and cannot exist independently.  A man’s spiritual annihilation from the emotional sphere is unthinkable because his organisation is naturally heterogeneous.  The mere sexualist represents a past stage of male eroticism which has been largely overcome, but he is rarely so completely under the spell of sexuality that he cannot highly develop other parts of his entity.  The double morality has, therefore, an objective reason (though perhaps not a higher justification), and would only be unjustifiable if man had achieved a complete erotic unity.

The more complicated life becomes, the more numerous and complex are the relations between individuals and groups.  A man is a member of a trades union; he has political, artistic, sporting and social relations; he may be a collector or interested in certain social phenomena, etc.  In modern civilisation every component part of the human personality is separated from the entire personality and brought into a systematic connection with similar component parts of other entities.  Our social principle is division of labour, not only in the community but also in the individual.  With one man one can talk only philosophy, with another music, with a third personal matters, and so on.  But because in this way only one part of man, and never the whole being, can be satisfied at a time, the desire to expend one’s whole personality in one great achievement, or in connection with another individual, is increasing exactly in proportion as specialisation is increasing in the community and in the individual.  The more richly endowed and synthetic a man, the more inappeasable will be his yearning to find the talents scattered broadcast over humanity combined in one personality, and to give himself wholly and entirely to that personality.  The splitting up of man caused by our social conditions is one of the principal causes of the longing for the great and strong love which we hear so much discussed.  The yearning for the absolute, for perfection, no longer separating and selecting but embracing man as a whole, annihilating body and soul in a higher intuition, the longing for mutual self-surrender, for giving and receiving an undivided self, is growing stronger and stronger.  The idea of modern love, a love embracing the whole breadth of human development, is unequalled in human history.  A single person shall stand for all mankind.  The lover has always been all the world to woman, but man has possessed many things in addition to the beloved.  Our age claims (wherever it understands its own eroticism) that woman, on her part, shall give to man all things in existence in a higher and purer form; not only complete satisfaction of the senses, not only the lofty emotion of spiritual love, but also friendship as a fellow-man; she shall be to him the friend who meant so much to the Greek and the ancient Teuton.  It is self-evident that the true erotic of our time has very little to spare for friendship, while on the