cancer in the very tissues of society and as a disrupter of the
securest social bonds. No attempt is made to treat the manifestations
of this fundamental instinct with dignity or to give it possible
social utility. The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the
desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether
more lovely than they really are, the idealization not only of each
other but of the whole earth which they regard but as a theater for
their noble exploits, the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the
make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what
might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more
companionable? And yet at the present moment every city is full of
young people who are utterly bewildered and uninstructed in regard to
the basic experience which must inevitably come to them, and which has
varied, remote, and indirect expressions.

Even those who may not agree with the authorities who claim that it is
this fundamental sex susceptibility which suffuses the world with its
deepest meaning and beauty, and furnishes the momentum towards all
art, will perhaps permit me to quote the classical expression of this
view as set forth in that ancient and wonderful conversation between
Socrates and the wise woman Diotima. Socrates asks: "What are they
doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? And
what is the object they have in view? Answer me." Diotima replies: "I
will teach you. The object which they have in view is birth in beauty,
whether of body or soul.... For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine
the love of the beautiful only ... but the love of birth in beauty,
because to the mortal creature generation is a sort of eternity and
immortality."

To emphasize the eternal aspects of love is not of course an easy