The Fate of Mankind
Chapter 40
Love comes into being
As mankind thus lives in disharmony with the laws of life and so inflicts upon itself great difficulties and sufferings, the faculty of feeling of the individuals is trained and developed.
They achieve a so much wider outlook in the area of the experiences of feeling that it is ultimately not only in the area of coarse feelings and sickness that they are able to feel, but also in areas of nuances of feeling of far finer dimensions.
This refined faculty of feeling manifests itself as sympathy for other beings who are suffering, as the need to help, as the need to be something for others and so on, just as the individual in question begins not to be able to kill animals, begins not to have the heart to do any living being harm, begins to be able to tolerate insult, begins to appreciate Nature and its riches in the form of living beings: people, animals, plants and minerals.
Such a feeling is the beginning of "love" or life's highest energy of pleasure.
The energy of feeling cannot, however, be completely pure love until it has become controlled or supported by a certain amount of the energy of intelligence.
Intelligence, as previously mentioned, is necessary to make the individual become conscious of the details in his experiences and manifestations of feeling, or to realise their real nature.
If the intelligence is not sufficiently developed, the individual can guide his feeling only by means of his instinct or his faculty to sense vaguely.
As this faculty is degenerating, the individual, when he should guide his feeling by means of this, can easily inflict unfortunate accidents on his fellow-beings even though his actions are motivated by exceptional sympathy.
In other words, the individual cannot possibly act correctly as long as his intellectual faculty is not sufficiently developed for him to achieve an intelligent overview of his own behaviour and he can therefore only act in accordance with vague and therefore uncertain motives based on degenerated instinct.
Suffering thus develops feeling, but feeling has therefore to be controlled by a perfect intelligence before it can become really sensible.
If not, the old adage "Love is blind" will apply.
Love without common sense is not love but only uncontrolled and therefore primitive feeling.