Donnay, in his play _L'Escalade_, makes a cold and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love himself.

He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred.

Ah! to think that a thing so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy merely because it is the body of one particular woman--what insanity! And yet that is what I feel."[64] That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.
That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer.

When a youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the ecstacy of love they imagine that they are seeking their own happiness.

But it is not so, said Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race.