Here the remotest limit has been reached—­sensuousness seems to flow into eternity, voluptuousness would shatter the world to pieces and create a new relationship of things.  Before this poem all ecstasies of sensuousness masquerading as cosmic emotion are dull and timid.  The transcendent symbols of Catholicism are used to guide the insatiable sensuous imagination to metaphysics.  “Who can say that he understands the nature of blood?” Novalis may ask this question.  It is truly blood, human blood, longing to gush forth and pulsate through the body of the universe.

     In time to come all will be body
     One body;
     In celestial blood,
     Float the enraptured twain.

The human blood has become celestial blood; the voluptuousness of man, the voluptuousness of the world, and because the whole world is one body, it needs no duality; sexuality which has become a cosmic law rules over humanity, God, Christ and the universe.  This hymn is the immortalisation of voluptuousness.  If the love-death is the immortalisation of love unable to find satisfaction on earth, so its counterpart, cosmic sensuousness is, in the last sense, orientalism.  Only a genius could invent a new, symbolic language to express feelings so alien to the European.  Earthly sensuality did not satisfy Novalis, voluptuousness detached from man, voluptuousness in itself, was his dream and his religion—­the supremest creation ever achieved by sexuality intensified into a cosmic emotion.

I think that I have now made clear the fact that the emotional life of man is rooted in two elements, completely distinct from the beginning:  the sexual impulse and personal love.  It is in studying the love of the transcendental, that culminating point of so many feelings springing from various sources, that the inherent contrast between the two fundamental principles becomes most apparent; and that we realise why they have always been intermingled both in theory and in reality.

We have last examined the attempt of sexuality to possess itself of the whole universe; we will now turn our attention to the true union of both erotic elements.  This union occurred at the time when Goethe and Novalis were bringing spiritual love and cosmic sensuousness to their highest summit.

THE THIRD STAGE

(The Unity of Sexual Impulse and Love)

CHAPTER I.

THE LONGING FOR THE SYNTHESIS.

Humanity inherited the pairing-instinct from the animal-world; but as differentiation progressed, this instinct tended to restrict itself to a few individuals—­sometimes even to a single representative only—­of the other sex.  In the beginning of the twelfth century a new and unprecedented emotion—­spiritual love of man for woman based on personality—­made its appearance, and until modern times the two fundamental erotic principles existed side by side without inner