We, my children, who are too rational to mistake the means by which Nature impels us to accomplish her designs for the designs themselves, will take care not to fancy that the end of love is pleasure; on the other hand, we have too much respect for equality to imagine that it is for the benefit of one sex alone. We will remain faithful to the ideal of our lofty destinies, in defining love as the reciprocal attraction of man and woman with the end of perpetuating the species, of improving the partners mutually with respect to intellect and feeling, and of advancing science, art and industry by the labor of the pair. IV. Sophists have told you, my son, that all our inclinations are in Nature; that they are good and should be respected. You asked them doubtless whether the inclinations to theft, to assassination, to violation, to anthropophagy, which are in Nature, are good, and why, instead of respecting them, society punishes their manifestation. You demonstrated to them, I hope, that there is nothing commendable in the exaggeration or the perversion of instincts. You demonstrated to them, I hope, that Nature is brutal fatality against which we are bound to struggle both within and without ourselves; that our Justice and virtue are composed only of conquests made over it in us, as all that constitutes our physical well-being is only the result of conquests made over it outside of us. These sophists have told you that love comes and goes without our knowing how or wherefore; and that we can no more command it to spring up than to endure. This is true, my son, of the brutal desires of the flesh, which is the passion of animals alone, and is extinguished by possession. This is also true of that complex passion which has its seat in the imagination and the senses, and ends with the illusion that is always of short duration. But it is not true of genuine love; this sees both the faults and the virtues of the loved one; but softens the first and exalts the last, and hopes by degrees to put an end to that which wounds it. This sentiment which takes possession of the heart, is patient; it bears lest it become effaced, it surrounds itself with precautions in order to remain constant; if it becomes extinct, it is not unconsciously: for we suffer cruel tortures before resolving to cease to love. You have been told that love is irrepressible; are we then beings of fatality? This sophism renders man cowardly and depraves him; for what is the use of struggling against what we know to be unconquerable, and why not sacrifice to it the best of our tendencies? Examine the conduct of the partisans of such a doctrine.