too little distracted feel this truth bitterly and, in the decline of age, they seek in religion some shadow of that God who seems to have withdrawn from them along with their cherished passion; they exist only in the hope of another life where they may be reborn to the happiness of loving. Such is also God's opinion; he believes that man is an incomplete being without love; and so he has taken countless precautions to ensure for the elderly of both sexes the illusions and amorous diversions of the order of Harmony whose theory you are about to read.
Our civilized elderly manage to forget love, but they do not replace it; the pleasures of ambition and paternity are often for them nothing but a path of thorns; every sexagenarian exalts and mourns the pleasures he tasted in his prime. No young man would wish to exchange his loves for the diversions of old age. It is therefore love that holds the first rank among the passions; it is their King of opinion, their ideal hearth. It is in love more than in any other passion that one must seek the trace of the divine spirit, the pledge of interpretation of God's designs.
And yet it is the most proscribed passion in civilized customs; no other development is permitted to it than what is called marriage, whose faults [translator's note: text appears corrupted or illegible here in the original] need we say more to sense that civilization is the antipode of God's designs, and that God's social code, or code of passional harmony, will be [text incomplete]. And how could this shameless civilization not have proscribed love, this civilization that has come, after so many centuries of study, to proscribe God himself, to deny him in its metaphysical subtleties and its dictionaries of atheists? We shall follow a very different path, and it is principally in love and its developments that the theory of attraction will be applied to determine the passional mechanism willed by God.
The ways of love and religion.
I have fulfilled the preliminary task, the determination of an index to guide us through the labyrinth of the passions. I have signaled a rallying beacon toward the divine essence. Rigorists who proscribe love, philosophers who ridicule the religious spirit, do not read this treatise on attraction, or