The most obscuring of these lower forms, the least regardful of anything beyond itself, is that instinctive passion between the sexes which tries to monopolize the name of love. Friendship is more intelligent. Unities of a still wider and firmer kind are disclosed in the social, artistic, and scientific impulses. These are all prompted by love and follow increasing grades of beauty. Religion, however, alone reveals the full significance of these struggles toward conjunction; for God is the only complete wholeness, and every endeavor to unite with other things or persons is but a blind seeking after him. Love appears once more in the _Phædrus_, where its deeper implications are traced in connection with rhetoric and general philosophy. At the time of the Renaissance Marcilius Ficinus translated the _Symposium of Plato_ and carried its influence into all the literatures of western Europe. Edmund Spenser reflects that influence in his two superb hymns in _Honor of Love_ and in _Honor of Beauty_. A vivacious modern statement of the ancient doctrine is that of R. W. Emerson in his _Essay on Love_; and an amusing disparagement of love, as that which interferes with the comforts and conveniences of the separate self, appears in Bacon’s _Essay on Love_. It has been well said that any one who imagines Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon should read this essay and follow it with _Romeo and Juliet_. Of course, all the poets linger in the neighborhood of love and declare it to be that which makes the world go round. One of them, the mid-Victorian Coventry Patmore, made himself its expositor and devoted his entire product to the systematic analysis of its every phase. Perhaps to heighten the impression of veracity, he has made the verse of his early volumes, entitled _The Angel in the House_, approach as nearly as possible to prose, while his later volume, _The Unknown Eros_, treats the same matter in a series of rapturous odes. Admiring them both as I do in an age when they are both out of fashion, I take up _The Angel in the House_ when in a psychological mood I am not disturbed by absurdity, and turn to _The Unknown Eros_ when my ear craves music and I welcome the Platonic madness. CHAPTER VII JUSTICE Before advancing further it may be well to survey the tangled ground already traversed; for in mutuality, the third great section of Altruism, I have not been able to employ the simple treatment which Manners and Giving received. The principle throughout is precise and uniform. Within a specified field the interests of two or more persons are to be accounted identical, so that a double gain becomes possible, altruism transforming itself into egoism and egoism into altruism. This is the common principle which shapes every form of mutuality. But the extent of the fields specified differs so widely as to give rise to forms of very unlike moral value, which deserve separate examination.