Higher eroticism requires, then, the beloved to be a vehicle of a projected personality. Love for a man or a woman is the attempt to realize one’s ideal in the man or the woman. The impulse to love is the search after the incarnation of the inward ideal, and falling in love is the instinctive conviction that the ideal has been found. The lower and simpler the individual himself, the simpler will be the qualities of his ideal in corporate form. Among people of a low state of civilization the qualities required of the ideal are so few that almost every individual of one sex represents the ideal of the other sex. They may both be paired like animals, and love does not yet exist. The more cultivated a person becomes, the more complicated become the qualities demanded of his ideal, and the harder it is for him to find the same. A person looking for physical qualities in his ideal or for external beauty only, will easily find them, and a case of love at first sight, about which romantic dreamers go into such raptures, is naturally possible. But such love is only sensual and does not deserve to be thus extolled. For true love among men and women of a higher state of culture is an ideal symphony of tones of all kinds. Generally bodily perfection and a retiring, tender, beneficent, confiding nature in woman constitute an attractive ideal for the man, while mental superiority in man constitutes the attractive power for the cultured woman. In her love the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient. The woman, says Kant, has an exquisite feeling for the beautiful, so far as she herself is concerned, but for the noble so far as it is found in the man. The man, on the contrary, has a decided feeling for the noble, which belongs to his own qualities, but for the beautiful so far as it is met with in the woman. Hence it follows that the aims of nature are directed through love upon making men still nobler and women more beautiful.