love - growth and evolution

Love is concerned with growth and evolution. 

It is — though as yet hardly acknowledged in that connection

 — a root-factor of ordinary human growth; 

for in so far as it is a hunger of the individual, 

the satisfaction of that hunger is necessary for individual growth

 — necessary (in its various forms) for physical, mental and spiritual nourishment,

 for health, mental energy, large affectional capacity, and so forth. 

And it is — though this too is not sufficiently acknowledged

 — a root-factor of the Evolution process. 

For in so far as it represents and gives rise to the union 

of two beings in a new form, it plainly represents a step in Evolution, 

and plainly suggests that the direction of that step 

will somehow depend upon the character and quality of the love concerned.
...
Love — even rude and rampant and outrageous love

 — does more for the moralizing of poor humanity 

than a hundred thousand Sunday schools.

 It cleans the little human soul from the clustered lies

 in which it has nested itself — from the petty conceits

 and deceits and cowardices and covert meannesses.
...
Self-consciousness is fatal to love. 

The self-conscious lover never ‘arrives.’

 … And so too the whole modern period of commercial civilization 

and Christianity has been fatal to love… They have bred the self-regarding

 consciousness in the highest degree; and so

 — though they may have had their uses 

and their parts to play in the history of mankind, 

they have been fatal to the communal spirit in society, 

and they have been fatal to the glad expression of the soul in private life.

Self-consciousness is fatal to love,

 which is the true expression of the soul.

 

 

~ Edward Carpenter

from Marriage in Free Society

 with thanks to brainpickings

 Carpenter was a poet and writer, he was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and a friend of Walt Whitman.  He corresponded with many famous figures, such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E. D. Morel, William Morris, Edward R. Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner.

 

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