Love may be never so free in its social aspect; no freedom of morals or of divorce can release the sons of men from the inevitable sufferings of their own nature, nor from the inevitable conflicts of their connection with the past. These sufferings and conflicts have been made so deep by life itself that there is indeed no necessity for the law to make them deeper. The most usual form of the conflict is that a person is bound by or broken by casual love—whether wedded or free—when the predestined intervenes in his existence. That so many more unhappy marriages continue than are dissolved may be due less to a sense of duty than to the fact that only a few are capable of great emotions. Peer Gynt’s symbol—the bulb—illustrates the erotic nature of the majority. It flowers as readily in sand as in water, in the open as in a pot. But should an acorn be planted in a pot, it is inevitable—on account of the vital conditions of the oak—that it should one day burst its prison or die. And in such a case, it is unfortunate when a Christian ethical view stands in the way of serious and genuine chances of so renewing life that it may be more valuable to the community as well as to the individual himself. People who are equipped with rich possibilities still allow themselves to be decided by unconditional consideration for others’ feelings, which, taken from Christianity, have been grafted even on evolutionism, and which, especially through George Eliot, have obtained their great but one-sided expression. That the race not only needs people willing to lose their lives in order to gain them, but also people with courage to sacrifice others in order to win their own—this is a truth which nevertheless must be indissolubly bound up with an evolutionist view of life, to which the will to preserve and enhance one’s own existence is a duty as undeniable as that of preserving and enhancing the lives of others by self-sacrifice. To have the courage of one’s happiness, to be able to bear the pain inseparable from a rupture without pangs of conscience, is only in the power of those who act from their innermost necessity. That pairs of lovers outside the law now so often commit suicide together is no proof of the overmastering power of love; it rather proves the powerlessness of their emotion to dare and win the right of direct and immediate living and thus increasing the riches of life. For it is only to a love that is throughout a will to live that circumstances become as wax in the artist’s hand.