It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover’s soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about life? For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes, of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact, with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred, individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their extended operations. When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass through our lives have (by association), links and connections which to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of the close identification established between us and them for the time being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of them are addressed also to a universal goal.