“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”; and that being so, it is the task of those who are a little more serious than the serious to set about discovering the principles of glory and enjoyment in life. And--I am setting down a truism--the main principle of enjoyment for the human race is not art, nor thought, nor the practice of virtue, but for man, woman, and for woman, man. The exchange of happiness between the sexes is not only the creative agent in human life, perpetuating it; it is also the thing which gives the perpetuation of life its chief meaning. People have always felt this vaguely; it has made labor endurable to them; but hardly ever have they recognized it clearly, and to the poets and artists who know it they have always responded a little skeptically. They have thought of love as a justification a little too materialistic for life; but love is only materialistic when it is regarded as a means. To accept men and women as ends in themselves, to enter into their life as one of them, is to partake of absolute life, that life which at every moment realizes itself, existing for its own sake. We cannot live in that life continuously; for the accomplishment of the intricate purposes of society we must at certain times and with part of our minds regard our fellow-creatures as instruments; but the more we tend to do so the more we banish joy from life. Life does not consist, whatever the utilitarians may say, in functioning, but in living; and life comes into being where men and women, not as functions, but as self-constituted entities, intersect. This is the state which in religion as well as art has been called life; this is the final life of the earth, beyond which there is no other. We may accept it or pass it by; but whatever we may do with it, it is our chief end, giving meaning to the multitudinous pains of humanity. This commerce between men and women is not merely sexual, in the narrow sense which we have given the word; it involves every human joy, all the thoughts and aspirations of mankind stretching into infinity. It is the thing which has inspired all great artists, mystical as well as earthy. It is the point of reference for any morality which is not a disguised kind of adaptation; for virtue consists in the capacity to partake freely of human happiness. All reform, all economic and political theory has a meaning in so far as it makes for this; and that was recognized by the first reformers, the utopians who had not yet become mere specialists in reform.