The intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing offspring.

In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature.

As Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion.

The lovers thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal happiness; they were probably deceived.

But they were deceived not because the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more; instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully recognized.[65] It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be, and frequently is, a delusion.