While deification is universally creative, while it is fresh as the spring and full of faith, the love-death with its gloomy pathos demands the entire individual and destroys everything but itself.  It has no creative power, for there is nothing beyond it.  One may justly maintain that the love-death realises the mystico-ecstatic religious emotion, while in the deification of woman the religious need to worship finds satisfaction.  Both are combinations of love and religion, both are metaphysical eroticism, paradoxical and yet logical conclusions of human emotion.

The overwhelming longing which is connected at least with the first stages of a great love, may be interpreted in another, in a social sense.  Love is the intensest and most direct relationship which can exist between two beings, and the impossibility of realising its final longing represents the most genuine tragedy of life among men and women of the social world.  The need which impels two beings to each other lacks, in this union too, the possibility of complete consummation.  And if the most powerful of all social emotions (and as many believe the root of all others) suffers from an inner duality, to how much greater an extent must the less intense feelings which unite individuals share the same lot!  Humanity, wherever it is comprehended profoundly and spiritually, not economically, carries within itself the germ of its tragical imperfection.  Whatever social relationship we may enter, we find that it has a flaw, and the more genuine and profound the relationship, the less dictated by utilitarian considerations (which in this connection correspond to the element of sensuality in eroticism), the more painfully does this flaw make itself felt,—­whether it be in friendship, in the relationship of master and man, or in free companionship.  Every relationship between individuals is stricken with the curse of incompleteness—­even love cannot escape this fate.  Love enforces in the deification of woman a transcending of earthly life—­and it throws itself into the last embrace of a common death—­that is to say, it shudderingly admits the impossibility of its consummation.

CHAPTER III

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND LOVE

The Seeker of Love and The Slave of Love

It is obvious that even an equilibrium between sexuality and love cannot always be established, while a genuine and complete unification is very unusual and may, perhaps, be called utopian.  In the previous chapters I have dealt with the blending of both elements in the highest form of eroticism; in the following I will attempt to throw light on some of the principal phenomena resulting from a defective union of sexuality and love, phenomena which I am convinced have never been correctly interpreted.  I allude to perversions which are not inherently pathological, although they are as a rule only observed and described in their pathological form.