The extreme individualistic ideal would lead to an absolutely unproductive view of life.  Asceticism stands condemned because it is unproductive.  I may regard an Indian fakir who has become so godlike that he can sustain life on six grains of rice a day, and draw breath once every quarter of an hour—­to say nothing of speech or cleanliness—­as a very strange individual; but I see nothing positive or important in him.  The road which leads from the individual to the universal cannot be the rejection of the world; it must be its perfection, resulting from productivity of mind, or soul, or deed.  He who on principle refuses to be productive, condemns himself to annihilation in the higher sense.  I admit that he who works at his own perfection does good work, too; but it is the inexplicable secret of all truly creative labour—­in the highest as well as in the lowest sense—­that it must ultimately affect the world and eternity.  The strongest emotions, the inner illumination of the mystic and the love of the great erotic, have been conceived in the heart of hearts; and have ultimately grown beyond their creator, from the individual to the universal.  The more intimate and powerful the creative impulse has been, the more retarded and abundant may, perhaps, be the effect.  But the chain which links the great soul to humanity cannot be broken, the work will make itself manifest—­the work of deed, the work of the mind, the work of love—­I do not say to “the public,” but to life, to the world.  The creative personality alone is the father of the objective values of civilisation.

The great love which led Dante, Goethe and Wagner to the summits of humanity is in the highest sense positive and creative.  And he who realises that love is not subject to sexual impulse, who knows it as something purely personal, foreign and even hostile to the genus, must admit that it is one of the very highest of values.  A contrary ethic is sterile, Indian, unproductive, not European.  I am well aware that Weininger did not explicitly draw this conclusion; but he rejects spiritual love because it endows the lover with new capacities, the capacities of growth and perfection, and he is therefore in the last resort a representative of philosophic nihilism.

(c) Dante and Goethe

The worship of woman found its climax in Dante.  Through the work of his youth, the Vita Nuova and his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, we can trace step by step the stages of the road, beginning with a glimpse of a young girl in Florence, and ending with the incorporation of a woman into the world-system.  We are face to face with an extraordinary process of evolution.  The young girl he had seen a few times, and who died in her youth, goes on growing and developing in his soul, until, at last, in him the will to raise woman above time into eternity, the will to make her a member of the divine system, reaches its full realisation.  What had been begun by the troubadours and fully comprehended by the poets of the sweet new style, reached completion in Dante, and, was henceforth an eternal value for all humanity.