In the
second half of the eighteenth century there appeared--timidly at first,
but gradually gaining in strength and determination--a tendency to find
the sole course of every erotic emotion in the personality of the
beloved, a longing no longer to dissociate sexual impulse and spiritual
love, but to blend them in a harmonious whole. Personality should knit
body and soul together in a higher synthesis. The first signs of this
longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find
traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's _Werther_); it was
developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern
love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The
achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous
with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul,
is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. The
characteristic of this third stage of eroticism is the complete triumph
of love over pleasure, the neutralisation of the sexual and the
generative by the spiritual and the personal.
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