lf-heartedly. Luther's vacillating attitude towards sexuality is
typical of this indecision. At heart he could not justify sexuality; he
regarded it, in the same way as did the Fathers of the Church, as an
evil with which one had to make terms. His sanction of marriage was
nothing but a crooked and ill-founded compromise; and as he remained at
the old dualistic standpoint, it could not have been otherwise. But the
moment the new sensuous-supersensuous form of love had come into
existence, it behoved Christianity, as the religion of personality, to
acknowledge it.

After this digression I return to the period of the inception of the
third stage of love. If I were writing a history of eroticism, I should
now have to describe the rococo period, a period essentially
rationalistic and devoted to pleasure, a period which believed in
nothing but the obvious and understood love only in the sense of sensual
pleasure. If sensuality had hitherto been evil--at least
theoretically--it now became obscene. Stripped of every grand and cosmic
feature, it degenerated into the principal form of amusement. The
eighteenth century, though instructive and interesting to the student of
eroticism, produced nothing new. Under the undisputed sway of France, a
period of sensuality set in, unparalleled by any other epoch in the
history of the race, except, perhaps, the early oriental epoch; even the
gynecocratic family of remote antiquity was openly revived by the ladies
of Paris. Casanova was the sexual hero of the age (as he is to some
extent the hero of our present impotent epoch). Indefatigable in the
pursuit of woman and successful until old age, he was a well-bred
sexualist without subtlety or depth. The Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of
Choderlos de Laclos' famous and realistic novel _Les Liaisons
Dangereuses_, an absolutely cold and cunning seducer, was its god. They
were seconded by the pleasure-loving Ninon de l'Enclos, who was still
desired at the age of eighty.

This ultra-refinement was followed by the loathing of civilisation and
love of nature expressed by Rousseau, Werther and Hoelderlin; closely
allied to these passions was sentimental love, the direct precursor of
our modern conception of love. Its peculiarity lay in the fact that
although spiritual in its source, it yearned for psycho-physical unity,
and was therefore always slightly discordant. Rousseau was the first
exponent of this romantic nature cult and sentimental love of w