We live in a period of spiritual reformation of immense importance in the history of the world. Every human being who himself has soul is being more and more penetrated by the sense of the mysterious effects of elective affinities; of sympathetic and antipathetic influences; of subconscious powers, above all in the erotic sphere. Sensations of the erotically dæmonic are not new. But they were formerly condemned to as great an extent as they are now recognised and indeed sometimes assisted. It is this exquisite sensitiveness, these vibrating nerves, these changing moods, this irritability of sensation that the woman—like the man—of the present day has acquired as her superiority, her gain through culture, her right of precedence before any other generation. But this new wealth involves innumerable new conflicts. The senses go their own way and are attracted where the soul is estranged, or repelled although the heart is filled with tenderness. Until the physiology and psychology of loathing are understood, we shall not have gone far towards the solution of the erotic problem. Every day—and night—these innumerable influences, conscious or unconscious, are at work transforming the feelings of married people and lovers. And although our time is becoming increasingly conscious of this, it does not yet understand either how to counteract the dangerous or encourage the favourable influence of the important trifles of married life. Only the foremost of women with a genius for love have arrived at that degree of sensitiveness which makes it impossible for them to give or receive anything in love without the feeling which one of Charlotte Brontë’s women expresses in the words: _You fit me into the finest fibre of my being._ Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not _en mâle_ but _en artiste_. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her, and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman. She will belong only to a man who longs for her always, even when he holds her in his arms. And when such a woman exclaims: “You desire me, but you cannot caress, you cannot listen ...” then that man is doomed. Modern woman’s love differs from that of older times by, amongst other things, the insatiability of its demand for completeness and perfection in itself, and for corresponding completeness and perfection in the feeling of the man. Our soul is doubtless often deeper, but occasionally also shallower, than our conscious existence and will. Therefore it may happen that the new love in all its force exists in a woman who is unconscious of her own erotic greatness, while, on the other hand, another, who desires it with all her will, perhaps may lack the depth of feeling, the instinctive sureness of choice.