So long as man and woman are so divided in their erotic needs as is at present often the case, love will be the “everlasting conflict” described by those poets and thinkers who see only the immediate present, without faith in the development of love or mankind’s education in loving; for in the midst of the age of evolutionism men neither think nor feel according to its doctrines. To him, however, who does so feel, nothing is more certain than that “the everlasting conflict” will one day end in the conclusion of peace. The sceptics just referred to smile ambiguously at the mention of friendship between women, as at that of the refinement and craving for sympathy in woman’s love. It is not until a mistress or a wife, misunderstood in the depths of her being, leaves him, that such a man discovers that the being he believed himself to be making entirely happy, has not even had her senses satisfied—since the soul received nothing from the senses and gave them nothing. Those men—for the rest often men of fine culture—of whom this is true, are generally verging on middle age. Among men comparatively young, on the other hand, the erotic longing is often as refined and craves as much for sympathy, as with women, although it is still rare for the man to possess that balance between soul and senses which his equal in the other sex has attained. That women now venture to acknowledge that they possess erotic senses, while men are beginning to discover erotically that they have souls; that woman demands feelings in a man and he ideas in her—this is the great and happy sign of the times. Sensitive young men of the present day suffer perhaps as much as their sisters when loved only for their sex, not personally and on account of their personality. They for their part love just that womanly individuality for which they provide freedom of movement, instead of—as their own fathers did—trying to assimilate it to their own. On the highest plane—as on the lowest—the similarities between man’s love and woman’s are already greater than the dissimilarities; and there may be more danger to love in the growing likeness between the sexes than in continued unlikeness. Man becomes a human being—and woman likewise—at the cost of his secondary sexual characters. There are already some who think that the close of psychical development will present the same phenomenon as the beginning of physical development, namely, that the embryo at a certain stage is neither male nor female but includes both possibilities!