In other words: personal characteristics have tended more and more to inspire love, and love has more and more developed personal characteristics. This again—as already admitted—has resulted in more and more individuals failing to perform their duty to the race, either because their feeling, although reciprocated, could not lead to marriage, or because the feeling in some respect or other has been disappointed. This passionate selection of a single one among the many by whom—from an objective point of view—the duty to the race might equally well have been performed, has thus in a sense become anti-social. But such lives, wasted as they are from the immediate point of view of the ennobling of the race, have yet been able to serve the same end indirectly. Many of these persons, childless in an ordinary sense, have left immortal offspring. Others have shed upon the battle-field, in winning victories for humanity, the blood which they never saw flowing in the fine network of veins on a child’s temples. By the greatness of their own ideals they have enlarged the hearts of their fellow-men; and their courage has not had to sink before the possibility of their own failure to realise their ideals being cast in their teeth. They have bought their prophetic power at the highest possible price: that of never having had a happiness to lose; and they bear without bitterness the poverty which has made them richer in faith. That many lives—and worthy lives—are wasted through love is only one manifestation of life’s impenetrable tendency to universal prodigality. It is one with the great necessity, whose hand smites and wounds us so long as we curse it, but caresses and supports as soon as we bless it. We must not look at the victims—even if we ourselves are among them—if we would see the meaning of life in life itself. We must fix our eyes upwards. And then it is certain—since love continually and in spite of all is extending its power—that individual love, with all its victims and all its mistakes, nevertheless in the long run assists the elevation of the race.