The creative personality alone is the father of the objective values of
civilisation.
The great love which led Dante, Goethe and Wagner to the summits of
humanity is in the highest sense positive and creative. And he who
realises that love is not subject to sexual impulse, who knows it as
something purely personal, foreign and even hostile to the genus, must
admit that it is one of the very highest of values. A contrary ethic is
sterile, Indian, unproductive, not European. I am well aware that
Weininger did not explicitly draw this conclusion; but he rejects
spiritual love because it endows the lover with new capacities, the
capacities of growth and perfection, and he is therefore in the last
resort a representative of philosophic nihilism.
_(c) Dante and Goethe_
The worship of woman found its climax in Dante. Through the work of his
youth, the _Vita Nuova_ and his masterpiece, _The Divine Comedy_, we can
trace step by step the stages of the road, beginning with a glimpse of a
young girl in Florence, and ending with the incorporation of a woman
into the world-system.
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