gher justification), and
would only be unjustifiable if man had achieved a complete erotic unity.

The more complicated life becomes, the more numerous and complex are the
relations between individuals and groups. A man is a member of a trades
union; he has political, artistic, sporting and social relations; he may
be a collector or interested in certain social phenomena, etc. In modern
civilisation every component part of the human personality is separated
from the entire personality and brought into a systematic connection
with similar component parts of other entities. Our social principle is
division of labour, not only in the community but also in the
individual. With one man one can talk only philosophy, with another
music, with a third personal matters, and so on. But because in this way
only one part of man, and never the whole being, can be satisfied at a
time, the desire to expend one's whole personality in one great
achievement, or in connection with another individual, is increasing
exactly in proportion as specialisation is increasing in the community
and in the individual. The more richly endowed and synthetic a man, the
more inappeasable will be his yearning to find the talents scattered
broadcast over humanity combined in one personality, and to give himself
wholly and entirely to that personality. The splitting up of man caused
by our social conditions is one of the principal causes of the longing
for the great and strong love which we hear so much discussed. The
yearning for the absolute, for perfection, no longer separating and
selecting but embracing man as a whole, annihilating body and soul in a
higher intuition, the longing for mutual self-surrender, for giving and
receiving an undivided self, is growing stronger and stronger. The idea
of modern love, a love embracing the whole breadth of human development,
is unequalled in human history. A single person shall stand for all
mankind. The lover has always been all the world to woman, but man has
possessed many things in addition to the beloved. Our age claims
(wherever it understands its own eroticism) that woman, on her part,
shall give to man all things in existence in a higher and purer form;
not only complete satisfaction of the senses, not only the lofty emotion
of spiritual love, but also friendship as a fellow-man; she shall be to
him the friend who meant so much to the Greek and the ancient Teuton. It
is self-evident that the true erotic of o