In that sense the Gospel of Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare (in the _Tempest_) and of Calderon (in _La Vida es Sueno_), who felt that ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream.

But short of that large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other cravings and aspirations escape.

On the contrary, it is the most solid of realities.

All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex.

If we admit the action of sexual selection--as we can scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential accretions[67]--love has moulded the precise shape and color, the essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.
If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure--our social feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art--are, in some degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex, and would have been, if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion.