of the Saviour), with the newer ideal, the Virgin, created the ideal of the late Middle Ages:  the virgin with the Child.  Here the natural vocation of woman and the fantastic mission laid upon her by man were united in a paradoxical higher intuition, and it is superfluous to point out that the most irreligious minds of the Renascence, as well as those of all later eras, have to this day worshipped this ideal, and never wearied of representing it under new forms.

But the worship of the Virginal Mother contains another element, an element of which man in his contact with woman is deeply conscious:  the element of mystery.  To a man a young girl, untouched by the faintest breath of sensuality, has a quality of strangeness and mysteriousness (this is probably a result of European sentiment), and at all times the woman who has become a mother has been regarded with a slight feeling of superstitious awe.  In the Virginal Mother these two vaguely reverential feelings are blended; she is a strange and awe-inspiring being, and man, divining a mystery, bows down before her.

Otto Weininger was the first to give us a psychology of the cult of the Madonna, and he did it in a manner which proved his entire comprehension of this peculiar sentimental disposition.  He realised and pointed out the contrast between sexuality and eroticism (his terms for sexual impulse and love), but in accordance with his extreme mental disposition he left these two principles in irreconcilable conflict, while I regard their antithesis merely in the light of a transient phase which will be followed by a reconciling synthesis.  Weininger is, I believe, in conflict with spiritual reality when (guided by ethical, not psychological considerations) he proposes the theory that a man endows the beloved woman with all the lofty values he desires for himself.  “He projects his ideal of an absolutely perfect being on another human being, and this and nothing else is the meaning of his love.”  “To bestow all the qualities one would like to possess, but never can quite possess, on another individual, to make it the representative of all values, that is to love.”  It is a commonplace experience that genuine love will awaken in the soul new and transcendent emotions, compared to which all previous experience appears petty and insignificant.  The waves of this emotion are able to carry the lover to the infinite, or at least his emotion will help him to divine the infinite.  He sees, unexpectedly, his inmost soul revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him; the egoist becomes less selfish, the cruel man gentle, the dullard clairvoyant; every man feels that he has become greater and more human.  This is neither illusion nor projection, nor is it a subtle, psychical deception—­it is sober reality.  Weininger’s suspicion of a delusion is nothing but the result of his ascetic solipsism, refusing to accept another being’s help in his striving for perfection, a consequence of the one-sided, sterile cult of his individual soul, a noble but puerile pride refusing to be indebted to the world and to his fellow-men, the fanatical, metaphysical dualism which is so often met with in the second stage of eroticism, and to which stage he belongs.