When the foundation of sexual morality was laid in an existence beyond this world, it lost its connection with the continuation of the race and thus was brought into contradiction with itself. This is the reason why Christianity, while it has indirectly done much for the spiritualisation of love, has yet never succeeded in combining the needs of the individual with those of the race, the cravings of the soul with those of the senses. That moral standard will alone be all-embracing which is determined by the belief that the meaning of life is its development through individuals towards higher and higher forms of life for the whole race. This standard will not regard any asceticism as moral which contemplates the freeing of the soul from the bonds of sensuality, as is the great aspiration of Eastern asceticism. It only recognises the claim of such self-discipline as brings about an ever-increasing unity between the soul and the will of the body. Such a self-discipline, indeed, renounces the nearer and lesser good for the more distant and greater. But it finds this good, in the domain of love as in everything else, _in an increasingly soulful sensuousness, or in an increasingly sensuous soulfulness_, not in the spirituality of asceticism, more and more freed from the senses. To the chapel of this spirituality a mountain path leads, which—however arduous every step may be—yet goes straight to the goal. The soulful-sensual existence again is a cell to which a labyrinth leads. Here each step is less difficult, but the whole journey involves infinitely greater dangers and excitement. It may be for this reason that as yet it only attracts the strongest—those who never renounce pleasure, since they find pleasure even in renunciation. For him who seeks the latter goal a single standard of morality will appear inapplicable—simply because human nature is manifold. Sexual abstinence in youth, for instance, may strengthen nine out of ten young men. The tenth it may change into a man of bestial impulses, who, although before marriage he has been chaste, may show, when married, a coarseness or depravity which drags down the wife to his level or opens an abyss between them. Purely sensual unions may in nine cases out of ten deteriorate both the man and the woman. In the tenth case such a connection may deepen into a feeling that determines the course of two lives, and the resulting marriage offers better prospects of happiness than that of many a young couple who have entered upon married life according to the rule which is regarded as the only one to give security of happiness. Thus it is possible in one case out of ten that the love for which a young man has kept himself pure until marriage really is personal love. In the other nine cases it is not so, but on the contrary the most impersonal of all love. Thus in nine cases out of ten, it is possible that such disappointments can be borne through a sense of duty, so that personality grows beneath them.