=Love's Stimulation=, reaching us, as we shall see in another chapter, thru all the senses and thru a thousand memories, is incomparably more powerful than that of any other craving.
Nutritious food in sufficient quantities is generally synonymous with good health. Improper food in insufficient quantities is generally synonymous with bad health.
The mental connotation of good and bad food, however, is far from being as important as the mental connotation of love or lack of love. There are besides the sexual factors, such tremendous egotistical factors in the love life (as will be shown in Chapter VIII,) that love is the most powerful stimulus known and the lack of love or the loss of love the most terrible depressant for the human organism.
=The Successful Lover= has a good appetite, regular heart action, (hence a healthy complexion); he enjoys sleep undisturbed by nightmares, is capable of continued effort (good thyroid action), has firm muscles (regular adrenal section), is self-reliant, etc. In other words his organism is working on a hundred-per-cent basis and under the influence of that stimulation he can accomplish tasks which, under any other circumstances, would appear too difficult, and understand things which under the influence of a sluggish thyroid or bowels would have appeared very obscure.
People indifferent to physiology might attribute some of love's magic results to "inspiration," to "spiritual uplift" and other vaguely conceived factors of a romantic and sentimental nature.
I am always reminded when encountering such explanations in the literature of love, of the nuptial flight of the bee.
When a male and female bee fall in love, they both fly to a dizzy height in the direction of the sun and there perform the sexual union. To an unscientific mind of the Maeterlinckian type, there might be in that picture a beautiful symbol of love's exaltation.
The cold blooded scientist, on the other hand, will simply tell us that erotic excitement in the bee produces a large amount of irritating phototropic materials which compel the bees to fly toward the source of light.
At the end of the sexual act, the production of phototropic materials ceases and the bees come back to earth .... like lovers tired of each other.