Tertium Organum

philosopher's stone
or the 
elixir of life,
or some special 
electricity,
necessary to someone for some mysterious purposes. 
Love, in relation to our life, is a Deity, now stern, now benevolent, but 
never submitting to us, never consenting to serve our aims. Men strive to 
subjugate love to themselves, to force it to serve their aims, both spiritual and 
material. But love cannot be subjugated to anything and it wreaks merciless 
vengeance on the puny mortals who strive to subjugate 
God
to serve their 
own ends. It confuses all their calculations and makes them do what they have 
never expected. It forces them to serve 
it,
to do what 
it
wants. 
Mistaken about the 
origin of 
love, men are mistaken about its 
result.
Both 
positivist and spiritualist morality equally admit only one possible result of 
love - children, the propagation of species. But this objective result, which 
may or may not happen, is in any case only the result of the external, 
objective side of love, of the material fact of impregnation. If one does not see 
in love anything beyond the material fact and the desire for it, this is how it 
should be. But in reality love does not in any way consist of the material fact, 
and results of love, apart from the material, may manifest themselves on quite 
a different plane. This different plane in which love operates, and the ignored, 
hidden results of love are not difficult to understand even from a strictly
positivist, scientific point of view. 
For science, studying life, as if apart from it, the purpose of love consists in 
the continuation of life. To be more exact, 
love 
is a link in the chain of facts 
which maintain the uninterrupted flow of life. And the force which mutually 
attracts the two sexes acts in the interests of the propagation of species and is 
created by the very forms of the propagation of species. But if we regard love 
from this standpoint, we shall have to admit that there is 
more of this force 
than is necessary. 
It is precisely in this that lies the key to the true essence of 
love. There is more of this force than is necessary, infinitely more. In reality,
for the purposes of the propagation of species only a 
small fraction of one per 
cent of
this force of love inherent in humanity is utilized. Where, then, does 
the main part of the force go?
We know that nothing can disappear. If energy 
exists,
it must 
pass 
into 
something. And if only a negligible fraction of energy goes towards the 
creation of the future 
by means of birth, 
the remaining pan must also go
towards the creation of the future, but by other means. We know in the 
physical world many instances when the 
direct
func-

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tion is fulfilled by an extremely small fraction of the energy expended, while 
the greater part of this energy seems to be uselessly wasted. But of course 
this greater part of energy does not disappear, does not vanish, but produces 
other results, quite distinct from the direct function. 
Let us take an ordinary candle. It should give light. But it gives much more 
heat than light. Light is the direct function of the candle, heat is the indirect 
function, but there is more heat than light. A candle is a furnace adapted for 
lighting. In order to give light, the candle must burn. Burning is the necessary
condition for obtaining light from a candle; burning cannot be done away
with. But this same burning produces heat. It seems, at the first glance, that 
the heat, produced by a candle, is wasted unproductively and is at times even 
superfluous, unpleasant and hindering: if a room is lighted by candles it 
becomes too hot. But the fact of the matter is that light is obtained