The great Western prophet of pessimism argued that love was nothing but a task imposed in this fashion upon the individual by _der Genius der Gattung_; that only contradictions attract one another and that the offspring inherits the complementary qualities that each has sought in the other. These contradictions—through the hostility of which the parents afterwards make each other unhappy—coalesce and neutralise each other in the child, so that the latter, at the expense of its parents, becomes a well-equipped, rich, or harmonious personality. Carried to an extreme, this saying of Schopenhauer’s, like many other such pregnant thoughts, becomes an absurdity. But every one who has observed love must have found—long before he knows, or without ever knowing, that this experience is exalted into pessimism—that all powerful love arises between opposed natures. The harmony that results from similarity is monotonous, poor, and moreover dangerous to the development of the individual, as well as that of the race. But what is contrary is certainly not always conflicting, although it may prove so if the contrariness extends to views of life and its purpose, its value and conduct. Conflicting natures are—in spite of Schopenhauer—not unfrequently equally unfavourable for the child’s disposition and for its bringing-up, and the will of the race often fails of its purpose through their very compulsion to unite in a love which is soon turned to hatred. Again, contrary natures often become conflicting, owing to their turning the wrong side of their qualities to each other after marriage, while in the early period of love they had shown each other the right side of these qualities. That such a marriage is unhappy is no evidence against love’s selection, but a great one for mankind’s lack of culture for marriage. That every sympathetic dissimilarity between persons has a limit, the overstepping of which leads further and further towards antipathetic dissimilarities, is a psychological lesson which is deeply inculcated by marriage.