Conjugial Love (Chadwick) n. 110

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110. Then he took the seventh paper and read out from it as follows.

'We, the representatives in the room under the light of our window, have been much cheered in thinking and passing our judgments by meditating on conjugial love. Surely everyone is cheered by it; for when we have that love in our minds, it pervades at the same time the whole of our bodies. Our judgment is that the source of this love is from its pleasures. Does anyone know or has anyone ever known a trace of any love except from the pleasure and gratification it gives? The pleasures of conjugial love are experienced in its beginnings as blessedness, bliss and happiness; and as it progresses as loveliness and gratifications, and at the lowest level as the supreme delight. So sexual love arises as the interior of the mind, and so the interior of the body, is opened up, as those pleasures flood in. But conjugial love then arose when the earliest sphere of that love conceptually advanced those pleasures by starting formal engagements.

'As regards the strength or potency of that love, this is the product of that love's ability to penetrate, carrying its influence from the mind into the body. For the mind, when feeling and acting, leaves the head for the body, and especially when experiencing the delights of that love. We judge that to be the source of the degrees of potency and the regularity of its alternations. In addition, we think the strength of potency depends on breeding. If that is exceptional in the father, it is equally so in the offspring who inherit it. Reason combined with experience demands that it is inheritance which produces, passes on and transmits such excellence.' This paper was signed with the letter F.


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