Lifelong tenacity was demanded in those days when it was assumed that a single doctrine, a single set of circumstances, was entirely adequate for personal development for a whole lifetime. The crime of deviation was then logically punished by excommunication or by fines. But the profounder view which we have acquired in the matters of belief and occupation must also be extended to the third. We ought to perceive that unconditional fidelity to one person may be just as disastrous to the personality as unconditional continuance in a faith or an employment. Those who are now patching the sack-cloth of asceticism with a few shreds from the purple mantle of personality are spoiling both. Either state the claim of renunciation clearly, like the Catholic, or admit the whole claim of personality. But the whole problem is unfairly stated by those who make “personal love” the moral basis of marriage, but go on to speak of this love as though it were a question of light-heartedly taking partners for a game, where nothing is more usual than that each woman finds the right man and each man the right woman—and so everything is in order. If life were so easy, there would be reason for the pronouncements, which are now so profoundly coarse, that only the man or woman without character, the aimless personality, is incapable of vowing a lifelong love and keeping the promise; nay, that a true personality can “command itself to love its child’s father or mother.” He who asserts that our true personality will always follow the duty laid down by society and constantly be able to fulfil the claims of fidelity, and that those who cannot do this are guided by a false subjectivity and not by their personality, makes the idea of personality equivalent to that of member of society, the whole equivalent to the part. The personality, the unique and peculiar value, is certainly connected through part of its nature with the standards of right upheld by society. Yet it never becomes equivalent to them. The only thing therefore that a psychological thinker can demand is that love should not divide the personality in any phase of a human being’s development, but should always be its true expression. But only one who is ignorant of the idea of personality can believe that the relation, into which a person at the age of twenty puts his whole feeling, must necessarily correspond to the needs of the same personality as it becomes at thirty or forty. Only one so ignorant can persuade himself that the destiny of our love will necessarily resemble our lofty theory of love, our pure desire of constancy. If even our own will has little to do with the love we feel, how much less then will it influence that which we receive or lose! Thus the problem of fidelity is not solved merely by imposing the claim of constancy upon one’s self; for in the first place, in love there are two who must desire the same thing, and in the second, each of these two is manifold.