feeling, his soul yearns
for the consummation of his love--and already he has reached the
confines of life.

There are various paths by which the erotic may travel towards
perfection; they correspond to the principal erotic types. I have
devoted a special chapter to the seeker of love, or the Don Juan; the
woman-worshipper who cannot find satisfaction on earth has been dealt
with already. The great and rare lover, however, the exponent of the
final form of love, who loves a woman of flesh and blood with every
fibre of his being, differs very essentially from either of these types.
The profounder the emotional depth of the soul, the greater is the
difficulty of finding a complementary being. The erotically
undifferentiated nature (whose intellectual level may, however, be a
high one) finds, and in case of loss replaces, the complementary being
comparatively easily. The difficulty both of finding and of substitution
increases in proportion to the differentiation and the intensity of
feeling. The true erotic, once he has found his complementary being, is
overwhelmed by the will to the perfect realisation of his passion. It
appears with the unanswerable logic of the unique and final, carrying in
its train supreme happiness and infinite sorrow. A love able to deliver
a soul from its solitude is rare; once there, the whole world is as
nothing to it. All life is embraced and brought under its spell. (In
this connection I need only mention Michelangelo.) A lover of this type
surrenders himself to love unconditionally--love shall completely
annihilate, completely renew him.

But it is just in this overwhelming love that the impassable barrier
becomes apparent. The lovers are two beings and not one indivisible
entity. The fundamental fact of individuality stands between them as the
last obstacle to their complete union. The more intense the emotion, the
more desperately it tilts against this barrier, against the
impossibility of complete mutual absorption, and the more passionately
it demands another common form of existence. Individuality and the
eternal duality of being is felt as a curse. The lovers cannot endure
the thought of continuing life as distinct personalities.

The great erotic who, against all expectation, finds the being to whom
he can surrender himself unreservedly and with a sense of immortality,
discovers within himself the supreme and only happiness, and by that
very fact has himself become the source of his