Like lawn-tennis—which in certain circles makes or mars marriages—love is favoured by summer air and idleness. But at all seasons there are men and women for whom everyone is a ball that sets their fancy or their vanity in motion. No form of self-assertion is more justified than that of opposing one’s vigilance, one’s will, and one’s dignity to this use of one’s personality. What stimulates the game is not the power of the senses alone. No, this game is the sole inventive faculty of spiritual poverty, the mark of erotic ill-breeding. Only a refined person can rejoice at the stimulants to life in every field, the means of which he does not himself possess. As yet few people have attained a culture like that of the Athenian beggar, who thanked Alcibiades for giving him the jewels that Alcibiades indeed wore—but that the beggar was free to rejoice at. To attain in regard to human beings this sense of joy, free from all covetousness, is the flower of fine breeding. But the nervosity of the present day stimulates, on the contrary, erotic kleptomania. People steal one another, now from the same kind of hysteria which makes thieves of Parisian ladies in the fashionable stores; now from the same crudity which makes the child pluck every flower he sees; now from the same desire which urges the collector constantly to acquire new specimens. When in regard to human beings the pleasure of the connoisseur rather than that of the collector has been attained, then the greatest of all joys—that of human beings in one another—will not be so often disturbed by erotic complications. To appeal to the liberty of the personality in frivolous concessions to eroticism is the same gross abuse of the idea as to use the name of this liberty in sailing a leaky yacht in a storm. The liberty of the personality involves great risks to win great rewards; but it does not involve allowing one’s self to be driven into dangers, where for a trifle one stakes one’s own life and that of others. To drift into relations where one has not the hundredth part of the consent of one’s innermost ego, is not proving but wasting one’s personality; for every action which is less than ourselves, degrades our personality. Again, it may be disastrous to perform acts greater and stronger than ourselves. He who ventures upon an exceptional course must—like the alpine climber—possess an abundance of strength and the sense of security which it lends; for otherwise, in both cases, the enterprise will be successful only if everything occurs according to the most favourable calculation. In an unforeseen misadventure the inadequate ones are those who are lost. Therefore, in one case as in the other, public opinion is unwittingly right when it glorifies the daring that succeeds, but condemns that which fails.