Woman’s need of living and suffering for the race gives her love a purer glow, a higher flame, a profounder will, a more tireless fidelity than man’s. The unsatisfied longing for motherhood is released in an ever warmer, ever more self-sacrificing affection for the loved one. Man, on the other hand, who has less and less opportunity of giving, thereby comes to love less and less. When the woman discovers this, she begins to remember what she has given. And then strife, sin, sorrow, and their wages—death—have entered into what was perhaps at the beginning a genuine love; a love which might have had a full and fair life, if it had had the unifying and purifying influence of a common end, a great purpose. When love possesses nothing of this kind, its power of motion is directed against itself. The feelings of both parties then become the object of a game like that of _parfiler_, which was the rage in the eighteenth century, and which consisted in drawing the threads out of worn-out cloth of gold. The feelings are torn up, ripped open, tied together; tangled, disentangled, and wound up. But feelings are roots, not threads—not even gold threads. It is in the great, wholesome realities of life that the creative force of love, like that of art, finds the productive earth for its growth. Torn out of this earth, love, as surely as art, is like a tree blown down by a spring storm, which may indeed put forth leaves this spring—though all its roots are exposed to the air—but which will not live through the summer. Clandestine love is in this respect like an upper-class marriage without children and without common pursuits, although the self-sacrificing, self-supporting, clandestine mistress stands far above the kept wife, fashionable and full of pretension. Thus it is not abstract ideas of duty, but real selfishness, which is one with real morality, that will teach youth to understand the meaning of Spinoza’s profound thought, made still more profound by the doctrine of evolution: that “the sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental, may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting, _which has its cause in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children_.” Through the religion of life and its countless influences, through gradual, scarcely perceptible transformations, will love’s freedom more and more come to mean freedom for enduring love. The spirit of the age, working through the standards of literature and public opinion, transforms with infallible certainty thoughts and feelings in the direction in which the strongest lead them. It now rests with the young to be these strong ones.