But what is the reason why women cannot resist him?  Let us first settle the point as to why women are attracted to men.  I will answer this question briefly, and though my answer may appear dogmatical, it need not therefore be wrong.  Women know very little of man, but there is one thing they feel with unfailing certainty, and that is whether their sex is of great or of small significance to him. (I am only alluding to the general effect of men on women, not to genuine personal love which is always incommensurable.) The greater the importance a man attaches to women, the more readily do they respond to his influence.  They are attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual or physical qualities.  Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much, everything.  It is as if they were compelled to throw themselves into the chasm of his vacuity—­every fresh victim with the fond hope of filling it—­but all of them perish.  And yet, at the moment of their defeat they are supremely happy, for they experience the full intensity of his passion and the boundlessness of his longing.  The erotic craving of a man simply means that women are to him the most important thing in life.  Women instinctively yield to that man who most eagerly desires them.  The coarse sensualist, to whom all women are alike, attracts sensual women, not exactly because they find in him the satisfaction of their craving, but because they themselves act on him indiscriminately.  But a woman will adapt herself with the greatest ease to the needs of the differentiated erotic (for instance, she will become really sentimental to please the man who prefers sentimental women), for she loves to give herself to the man who most desires her and as he desires her.

Don Juan, animated by illimitable erotic yearning, is therefore the undisputed master of the other sex.  He has the power of bestowing absolute happiness, even if only for a brief hour, because in his boundless love (which is projected on anything but her) a woman receives the supreme value.  Maybe he would be saved if a woman denied herself to him—­maybe he would cease to be a seeker of love and become a worshipper, for he could not refuse to believe in the woman who rejected him; but it is his fate that no woman he woos can resist him, that all throw themselves into his arms without an exception and without a struggle.

Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes sexuality—­his portion—­and yearns for a higher form of love.  He shares this attitude with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover.  The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere.  What the psychopathist since Kraft-Ebbing designates as masochism, is the pathological degeneration of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid.  Certainly