It is this which makes a lover desire to keep his beloved at a distance--on no account to injure her purity by contact with him--in order to assure himself of her and of his own existence. Many an inflexible empiricist, coming under the influence of love, becomes an enthusiastic mystic; the most striking example being Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, whose whole theories were revolutionised by his feelings for Clotilde de Vaux.
It is not only for the artist, but for the whole of mankind that _Amo, ergo sum_ holds good psychologically.
Love is a phenomenon of projection just as hate is, not a phenomenon of equation as friendship is. The latter presupposes an equality of both individuals: love always implies inequality, disproportion. To endow an individual with all that one might be and yet never can be, to make her ideal--that is love. Beauty is the symbol of this act of worship. It is this that so often surprises and angers a lover when he is convinced that beauty does not imply morality in a woman. He feels that the nature of the offence is increased by “such depravity” being possible in conjunction with such “beauty.” He is not aware that the woman in question seems beautiful to him because he still loves her; otherwise the incongruity between the external and internal would no longer pain him.
The reason an ordinary prostitute can never seem beautiful is because it is naturally impossible to endow her with the projection of value; she can satisfy only the taste of vulgar minds. She is the mate of the worst sort of men. In this we have the explanation of a relation utterly opposed to morality: woman in general is simply indifferent to ethics, she is non-moral, and, therefore, unlike the anti-moral criminal, who is instinctively disliked, or the devil who is hideous in every one’s imagination, serves as a receptacle for projected worthiness; as she neither does good nor evil, she neither resists nor resents this imposition of the ideal on her personality. It is patent that woman’s morality is acquired; but this morality is man’s, which he in an access of supreme love and devotion has conveyed to her.
Since all beauty is always only the constantly renewed endeavour to embody the highest form of value, there is a pre-eminently satisfying element in it, in the face of which all desire, all self-seeking fade away.