The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his conviction that, even from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing in the world, is far from standing alone.

"Love has always appeared as an inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde, the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life.

"But will it always be thus?
Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular order ?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his own _Mecanique Celeste_, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love.
One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of loving, nor of saying so.

In the worst tortures of affection I have never ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain." And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can no one love me?
I could give more than most women, and yet the most insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say, is the one thing that is supremely worth while.

The greatest and most brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The Imitation of Christ_ or _The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_.