nally, I should
like to point out that the perversity and sexual refinement peculiar to
China and Japan are attributable simply to the fact that the limits of
sexuality cannot be overstepped, and that sexuality is therefore
dependent on vice and perversity to satisfy its craving for variety.

The first manifestation of overwhelming personality appears in Jesus,
and he created the religion of love. In him personality and love were
convertible forces, one might even say they were identical. He, first of
all, revealed their mysterious intimate connection, and clearly showed
that love can only be experienced by a distinct personality, because it
is an emanation of the soul and not a natural instinct.

It was, again, personality which, in the twelfth century, produced a new
force: spiritual love projected not only on God and nature, but also on
woman. Now only had personality acquired its true significance; it no
longer meant--as it did in the mature Greek world--the individual
separated from his environment, the individual with a conscious
beginning and a conscious end, but the principle of the synthesis, a
higher entity above the mere individual, the source of all values and
virtue.

Personality is the self-conscious, individual soul, producing out of its
own wealth the universal ideal values, and re-absorbing and assimilating
these ideal values in their higher form. It admits of the fusion of the
subjective with the universal and eternal, with the religious and
artistic, the moral and scientific values of civilisation. "Personality
is the blending of the universal and the individual," said Kierkegaard,
expressing, if not exactly my meaning, something very near it.

I shall endeavour to depict the spiritual love of man for woman--the
position cannot be reversed--from its inception to its climax. I shall
submit abundant evidence to make the great unbroken stream of emotion
clearly apparent, and indicate all its tributaries. I do not pretend
that I have exhausted the subject--that would be impossible. The works
from which I have drawn may be safely regarded as the direct outpouring
of emotion; those purely lyric poets were entirely subjective and ever
intent upon their own feelings; there hardly exists one Provencal,
old-Italian, or mediaeval love-song without the "I."

Spiritual love first appeared as a naive sentiment--unconscious of its
own peculiar characteristics--in the poems of the earlier troubadours of
Provence