But for the shaping of life the difference is immeasurable. Here we are confronted once more by the dualist and monist views of life, the belief in the soul as supersensuous, and the belief in the soul as dwelling in the senses; the belief that the soul can attain its highest development and happiness independently of—instead of by means of—its earthly conditions. According to the latter view man and woman are determined by their sexual life even in the greatest emotions of their soul. Sexual emotions pulsate in the age of puberty’s dreams of heroic deeds and martyrdom; they are the warm undercurrent in the religious needs which awaken at that time. Every woman who has afterwards performed a brilliant achievement of love, who has become a great Christian character—like St. Bridget of Sweden, like St. Catherine of Siena, or like St. Teresa—has had the fire of great love in her soul; her blood has been on fire with the longing to serve the race with body and soul. And therefore also her charity had warmth in it, while the victims of so much other benevolence freeze like shorn sheep. A woman’s essential ego must be brought out by love before she can do anything great for others or for herself. She whose existence has been erotically blank seldom finds the way to what is human in a great sense, while, on the other hand, she to whom life has denied the opportunity of manifesting her erotic being in the usual sense, transforms it into an Eros that embraces all life, the Eros of whom Plato had the intuition when he made Diotima proclaim him: a touch of infinite delicacy; for may it not possibly be only woman who—since her whole nature is erotic—can thus satisfy her love-longing from the whole of existence? But this sense of oneness with the universe—which the theosophist, the mystic, the pantheist, and the evolutionist express each in his own way, but which they all feel alike—is, above all, the gift of a great happiness in love. It is this way of loving of which it is especially true to say, that only he who loves knows God, the great word for unity in the all, in which we live and move and have our being. Not because God created mankind to increase and inhabit the earth, but because they were fruitful and filled the earth with beings and with work, did they give the Creator’s name to life and worshipped in the likeness of gods their own creative power, on account of which they also dreamed that they were eternal.