A woman has aptly said that “it is precisely woman’s greater sensuousness that makes her less sensuous than man: on account of motherhood—and all that it implies—she is sensuous, so to speak, from head to foot and chronically, while man is so only acutely and locally.” If one transfers one’s thoughts from erotics to motherhood, the truth of this will at once be clear: the feeling of motherhood is the most thoroughly sensuous and therefore the most thoroughly soulful of emotions; the same transport of the senses in which the mother exclaims that she could “eat” her child, expresses itself in the affection which would prompt her to die for it. But the author just quoted goes on to consider that even with men the erotic emotions could be transposed or released in many ways besides the one which to most of them still represents the whole expression of “love.” What Rousseau revealed to his unbelieving contemporaries will perhaps one day become true in a psycho-physical sense: that a look may fill a lover with voluptuousness; that the great emotions are the chief conditions of love’s happiness; that the lightest touch of the loved one’s hand gives greater bliss than the possession of the most beautiful women without love—feelings which all great lovers in all times have confirmed, and as to which even the most contrary natures give the same testimony. The peasant’s love, which knows nothing of caresses, comes lower in the scale of happiness than that of the cultivated person, who finds in love all the refined delights of the senses; and this again is far below the happiness of those who even in the encounter of two ideas or two moods can experience all the transport of love. The conviction that sensuousness can only be controlled through being spiritualised is what directs those women who are now hoping to convert men, not to the duty of monogamy, but to the joy of unity. Before woman’s will could thus become conscious, her long struggle for liberation had to take place. Marriage had to cease to be a trade among the upper classes, as prostitution still is among the hungry lower classes. Love must have become free at least in the sense that a woman had no choice but charity from her family or forced sale to her husband; her personality must have attained consideration, not only for her value as a woman and dignity as a human being, but also individually. Not until—by her own labour and activity—she no longer exclusively depended on a man’s courtship for both her livelihood and her life’s destiny, did woman’s salvation come to be, not “that the man wills” (Nietzsche), but that she herself can exercise her will. Language already reflects the change of custom. We seldom hear it asked nowadays of a woman: _Why has she not married?_ but it is all the more frequently enquired: What has her love-story been, _since she has never married_?