or and sin where she
cannot err, for her instinct is nature herself, and she knows not the
meaning of sin. Whatever burden man has laid upon her, she has borne it
patiently and silently; she has allowed him to worship her as a goddess
and stigmatise her as a fiend, while all the time she remained
problemless and natural, inwardly remote from the aberrations in which
her intellect believed so readily. The conclusion which we have to draw,
and which touches the foundation of the psychology of both sexes, is
that only man's emotions have a history, while those of the woman have
undergone no change.

If there is a law by which the human race is reproduced in the
individual, then the so-called atavism in the shape of abnormality
cannot be the sudden, or apparently sudden reappearance of conditions
which once were normal and then disappeared; rather must it be the final
arrest of an individual on a previous and lower stage, preventing him
from reaching our standard in one or the other emotional sphere. The
more humanity a man has in him, the more perfectly will he repeat in his
life the stages through which the race has passed, or, in other words:
the oftener that which once quickened the heart of man is repeated and
surpassed, the greater is the possibility that new things may grow out
of it. Atavism therefore is not so much the persistence of the earlier
as the absence of the later stages. (This agrees with Freud's conception
of the neurotic subject.)

It is obvious that the three stages of love are merely the expression of
a period in one definite direction. The emotions of antiquity were
entirely earthly, obvious and impersonal; the Middle Ages, on the other
hand, attached value only to the world beyond the grave and matters
pertaining to the soul. The beauty of spring was to them but a reflexion
of another beauty.

"How glorious is life below!
What greater glories may the heavens hold!"

sings Brother John characteristically. But our period is conscious of
the need of realising all our desires, and attaining to the highest
possible spiritual perfection in this earthly life, and this not by
destroying the transcendent ideals, but by stripping them of their
metaphysical character, and bringing them to bear on this life, so that
it may become a higher and holier one. The will of our intellectual
heroes is not the rejection of the doctrine of the survival of the soul,
but the comprehension of past transcendent