. Sexuality with its various manifestations has existed from
the beginning; the ultimate object of sexual intercourse is pleasure;
but here and there, and parallel with sexual pleasure, there have been,
in varying degrees of intensity, instances of spiritual love. In the
second half of the eighteenth century there appeared--timidly at first,
but gradually gaining in strength and determination--a tendency to find
the sole course of every erotic emotion in the personality of the
beloved, a longing no longer to dissociate sexual impulse and spiritual
love, but to blend them in a harmonious whole. Personality should knit
body and soul together in a higher synthesis. The first signs of this
longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find
traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's _Werther_); it was
developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern
love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The
achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous
with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul,
is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. The
characteristic of this third stage of eroticism is the complete triumph
of love over pleasure, the neutralisation of the sexual and the
generative by the spiritual and the personal. The physical and spiritual
unity of the lovers has become so much supreme erotic reality, that the
line of demarcation between soul and senses is completely obliterated.
In extreme cases--which are not at all rare--the bodily union is not
realised as anything distinct, specifically pleasurable; it does not
occupy a prominent position in the complex of love; sensuous pleasure,
the universal inheritance from the animal world, has been vanquished by
personality, the supreme treasure of man. The characteristic of the
first stage was the unquestioned sway of one of the elements of erotic
life, sensual gratification (this stage has, of course, never ceased to
exist), as well as the aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of the human
form. The second stage gave prominence to all those spiritual qualities
which were most appreciated, virtue, purity, kindness, wisdom, etc.,
because love rouses and embraces everything in the human soul which is
perfect. In the third stage, sensuous pleasure and spiritual love no
longer exist as separate elements; the personality of the beloved in its
individua