relationship.  Sexuality with its various manifestations has existed from the beginning; the ultimate object of sexual intercourse is pleasure; but here and there, and parallel with sexual pleasure, there have been, in varying degrees of intensity, instances of spiritual love.  In the second half of the eighteenth century there appeared—­timidly at first, but gradually gaining in strength and determination—­a tendency to find the sole course of every erotic emotion in the personality of the beloved, a longing no longer to dissociate sexual impulse and spiritual love, but to blend them in a harmonious whole.  Personality should knit body and soul together in a higher synthesis.  The first signs of this longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe’s Werther); it was developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities.  The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism.  The characteristic of this third stage of eroticism is the complete triumph of love over pleasure, the neutralisation of the sexual and the generative by the spiritual and the personal.  The physical and spiritual unity of the lovers has become so much supreme erotic reality, that the line of demarcation between soul and senses is completely obliterated.  In extreme cases—­which are not at all rare—­the bodily union is not realised as anything distinct, specifically pleasurable; it does not occupy a prominent position in the complex of love; sensuous pleasure, the universal inheritance from the animal world, has been vanquished by personality, the supreme treasure of man.  The characteristic of the first stage was the unquestioned sway of one of the elements of erotic life, sensual gratification (this stage has, of course, never ceased to exist), as well as the aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of the human form.  The second stage gave prominence to all those spiritual qualities which were most appreciated, virtue, purity, kindness, wisdom, etc., because love rouses and embraces everything in the human soul which is perfect.  In the third stage, sensuous pleasure and spiritual love no longer exist as separate elements; the personality of the beloved in its individuality is the only essential, regardless as to whether she be the bringer of weal or woe, whether she be good or evil, beautiful or plain, wise or foolish.  Personality has—­in principle—­become the sole, supreme source of eroticism.  In this stage there is no tyranny of man over woman—­as in the sexual stage—­no submission of man to woman—­as in the stage of woman-worship; it is the stage of the complete equality of the sexes, a mutual giving and taking.  If sexuality is infinite as matter, spiritual love eternal as the metaphysical ideal, the synthesis is human and personal.