The new love is still the natural attraction of man and woman to each other for the continuance of the race. It is still the desire of the active human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the continuance of the race. It has sprung from man’s sense of loneliness within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as his soul is exceptional. It is the pining for that human soul which is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and shows its secrets and its glories without shame. Richard Dehmel has summed this up in two immortal lines: _Liebe ist die Freiheit der Gestalt Vom Wahn der Welt, vom Bann der eignen Seele._ The same feeling has possessed many a man before our time. One of them was Eugène Delacroix, who speaks in his journal of the pain of only being able to show to each of his friends the aspect of himself which that friend understood, and of thus being obliged to become another for each of them, without ever feeling himself completely understood; a suffering for which he only knew one remedy, _une épouse qui est de votre force_. But what is new about it is that this sentiment has become diffused and has taken shape in the consciousness of the many; that it is beginning to set its stamp upon the whole spirit of the age. Meanwhile, mankind continues to be guided by erotic impulses which lie deep below its conscious erotic needs. Man’s senses are spurred by a desire which thrusts aside that of the soul. The culture of the idea of love is far in advance of the instincts of love. And thus our time is brimful of love-conflicts.