d clairvoyant;
every man feels that he has become greater and more human. This is
neither illusion nor projection, nor is it a subtle, psychical
deception--it is sober reality. Weininger's suspicion of a delusion is
nothing but the result of his ascetic solipsism, refusing to accept
another being's help in his striving for perfection, a consequence of
the one-sided, sterile cult of his individual soul, a noble but puerile
pride refusing to be indebted to the world and to his fellow-men, the
fanatical, metaphysical dualism which is so often met with in the second
stage of eroticism, and to which stage he belongs.

Weininger shrank from the idea that an individual might be made the
means to an end, instead of being an end in itself. In my opinion his
justification for the translation of this formula--framed by Kant for
pure ethics--to empirical psychology, is doubtful. To use an individual
only as a means to an end which is alien to his inmost being, is
certainly immoral. But all social life is based on a mutual relationship
of means and ends; a man is an end in himself at the same time that he
is a means to other individuals and the community. The teacher is a
means as far as his pupils are concerned; the poet is a means in respect
to all who seek in his writings information or recreation. To carry the
stigmatisation of these facts to a logical conclusion, one would have to
call it immoral to accept anything from parents or teachers; one would
have to reject every good influence--which always comes from
outside--and become completely absorbed in the cult of one's own soul.
One would even have to object to being born, and would have to create
one's self out of nothing. It has always been regarded as the splendid
privilege of great men to exert an ennobling influence on others--why,
therefore, should the influence of a beloved woman on her lover be
objectionable?

Weininger's error in the sphere of eroticism arises from the fact of his
imprisoning love in a formula which is by no means applicable to it. In
love the mutual relationship of means and ends does not exist, the lover
feels that the beloved is always an end in herself in the highest sense;
he would find it impossible inwardly to establish such a relationship
between himself and her; very frequently himself, his well-being and his
life, are of no account to him if he can serve her. Weininger's
assertion that at the consummation of love every woman is merely the