ABSTRACT
At the outset we must formulate some conception of what love is. Many people, if they think of love at all in its elemental naked form, regard it as a dangerous and destructive force from which the young must be shielded as long as possible. Others regard it as a sort of disease for which marriage or sexual relationships outside marriage are a palliative, if not a cure. Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman, and many others, held to be inspired, offer a different conception. According to their teaching, love is the cosmic creative fire from which all life and forms have been generated, whether it be the life and forms of solar systems, or the life and forms of human beings, or the life and forms of flowers, or the life and forms of the smallest creatures and atoms in existence.
