father of the objective values of
civilisation.

The great love which led Dante, Goethe and Wagner to the summits of
humanity is in the highest sense positive and creative. And he who
realises that love is not subject to sexual impulse, who knows it as
something purely personal, foreign and even hostile to the genus, must
admit that it is one of the very highest of values. A contrary ethic is
sterile, Indian, unproductive, not European. I am well aware that
Weininger did not explicitly draw this conclusion; but he rejects
spiritual love because it endows the lover with new capacities, the
capacities of growth and perfection, and he is therefore in the last
resort a representative of philosophic nihilism.

_(c) Dante and Goethe_

The worship of woman found its climax in Dante. Through the work of his
youth, the _Vita Nuova_ and his masterpiece, _The Divine Comedy_, we can
trace step by step the stages of the road, beginning with a glimpse of a
young girl in Florence, and ending with the incorporation of a woman
into the world-system. We are face to face with an extraordinary process
of evolution. The young girl he had seen a few times, and who died in
her youth, goes on growing and developing in his soul, until, at last,
in him the will to raise woman above time into eternity, the will to
make her a member of the divine system, reaches its full realisation.
What had been begun by the troubadours and fully comprehended by the
poets of the _sweet new style_, reached completion in Dante, and, was
henceforth an eternal value for all humanity.

We see that the later troubadours were inclined to blend the lady of
their heart with the universal Lady of Heaven; the need of deifying the
loved woman was at the root of many dubious growths, and possibly these
early poets were also to some extent influenced by their dread of the
Inquisition (which never gained much importance in Italy). The new poets
deepened this feeling, stripped it of all externalities, and appeared
before the adored simply as lovers. They did not require the dogmatic
support of the Church, their own feeling was sufficient guarantee.
Dante, moreover, was possessed by a craving for an absolutely perfect
and consistent world-system, and had, besides, the power to build it up
and people it with sublime intelligences. And in this system, the crown
and perfection of the mediaeval-Catholic conception of the universe, he
assigned to the love of his youth a high an