As Geoffrey Mortimer has well shown, love among cultured people is largely dependent upon the imagination. In savages and in the human race, primarily, when at this period of their existence, it took the form of hedonism, or even the more gross sex-worship, and it was not until mankind was removed far from the brute that his imagination developed, and his mind was capable of abstract thought, that his æsthetic nature began to develop. As his intellect became more profound, and his mental range wider, his power of abstract thinking was accordingly augmented, until to-day, with the average human being, love is only, in a restricted sense, dependent upon physical gratification. Herbert Spencer has given a very sure test of love, based upon its dependence upon the imaginative faculty. According to him, when we are absent from the one we love, the mental picture which we form of her, and the attributes which we at that time give her, are all found in her when in her actual presence. Then, we are really in love with the person whose faults we cannot see. The truth of the old adage, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," still further shows the part which the imagination plays in love. There is no human being who has been so fortunate as to marry the first object upon which his affections settled, providing, of course, that his previous life has been spent so that he can enter into this relationship equitably, who did not find that if his love was reciprocated, life possessed a transcendent charm which words cannot express. Such an affection is necessarily based upon a most profound respect, and can only continue when this deferential regard exists. While feeling a security in its sense of ownership of the one loved, yet it asks and demands nothing, and can only bud, blossom, and ripen into its fullness in the atmosphere of kindness and absolute liberty. While sensual gratification, in the earlier stages, has been the means of nature in perpetuating the species, it is also the most powerful factor in the evolution of that community of interest which is the very soul of this attachment. The infinite number of little incidents which are never to be forgotten by any real lover, are all of a purely physical nature, but, in the aggregate, they form the nucleus of that "amazement of love and friendship and intimacy" which is like the melodious harmony of the sweetest sounds, which lead us into an ecstasy in every way supersensual. It is in the realization of such delight that Gay remarks, "Not to know love, is not to live."