to the first proposition)?  Metaphysical eroticism is the completion of personality in love.  Simultaneously with the birth of personality originated the deification of woman; the destruction of the most highly evolved personality, the last painful consequence of its blessed-unblessed nature, gives birth to the conception of the love-death.  Like antique torch-bearing genii the two metaphysical forms of love stand at the head and the feet of self-conscious man.  Here and there erotic emotion, transcending all limitations, becomes the pathway leading to the ultimate secrets of life:  deification creates a supernatural female being as the erotic representative of everything divine.  This is a productive act, erotic, artistic and religious at the same time.  It produces out of its own fulness new forces for the service of higher ideals; it creates a new world of emotion with new contents.

Simultaneously with the projection of the love of woman into eternity were sown the seeds of those great things on which the higher spiritual life of to-day is based.  Deification demands shape and individuality beyond the earthly sphere, in eternity.  But from one side it is love, love without response (unless the lover finds response in and through artistic expression), the eroticism of the solitary man, and it occurs as such to this day in rare minds.  Woman-worship is the natural and the highest form of love for the man who does not seek his own perfection in duality—­a reciprocal relationship with another being—­but solitarily, and yet not, as the mystic, shapelessly, but rather in a love definitely projected on another being.  The dream of the perfect woman is the only erotic dream which reality can never disappoint, for it makes no claim on reality.  Doubtless it is to some extent paradoxical that the inherently social feeling, anchored in duality, should be experienced and perfected solitarily, that it should waive all claim to response and reciprocity, to all appearances the most important elements of love.

The love-death corresponds more completely to the erotic ideal inasmuch as it is founded on absolute equality in reciprocity.  It finds its climax not in solitude but in the company of the beloved.  The idea of complete abandonment is revolting to the solitarily loving individual; the lover whose whole soul turns to the beloved cannot understand the love of the solitary soul; it appears to him unnatural and cold, perhaps meaningless and crazy.  Woman does not know true solitude, the thought of deification is foreign to her nature; she attains to the supreme only with and through man; it is easier to her to give herself to her lover entirely, and even to follow him into death.  But in this connection I am unable to suppress a doubt as to whether the fundamental emotion of the mystical world-union is altogether present in woman, whether she really divines behind her lover—­eternity.