To scorn influences of love over thought may be the fruit of pride, but it is also, more frequently, an incontrovertible proof of crass ignorance,--pride and ignorance which we shall bitterly expiate, because, if we today may be contented with the beauty of form, and if robust youth, comforted later by coquetry, may prolong the life of love founded on voluptuousness only, the day will come, sooner or later, in which, when the great disparity of brains shall destroy every hope of common intelligence, we shall find ourselves in the presence of this horned dilemma: either to renounce dual thought--horrible amputation of intellectual life--or lower ourselves more every day in order that the voice of a person who speaks in a subdued tone may reach our ear. Hence a continual toil, a weary and sad exertion, the impairment of lofty intellects and the disorders of weak brains; hence the inevitable death of a love which should have submerged only with the last plank of shipwrecked beauty; hence the veiled polygamy of our modern society, profoundly hypocritical, because it is so impatient that it wants to run, when it has only the strength to walk slowly; because it is so petulant that it wants to jump while its legs are still tied by the sacred straps of the middle ages. We must all inexorably yield to the influence of thought in love. If our robust brain can elevate in some little measure the smaller one of the person we love, we must always descend from our lofty plane, lowering the level of our thought and wasting many of the nobler forces of human progress. A certain disparity of levels is inevitable, but it should never be excessive, because, in the continual efforts to equalize them, in the sorrowful struggles to reach them, a great part of love may be wretchedly dissolved. CHAPTER XIII CHASTITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO LOVE This chapter may to many readers seem utterly useless in a psychological work, since chastity is a question of hygiene or a negation of love; and in any case, someone could whisper in my ear: "_Non est hic locus_." Let the enemies of chastity, or those who do not know what chastity is, jump this chapter, which will be among the shortest in the book, and allow us, when we speak of light, to say at least what shade means.