ABSTRACT
Personal love is the value complementary to personality, a communication to it of its own meaning. It provides what a personality cannot acquire for itself, a mirror which it cannot itself hold before itself. Since empirical personality never strictly corresponds to its own ideal value, but love looks exclusively to the latter, it inheres in the essence of personal love, to pierce through the empirical person to his ideal value. Distributed among several, love loses its personal character and approximates the more to superficial sympathy existing among members of the same class. The narrower moral value of love, its virtue, is distinct from the objective value of its real life. Love is the absolutely positive disposition as such; it is absolute affirmation, goodwill, devotion, constructive tendency, just as hate is denial, overthrow, annihilation. Love that is personal is the same affirmation in regard to personality.
