Goethe imagined that love could be disinterested, and this is really not so. The lover seeks a return of his love, for that is just what love means. Those novels where sacrificing lovers turn over the women they love to rivals, as in George Sand's _Jacques_ and Dostoievsky's _Injured and Insulted_, do not show disinterested love, but merely obedience to an abstract idea with which the whole individual's psychic and physical constitution is not in harmony at all. Goethe tried to be different from what he really was. The question, "What is that to thee if I love thee?" with its corollary that the love need not be returned, did not come, as Goethe thought, straight from his heart. His interest in Spinoza's sentiment, just as the creation of it by Spinoza, was a self curative process for grief because of disprised love. All psychoneuroses are unsuccessful efforts to purge one's self of repressed feelings. Now let us investigate the sentiment itself, and we will see under analysis it has no value intellectually. As a matter of fact, there is no warrant for Spinoza's assumption that man does not desire that God love him in return. All religion is based on the principle that God loves us and cares for us more than he does for other animals, or more than he does for other tribes or religious sects. Prayers are made to God to make us happy and prosper and satisfy our wants. This is tantamount to saying we want His love. If God, or Nature, as Spinoza understood Him, was only a malevolent force and gave us undiluted pain, we would not love Him or her. Again, man does not love God or Nature in the sense that he loves a woman, so even if Spinoza were right that man does not desire to be loved by God or Nature in turn, it is because that love does not promise the pleasure derived from the returned love of the woman. The truth is that both Spinoza and Goethe would have preferred to have had their love returned, and had such been the case, they would not have occupied themselves with this fatuous idea. III Then there is the reaction-impulse and the infantile regression in writers. Many books are written by their authors to counteract certain impulses. They feel that their course of conduct or thought was reprehensible, and they try to make amends for this. They become fanatical converts; they show a regression to a fixed period in their own lives, and return to the religion of their parents. Writers who in spite of being unable to believe in religious dogmas, miracles, ascetic notions of morality, nevertheless return in later life to the religions advocating these, belong to this class. The leading of a wicked life, but more often the influence of childish memories of a religious household, are responsible for such conversions. The converts feel young again; pleasant recollections of the mother or father and delicious memories of school days play a part in the process. Many free thinkers who have had a theological training never really outgrow this.