I will not elaborate the growth of this
love and the new feelings which arise in connection with it; just as in
the remote past the sense of personality was born as the centre of a new
consciousness, so the individual now undergoes a period of purification
and regeneration; through the love for his mistress he discovers his
inmost self, of which, until now, he had been practically ignorant. The
generative, undifferentiated impulse is supplanted by the love for an
individual and stigmatised as base and contemptible. Guincelli's words
characterising the second erotic stage of the race: _Amor e cor gentil
sono una cosa_, to-day apply to the second stage in the life of the
individual. It also occurs that in the heart of a man whom reality has
failed to satisfy an ideal woman gradually wins life and shape.
Sometimes it is the idealised counterpart of an actual woman, but not
infrequently it is a vague, unsubstantial shadow. Here we have the
deification of the woman reproduced in the heart of the individual.
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