It is more than a merely formal analogy, a superficial, verbal resemblance, to speak of the fruitfulness of the mind, of its conception and reproduction, or, in the words of Plato, to speak of the children of the soul. As bodily sexuality is the effort of an organic being to perpetuate its own form, so love is the attempt to make permanent one’s own soul or individuality. Sexuality and love are alike the effort to realise oneself, the one by a bodily image, the other by an image of the soul. But it is only the man of genius who can approach this entirely unsensuous love, and it is only he who seeks to produce eternal children in whom his deepest nature shall live for ever. The parallel may be carried further. Since Novalis first called attention to it, many have insisted on the association between sexual desire and cruelty. All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction, birth, and death are indissolubly associated; the thought of untimely death awakens sexual desire in its fiercest form, as the determination to reproduce oneself. And so sexual union, considered ethically, psychologically, and biologically, is allied to murder; it is the negation of the woman and the man; in its extreme case it robs them of their consciousness to give life to the child. The highest form of eroticism, as much as the lowest form of sexuality, uses the woman not for herself but as means to an end--to preserve the individuality of the artist. The artist has used the woman merely as the screen on which to project his own idea. The real psychology of the loved woman is always a matter of indifference. In the moment when a man loves a woman, he neither understands her nor wishes to understand her, although understanding is the only moral basis of association in mankind. A human being cannot love another that he fully understands, because he would then necessarily see the imperfections which are an inevitable part of the human individual, and love can attach itself only to perfection. Love of a woman is possible only when it does not consider her real qualities, and so is able to replace the actual psychical reality by a different and quite imaginary reality. The attempt to realise one’s ideal in a woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the empirical personality of the woman. And so the attempt is cruel to the woman; it is the egoism of love that disregards the woman, and cares nothing for her real inner life.