The supreme value of European civilisation, the value of
complete personality, into whose gradual development and perfecting all
human forces had been built, and in whose interest countless sacrifices
had been made, knows itself as the cause of supreme suffering, as an
element which ought on no account to exist. Not its completion, but its
annihilation is what should really be desired. We have here arrived at
the very confines of humanity. If the great thinker has found the
boundaries of all knowledge in the limitations of the intellect, and is
thus the representative of the human mind with its unattainable goal:
knowledge of the secret of being, the erotic has gone a step further. He
has found the boundary in the very perfection of his personality and, to
him, the barrier is unendurable. In the rare love of the rare
personality is discovered the eternal separateness of the ego; only the
destruction of its origin, the annihilation of itself, might, perhaps,
throw down the barrier which separates the lovers.
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