The constantly increased importance of sympathy in the life of the soul finds expression, however, at the present time within the feminine world in an over-estimation of friendship, both between one woman and another and in relation to love. A passionate worship between persons of the same age—or of an elder by a younger member of the same sex—is among women as among men the customary and beautiful morning glow of love, which always pales after sunrise. An entirely personal, great friendship is, on the other hand, as rare as a great love, and equally rare among women as among men. Those who expect to find the complement of their being in friendship have therefore no greater prospect of attaining the essential in this sphere, and moreover they run the risk of missing it in the sphere of love, through shutting themselves off from or impoverishing themselves of love’s emotions. The women of older times also cultivated friendship. But they did not content themselves with it in the place of love. And if women were once seriously to do this, then winter would have come upon the world. The way of evolution is to demand of love all that friendship affords—and infinitely more! But the rich spiritual intercourse between female fellow-workers and fellow-students, as also between comrades of different sexes, is now preparing the third historical stage of development, that of individual sympathy. It is true that great love has been individually sympathetic in all ages. What is new is that an ever greater number of spirits are guided by the same need; that the possibility of great love has become apparent to many, not only to a chosen few. Just as we have been able to gauge the revival of love by the diminution of marriages of convenience, by the recognition of young people’s liberty of choice, and by the popular condemnation of marriages for money, so can we now measure the strength of the new revival by other, equally significant phenomena; those, namely, called “the new immorality.” It has been said with truth that love as it now is—the great psychological reality with which one has to reckon—in its present complicated, manifold, and refined condition, is the result of all the progress of human activity: of the victory of intelligence and sentiment over crude force, of the transformation in the relations between man and woman which new economic, religious, and ethical ideas have brought about; of the growing desire for inward and outward beauty, of the will to ennoble the race, and other causes. But among these we have not named the most important, that in which many now see a sign of degeneration, but which is really one of development, the cause on which rests the hope of the final abolition of erotic dualism: the conciliation of the excessive opposition of sex.