“For love is a celestial harmony Of likely hearts composed of stars’ consent, Which join together in sweet sympathy To work each other’s joy and true content, Which they have harboured since their first descent Out of their heavenly bowers, where they did see And know each other here beloved to be.” Spenser intends by “harmony” what I have meant by mutuality, something where several different parts belong together and reach their full significance in union. If the two hearts are similar and each merely repeats what the other contains, there is no mutual profit. They must fit one another, and in this fitting there is always something of the unknown. They cannot of themselves entirely create the union. The “stars’ consent” must be added. Heaven must shine upon them. Spenser even suggests that their adaptation to one another is not begun in this world, but is merely recognized here as having been ever of old. Once known it brings them full content. This, then, is the topic to which we now turn. It is that which the ethical teachers of every age have counted fundamental. With Jesus it supersedes all else. Writers as unlike as the Catholic statesman Augustine, the Jew Spinoza, the Puritan Jonathan Edwards see in love the fulfilment of righteousness. “Love God and do as you please,” says Augustine. It is something we all experience and few understand. In it there are paradoxes not found elsewhere. Delicate analysis will be needed to bring out all that it involves, to show, too, how even here limitations creep in. To this puzzling and attractive work I devote the next chapter. CHAPTER VI LOVE In the _Symposium of Plato_ Socrates is made to say that he can profess knowledge of only a single subject, love, but that through acquaintance with this he has a key to unlock all wisdom. And certainly if Socrates understood love he deserves to be reckoned among the wise. Few have looked into it soberly. To those who are not experiencing it, it is a jest; to those who are, a blind passion. Novelists exploit it for cash; poets, on the whole its most serious students, too often for graceful fancies. Saint Paul’s compact sentences give more of its substance than can be had in the same compass elsewhere. In undertaking an analysis of it I believe I can best fix attention on its more important ethical features if I ask a series of simple questions about it and then develop their complicated answers.