Plato’s fable in the _Symposium_, much quoted recently, relates how humans were supposed to be duplex—two heads, two sets of arms and legs, a huge double-size body. Fearing the power of such humans, the gods cut them in two, one half of each binary human forming a man, the other half a woman. After that time the parts were so absorbed in trying to unite, that the gods were no longer worried. Corresponding to the self-magnification of the separate demi-human which seeks the magnification of its own petty half of the real unit of existence, the true love instinct always includes in its strivings the gratification of the other complement of the true social unit. The egoistic-social instinct then regards the world from a demi-human standpoint, looking for self-aggrandizement unconsciously, inevitably. The erotic instinct alone takes in the aspect of the world as affecting one other person too, and their children when they come along. The love instinct seeks gratification through the gratifications of one member of the opposite sex; and fails to find the first except through the second. It is impossible, from the viewpoint of this book, to love more than one member of the opposite sex at once. Men or women who think they do this are deceiving themselves. It is impossible to call that feeling love which has in it any reservations whatever. Every thought, every feeling, every act that could not be communicated to the mate, diminishes by so much the integrity of the personality in whom it originates and initiates an inceptive disintegration of personality. By this denial that love at first sight is a fact is meant that either of two things is more likely than anything else to happen in the cases where men and women fall thus instantaneously in love with each other and the union is continued through life, which is indeed comparatively rare. Either the pair are utterly ignorant of what true love really implies and maintain for years a passionless _mariage de convenance_; or one of the pair, realizing the emptiness of joy that marks their marital existence, is too proud to acknowledge failure. It is conceivable that the woman may realize how unerotic her husband is, and feeling unable, as most women are indeed, to change her husband’s ideas, to supply him with the ideal he should have had himself, naturally gives up what is essentially for her a hopeless struggle. § 47