His faith is unimpeachable and his curiosity and honesty unbounded: this is what makes him conspicuous. In claiming to be scientific, Stendhal meant nothing more than that his essay was based purely upon unbiassed observation; that he accepted nothing upon vague hearsay or from tradition; that even the finer shades of sentiment could be observed with as much disinterested precision, if not made to yield as definite results, as any other natural phenomena. "The man who has known love finds all else unsatisfying"--is, properly speaking, a scientific fact. Analytical, however, is the best word to characterise the Stendhalian method. Scientific suggests, perhaps, more naturally the broader treatment of love, which is familiar in Greek literature, lives all through the Middle Ages, is typified in Dante, and survives later in a host of Renaissance dialogues and treatises on Love. This love--see it in the _Symposium_ of Plato, in Dante or in the _Dialoghi_ of Leone Ebreo--is more than a human passion, it is also the _amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle_, the force of attraction which, combined with hate, the force of repulsion, is the cause of universal movement. In this way love is not only scientifically treated, it embraces all other sciences within it. Scientists will smile, but the day of Science and Art with a contemptuous smile for each other is over. True, the feeling underlying this cosmic treatment of love is very human, very simple--a conviction that love, as a human passion, is all-important, and a desire to justify its importance by finding it a place in a larger order of [Pg xi] things, in the "mystical mathematics of the kingdom of Heaven." Weaker heads than Plato are also pleased to call love divine, without knowing very clearly what they mean by divinity. Their ignorance is relative; the allegorical representation of Eros--damned and deified alternately by the poets--is in motive, perhaps, not so far from what we have called the scientific, but, perhaps, might better have named the cosmic, treatment.