The psychologists of the present day tell us that a feeling, in
becoming spiritualised, loses strength,--history teaches us that in the
case of great souls the opposite is the rule.
These suggestions purpose to explain the inception of an ecstatic love;
but the true metaphysical erotic is born and needs no outside stimulus;
his heart yearns for the inaccessible from the very beginning. There are
certain elements of feeling which must be present in his soul
simultaneously: a religious elementary feeling tending to the
metaphysical; the need of a sacred--a divine--being, as the foundation
of all existing things; a powerful and purely spiritual craving for
love, hurt, perhaps unconsciously, in early youth, and finally an
imagination endowed with plastic force--artistic tendencies. In the case
of the mystic the soul, too, is filled with the consciousness of the
divine; he, too, has the capacity for a great love, but with him it is
not the love of woman, but of something universal, not individualised,
the world, the cosmos, God.
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