recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we hardly expected
such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud. He has now broadened his
conception of sexual craving or _libido_ into a general principle of
attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets
Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown
open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have
escaped into the cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given
to understand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.

I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle
of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil
spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well
for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and
graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or
trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you
wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your
separate existence. Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a
prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only
an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and
death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly
content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old
equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite
is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space,
necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The
parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external
influences and differently related to one another. This inequality, even
in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in
time a wonderful complexity. It is the source of all uneasiness, of life,
and of love.