In personal love sensuality and soul are no longer
independent, contrasted principles; personality, taking the spiritual as
its foundation, includes the sensuous. In this highest stage all
eroticism not hallowed by mutual affection is felt as unpardonable. The
purely sexual principle continues to exist, but whenever it appears in
its impersonal and brutal crudity as an element hostile to personality,
it creates the consciousness of the obscene. The obscene is, therefore,
the purely sexual, not in its naive normality, but as a force inimical
to a value, as a rule to the value of personality. The obscene expresses
scorn and hatred for personal love. It is the seduction of the primitive
which is no longer something _earlier_, but something baser (for every
age must gauge all things by its own standard). The aesthetic
principle--in this connection the sense of the beauty of the human
form--so powerful an element in naive sensuality as well as in every
other form of eroticism, is excluded, because in this particular
condition the beauty of the human body is not objectively realised, but
is looked upon with the eyes of the senses.
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