But these ascetics may have arrived at their fanaticism by two different paths. One group—which includes most of the female ascetics—hates Cupid because he has never shown to them any favour. The other group—embracing the majority of male ascetics—curse him because he never leaves them in peace. Meanwhile, those who put a tremendous emphasis on purity and those who rave about pleasure, meet on the common ground of distrust of love’s possibilities of development. Love to them means desire and nothing else; if the soul enters into it, it becomes friendship and that alone. They have never experienced a love which is creative in the fullest sense of the word. Sterility—of the soul or the body or both—is the mark of the only love these two groups are acquainted with. The slaves of eroticism are admirably characterised by Lord Chesterfield’s confession that he had made violent love to at least twenty women, all of whom personally were entirely indifferent to him. They know nothing of the soul’s desire for one single person, from among an unlimited selection; a desire which—when it is deeply rooted—is met by the desire of the other. They do not know that the elective affinity of sympathy causes the one to gather from the other’s eyes an all-mastering, liberating force. For they themselves experience in the violence of desire only prostration and humiliation of their higher being. An otherwise sensitive man may feel unnerved by eroticism to such a degree that now he will wish all women dead, to be thus freed from his thraldom; now he will desire, as Caligula did of the Romans, that they had but a single neck—but not to sever it. The hatred of these men for eroticism is that of the savage for the hideous gods on whom he believes himself dependent, and whom he knows to be making sport of his destiny. And nothing is more certain than that love, thus conceived, makes men degraded and ridiculous. Even he who in his innermost soul loves tragedy and hates farce, is made, under the attraction of this love, to halt between the two and to turn his life into a tragi-comedy; for in order to attain to the true tragic greatness a man must be prepared to surrender himself unconditionally to, and to suffer through what is greatest in, his nature, his innermost ego. But the tragic destiny is apt to pass a man by against his innermost will, and then arises the impure form of the tragic that we have just mentioned. Thus men and women, who have only sought fresh stimulants in eroticism, at last come across a person who does not understand love in that way, and who ends the game for ever. Or perchance they themselves are gripped by a great emotion, but their past destroys the hope of its now being granted to them to worship in any holy grove the divinity to whom hitherto they have only burned paper lanterns in the turmoil of a fair. In most cases the tragi-comedy takes the same form as with the drunkard: satisfaction becomes more and