: Followed by Insanity’s Pleasure in Promiscuous Love

ML 111

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111. For the EIGHTH time a paper came forth, from which he read as follows: "In our compartment, we compatriots have not found the actual origin of conjugial love because that origin is inmostly laid up in the sanctuaries of the mind. Not even the most consummate wisdom can reach that love in its origin with any ray of the understanding. We have made many conjectures, but after vainly revolving subtleties, we know not whether our surmises are trifles or judgments. He, therefore, who wishes to draw forth the origin of that love from the sanctuaries of the mind and set it before his eyes, let him go to Delphi. We have contemplated the love below its origin--that in the mind it is spiritual, being there like the fountain-head of a sweet current; that from the mind it flows down into the breast where it becomes delightful and is called bosom-love, which, considered in itself, is full of friendship and, from a plenary inclination to mutuality, is full of confidence; and that when it has passed through the breast it becomes genital love. When a young man revolves these and like things in his thoughts, as he does when he chooses one of the sex for himself, they kindle in his heart the fire of conjugial love; and this fire, being the primitive of that love, is its origin. As to the origin of its virtue or potency, we acknowledge none other than the love itself, for they are inseparable companions and yet of such sort that sometimes the one precedes and sometimes the other. When love precedes and virtue or potency follows both are noble because the potency is then the virtue of conjugial love. But if potency precedes and love follows, then both are ignoble because the love is then from carnal potency. We therefore judge the quality of each from the order in which the love descends or ascends, and so proceeds from its origin to its goal." To this was subscribed the letter D.

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