lity is the only essential, regardless as to whether she be the
bringer of weal or woe, whether she be good or evil, beautiful or plain,
wise or foolish. Personality has--in principle--become the sole, supreme
source of eroticism. In this stage there is no tyranny of man over
woman--as in the sexual stage--no submission of man to woman--as in the
stage of woman-worship; it is the stage of the complete equality of the
sexes, a mutual giving and taking. If sexuality is infinite as matter,
spiritual love eternal as the metaphysical ideal, the synthesis is human
and personal.

Before the eighteenth century, this new erotic union did not exist as a
phenomenon of civilisation, but occasionally we find it anticipated or
vaguely alluded to. Some of the early German minnesingers (such as
Dietmar von Aist and Kuernberg) sometimes betray, especially when
speaking through the medium of a woman, sentiments prophetic of our
modern sentimental ballads. The following verses by Albrecht of
Johansdorf, express the reciprocity characteristic of modern love:

When two hearts are so united
That their love can never wane,
Then I ween no man should blight it,
Death alone should part the twain.

Even more modern in sentiment are the following stanzas:

This is love's measure:
Two hearts and one pleasure,
Two loves one love, nor more nor less,
And both right full of happiness.
In woe one woe,
And neither from the other go.

Though Walter von der Vogelweide adopted the contemporaneous conception
of love as the source of everything good and noble ("Tell me what is
Love?") he never quite accepted it:

Love is the ecstasy of two fond hearts,
If both share equally, then love is there.

More ancient evidence even is the definition of marriage by the
scholastic Hugo of St. Victor, who had leanings towards mysticism:
"Marriage is the friendship between man and woman," he says.

My knowledge of the subject cannot, of course, be unexceptional, but I
do not believe that personal love of the third stage, that is, the
blending of both erotic elements, was quite definitely expressed before
the second half of the eighteenth century. We may be justified in
maintaining that the tension between sexuality and spiritual love had
been slackening in the course of the centuries, that sexuality was
conceived as less diabolical, and love as less celestial than
heretofore; but the principle had rem