and hostile--not
according to human values, but according to their inherent nature--and
this is only possible when the individuality of all things is respected.
The method of science has slowly become the perfect weapon by whose aid
Europe has attained the mastery of the world; it rests on the
fundamental feeling for the material, and is capable of confronting the
"I" with the whole system of natural phenomena, the "not-I," and
expresses the final victory of comprehending spirit over matter.

CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF WOMAN

(THE FIRST FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)

_(a) The Love of the Troubadours_

In the long chapter on the Birth of Europe, I have attempted to bring
corroborative evidence from all sides in support of my contention that
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the birth and gradual
development of a new value of the highest importance: the value of
individuality, impersonated by the citizen of Europe. We are now
prepared to realise the psychological importance and the importance for
progress of one of the greatest results of this new development--the
spiritual love of man for woman. From this subject, the specific subject
of my book, I shall not again digress.

We are aware that the man of antiquity (and also the Eastern nations of
to-day) recognised between man and woman only the sexual bond,
uninfluenced by personal and psychological motives, and leading in
Greece to the institution of monogamy on purely economical and political
grounds. In addition to this bond there existed a very distinct
spiritual love, evolved by Plato and his circle and projected by one man
on another member of his own sex. In the true Hellenic spirit this love
aspired to guide the individual to the ideal of perfection, the beauty
and wisdom of the friend serving as stepping-stones in the upward climb.
In Christianity the spiritual love of the divine became the greatest
value and the pivot on which the emotions turned. The primitive
Christian scorned the body, his own as well as that of his fellow; he
despised beauty of form, and regarded only the divine as worthy of love.
Woman was disparaged and suspected; all thinkers, down to Thomas and
Anselm, looking upon her merely as a snare and a pitfall. The period
discussed in detail in the foregoing chapter ushered in a new and, until
then, unknown feeling. In crude and conscious contrast to sexuality,
deprecated alike by classical Greece and primitive Ch