higher ideals; it creates a new world of emotion with new contents.

Simultaneously with the projection of the love of woman into eternity
were sown the seeds of those great things on which the higher spiritual
life of to-day is based. Deification demands shape and individuality
beyond the earthly sphere, in eternity. But from one side it is love,
love without response (unless the lover finds response in and through
artistic expression), the eroticism of the solitary man, and it occurs
as such to this day in rare minds. Woman-worship is the natural and the
highest form of love for the man who does not seek his own perfection in
duality--a reciprocal relationship with another being--but solitarily,
and yet not, as the mystic, shapelessly, but rather in a love definitely
projected on another being. The dream of the perfect woman is the only
erotic dream which reality can never disappoint, for it makes no claim
on reality. Doubtless it is to some extent paradoxical that the
inherently social feeling, anchored in duality, should be experienced
and perfected solitarily, that it should waive all claim to response
and reciprocity, to all appearances the most important elements of love.

The love-death corresponds more completely to the erotic ideal inasmuch
as it is founded on absolute equality in reciprocity. It finds its
climax not in solitude but in the company of the beloved. The idea of
complete abandonment is revolting to the solitarily loving individual;
the lover whose whole soul turns to the beloved cannot understand the
love of the solitary soul; it appears to him unnatural and cold, perhaps
meaningless and crazy. Woman does not know true solitude, the thought of
deification is foreign to her nature; she attains to the supreme only
with and through man; it is easier to her to give herself to her lover
entirely, and even to follow him into death. But in this connection I am
unable to suppress a doubt as to whether the fundamental emotion of the
mystical world-union is altogether present in woman, whether she really
divines behind her lover--eternity.

While deification is universally creative, while it is fresh as the
spring and full of faith, the love-death with its gloomy pathos demands
the entire individual and destroys everything but itself. It has no
creative power, for there is nothing beyond it. One may justly maintain
that the love-death realises the mystico-ecstatic religious emotion,
while in the deificatio