My argument proves that the evolution as well as the aberrations of love have affected man alone and, roughly speaking, to this day affect only him.  He is the Odysseus, wandering through heaven and hell, ultimately to return home, perhaps, to where woman, the unchangeable, is awaiting him.  That which has been woman’s natural endowment from all beginning, the blending of spiritual and sensual love, man looks upon and desires to-day as his highest erotic ideal.  His chaotic sexual impulse, the inheritance of the past, appears to him low and base in the presence of her in whom sexuality has always been blended with love; his worship, intensified until it reached the metaphysical, seems to him unfounded and eccentric before her who has ever been and ever will be entirely human, and who is perfect in his eyes because she possesses what he is striving after.  This and nothing else is the meaning of the vague statement that in all matters pertaining to love woman occupies a higher position than man.  She is always the same; he is always new and problematical; never perfect, he falls into error and sin where she cannot err, for her instinct is nature herself, and she knows not the meaning of sin.  Whatever burden man has laid upon her, she has borne it patiently and silently; she has allowed him to worship her as a goddess and stigmatise her as a fiend, while all the time she remained problemless and natural, inwardly remote from the aberrations in which her intellect believed so readily.  The conclusion which we have to draw, and which touches the foundation of the psychology of both sexes, is that only man’s emotions have a history, while those of the woman have undergone no change.

If there is a law by which the human race is reproduced in the individual, then the so-called atavism in the shape of abnormality cannot be the sudden, or apparently sudden reappearance of conditions which once were normal and then disappeared; rather must it be the final arrest of an individual on a previous and lower stage, preventing him from reaching our standard in one or the other emotional sphere.  The more humanity a man has in him, the more perfectly will he repeat in his life the stages through which the race has passed, or, in other words:  the oftener that which once quickened the heart of man is repeated and surpassed, the greater is the possibility that new things may grow out of it.  Atavism therefore is not so much the persistence of the earlier as the absence of the later stages. (This agrees with Freud’s conception of the neurotic subject.)

It is obvious that the three stages of love are merely the expression of a period in one definite direction.  The emotions of antiquity were entirely earthly, obvious and impersonal; the Middle Ages, on the other hand, attached value only to the world beyond the grave and matters pertaining to the soul.  The beauty of spring was to them but a reflexion of another beauty.

     “How glorious is life below! 
     What greater glories may the heavens hold!”