If it can be established that the fundamental emotions of the human heart originated in historical time, the widely spread, but unproved, theory that everything great and decisive existed from the beginning will be contradicted.  The other complementary assertion that nothing which once existed ever quite disappears, must be admitted; nothing perishes in the soul of man; its position with regard to the whole is merely shifted by newly intervening motives and values; and even when it does not change its fundamental character, it becomes a different thing in the whole complex of the soul.  Sexuality, which in the remote past was a matter of course, unassailable by doubt, became problematical and demoniacal as soon as it entered into relationship with the new factors of erotic life.  An existence in harmony with nature was possible as long as the human race was still in evolution, and not yet conscious of itself.  But as soon as intellect and self-consciousness had been evolved, civilisation became possible.  Nature has no history in the sense of the origin of values; in the case of still uncivilised tribes every new generation is a faithful reproduction of the preceding one.  Certainly there is modification caused by adaptation to the environment, but there are no moral values, and consequently there is no history.

I have attempted to explain why tragedy is inseparable from love in its highest intensity, to show the limits which check all deep emotion and the yearning which would overstep them.  The emotional life of man, which is capable of infinite evolution, can only find satisfaction on its lower, animal stages.  Hunger, thirst, and sexual craving can be satisfied without much difficulty, and therefore no tragic shadow falls on the first stage.  But the emotion which overwhelms the soul cannot be appeased.  Not only the great thinker’s thirst for knowledge, the mystic’s religious yearning, the aesthetic will of the rare artist, but also the love and longing of the passionate lover must reach beyond the attainable to the infinite.  This earth is the kingdom of “mean” actions, “mean” emotions and “mean” men.  And the lover, unable to bear its limits, creates for himself a new world—­the world of metaphysical love.