And the forms of love vary from the flowering and seeding of plants to the music of Beethoven. It is not a progress from bad to good, it is not a retrogression from good to bad. It is rather a process which fills the Universe with death--death in myriads of lovely forms, from the form of the wood-violet to the form of the symphony. And this process is life. And life increasing the varieties of death is the general principle of progress. What is the purpose of this process? We do not know. But we can say that its purpose is delight. _Ecstasy clothing Himself in a thousand Forms._ The Universe delighting in itself preserves itself in death, for in death the imagination of the spirit is made immortal. FOOTNOTES: [1] How was this achieved? No biologist can tell us, but we shall not go far wrong in seeing here again the created organs of Desire. [2] Here we can find a conclusive argument in proof of the superiority of sentiment to sense in sexual experience. Sentiment is non-existent among animals and it is very faint in the lower human types but in the highest European types it now almost completely controls the sexual sense. CHAPTER IV THE IDEA OF PROGRESS IN MUSIC In the history of the world as we know it we discover that not all forms of death are immortal. There are animals which are extinct, there are plants which have disappeared, there are flowers which bloom no more. In vain has life fixed their images in that immortality of automatic repetition which we call death. Even death, we seem to find, is occasionally an illusion and its sleep is not more eternal than a man’s dream. It is probable that all things as _things_ are perishable; and we have no reason to believe that even the music of Beethoven will last for ever, or even for as long as man lasts. But there is the problem why some things last longer than others, and this perhaps raises the question of value, of goodness. Here is a new element in the idea of progress. Is it possible to discover any principle in the history of music which explains why, already, Bach has outlasted Frohberger?