The real cause of love is fourfold: the desire of beauty; our soul's
innate notion of beauty; our soul's affinity with beauty, and our
soul's instinctive sentiment of this affinity.[116] (Therefore as
beauty lies at the root of love, so) ugliness is contrary to nature
and divinity. In fact, when Nature wants to create, she contemplates
what is beautiful, determinate, and comprehended within the
(Pythagorean) "sphere" of the Good. On the contrary, the (Pythagorean)
"indeterminate"[115] is ugly, and belongs to the other system.[117]
Besides, Nature herself owes her origin to the Good, and, therefore,
also to the Beautiful. Now, as soon as one is attracted by an object,
because one is united to it by a secret affinity, he experiences for
the images of this object a sentiment of sympathy. We could not explain
its origin, or assign its cause on any other hypothesis, even were we
to limit ourselves to the consideration of physical love. Even this
kind of love is a desire to procreate beauty,[118] for it would be
absurd to insist that that Nature, which aspires to create beautiful
things, should aspire to procreate that which is ugly.