No wonder, therefore, that one of the German metaphysicians, Fichte, should have made a sophistic attempt to reduce masculine selfishness to a system. He proves to his own satisfaction that it is woman’s duty to sacrifice herself in man’s behalf; while man, on his part, has no such obligations. His reasoning is too elaborate to quote in full; but is too amusingly naïve to be omitted, so I will translate the summary of it given by Kuno Fischer in his _History of Philosophy_:— “What woman’s natural instincts demand is self-abandonment to a man; she desires this abandonment not for her own sake, but for the man’s sake; she gives herself to him, for him. Now abandoning oneself for another is self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice from an instinctive impulse is LOVE. Therefore love is a kind of instinctive impulse which the sexual instinct in woman necessarily and involuntarily assumes. She feels the necessity of loving.... This impulse is peculiar to woman alone; woman alone loves [!!!]; only through woman does love appear among mankind.... The woman’s life should disappear in the man’s without a remnant, and it is this relation that is so beautifully and correctly indicated in the fact that the wife no longer uses her own name, but that of her husband [!].” The latest (and it is to be hoped the last) of the German metaphysicians, the pessimist Hartmann, goes even a step beyond Fichte in arrogating for man special privileges in Love. If Fichte makes Love synonymous with Self-Sacrifice—feminine, mind you, not masculine—Hartmann tries to prove that man may love as often as he pleases, but woman only once. And what aggravates the offence, he does it in such a poetic manner. “Though it may be doubtful,” he says, “whether a man can truly love two women at the same time, it is beyond all doubt that he can love several in succession with all the depth of his heart; and the assertion that there is only one true love is an unwarranted generalisation to all mankind of a maxim which is true of woman alone.... Woman can learn but once by experience what love is, and it is painful for the lover not to be the one who teaches her first. True it is that a tree nipped by a spring frost brings forth a second crown of leaves, but so rich and luxuriant as the first it will not be; thus does a maiden-heart produce a second bloom, if the first had to wither before maturity, but its full and complete floral glory is unfolded only where love, aroused for the first time, passes in full vigour through all its phases.”