at the most irreligious minds of the
Renascence, as well as those of all later eras, have to this day
worshipped this ideal, and never wearied of representing it under new
forms.

But the worship of the Virginal Mother contains another element, an
element of which man in his contact with woman is deeply conscious: the
element of mystery. To a man a young girl, untouched by the faintest
breath of sensuality, has a quality of strangeness and mysteriousness
(this is probably a result of European sentiment), and at all times the
woman who has become a mother has been regarded with a slight feeling of
superstitious awe. In the Virginal Mother these two vaguely reverential
feelings are blended; she is a strange and awe-inspiring being, and man,
divining a mystery, bows down before her.

Otto Weininger was the first to give us a psychology of the cult of the
Madonna, and he did it in a manner which proved his entire comprehension
of this peculiar sentimental disposition. He realised and pointed out
the contrast between sexuality and eroticism (his terms for sexual
impulse and love), but in accordance with his extreme mental disposition
he left these two principles in irreconcilable conflict, while I regard
their antithesis merely in the light of a transient phase which will be
followed by a reconciling synthesis. Weininger is, I believe, in
conflict with spiritual reality when (guided by ethical, not
psychological considerations) he proposes the theory that a man endows
the beloved woman with all the lofty values he desires for himself. "He
projects his ideal of an absolutely perfect being on another human
being, and this and nothing else is the meaning of his love." "To bestow
all the qualities one would like to possess, but never can quite
possess, on another individual, to make it the representative of all
values, that is to love." It is a commonplace experience that genuine
love will awaken in the soul new and transcendent emotions, compared to
which all previous experience appears petty and insignificant. The waves
of this emotion are able to carry the lover to the infinite, or at least
his emotion will help him to divine the infinite. He sees, unexpectedly,
his inmost soul revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which
he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him
and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him; the egoist
becomes less selfish, the cruel man gentle, the dullar