TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION


Since the triumphant days of the Mechanists some twenty-five years ago,
the wedge of Pragmatism--a useful tool to be used and discarded--has
been driven between materialism and idealism, and it appears that the
whole tendency of philosophy is now in the latter direction. Even in
England the influence of Bergson has led modern thought away from the
pure materialism of the monists, and it seems probable that Benedetto
Croce's _Philosophy of the Spirit_ will carry the movement a step nearer
towards the idealistic concept of reality. And among the latest signs of
the new tendency must be counted the brilliant work of Emil Lucka, the
young Austrian "poet-philosopher," whose conception of the development
of love must rank with the most daring speculations in recent
psychology.

In the great reaction of the last century, love, that most cogent motive
of human thought and action, fell from its high estate and came to be
regarded as an instinct not differing in any essential from hunger and
thirst, and existing, like them, from the beginning, eternal and
immutable, manifesting itself with equal force in the heart of man and
woman, and impelling them towards each other. But Emil Lucka, in his
remarkable new book, _The Three Stages of Love_ (which was recently
published in Berlin, and has already created a sensation in literary
circles abroad), leads us on to speculative heights from which we may
look back upon the whole theory of evolution not as a bar but as a
bridge. "My book is intended as a monograph of the emotional life of the
human race," he says in the preface, and "I am prepared to meet with
rejection rather than with approval." There has been abundance of