It may seem extraordinary, but this absolutely unphilosophical, and really paradoxical emotion, found an appreciator in the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, the enemy of Christianity.  In his Essence of Christianity, as well as in his treatise On the Cult of Mary, he refers to it more than once.  “The holy Virgin,” he says, “the Mother of God, is the only divine and positive, that is to say, the only lovable and poetical figure of Christian mythology, and the only one worthy of worship; for Mary is the goddess of beauty, the goddess of love, the goddess of humanity, the goddess of nature, the goddess of freedom from dogma.”  Feuerbach is right.  The Lady of Heaven stands for the delivery from dogma, because she had her origin in spontaneous emotion, clothed with but a few rags of dogma.  “The monks vowed the vow of chastity,” he continues in his great work; “they suppressed the sexual impulse, but in exchange they had the personification of womanhood, of love, in the Virgin in Heaven.  The more their ideal, fictitious representative of her sex became an object of spontaneous love, the more easily could they dispense with the women of flesh and blood.  The more they emphasised in their lives the complete suppression of sexuality, the more prominent became the part which the Virgin played in their emotions; she usurped in many cases, the place of Christ, and even the place of God.”  Feuerbach then explains the need of man to project his noblest sentiments on Heaven, and lays much stress on the necessity of believing in the Mother of God, because the love of a child for its mother is the first strong feeling of man.  “Where the faith in the Mother of God declines, the faith in the Son of God, and in God the Father, declines also.”

I will now leave the region of the historical and examine the emotion whose reality and influence I have substantiated, from a timeless standpoint, for my principal point is the psychical, and more particularly the metaphysical consummation of the emotion of love.  The sole object of the abundant evidence I have been compelled to adduce is my desire to prove the existence and significance of all the emotions which stir the soul, and in the later Middle Ages strove so powerfully to express themselves.  My thesis that sexuality and love are opposed principles will no doubt be rejected, for, under the strong influence of the theory of evolution, all the world is to-day agreed that love is nothing but the refinement of the sexual impulse.  I maintain that (as far as man is concerned) they differ very essentially, and I have attempted to prove their incommensurability by submitting historical facts.  That they may, and will, ultimately merge, is my unalterable conviction.  My assertion that something so fundamental as the personal love of man and woman did not exist from the beginning, but came into existence in the course of history, at a not very remote period, may seem even more strange.  My only reply is that instead of advancing opinions