It would be an attractive and grateful task to point out the halting-places of the human race in the life of the individual; to fix the moment when for the first time in his life the child says "I"--a moment which usually occurs in his second year, and represents the humanisation of the race, the great intuition, when primitive man, divining his spiritual nature, severed himself from the external world; to perceive the child--like its primitive ancestors in their day--treating all weaker creatures which fall into its hands with almost bestial cruelty; to watch the boyish games reflecting the period when the nations lived on war and the chase, their eagerness to draw up rules and regulations and create gradations of rank and marks of distinction. I am not able to carry out such a task in detail and, moreover, as I am dealing with the erotic life only, such a proceeding would be out of place here. The psychogenetic law, then, comes to this: Every well-developed male individual of the present day successively passes through the three stages of love through which the European races have passed. The three stages are not traceable in all men with infallible certainty, there are numerous individuals whose development in this respect has been arrested, but in the emotional life of every highly differentiated member of the human race they are clearly distinguishable, and the greater the wealth and strength of a soul, the more perfectly will it reflect the history of the race. The evolution of every well-endowed individual presents a rough sketch of the history of civilisation; it has its prehistoric, its classical, its mediaeval, and its modern period. Many men remain imprisoned in the past; others are fragmentary, or appear to be suspended in mid-air, rootless. The spirit of humanity has lived through the past and overcome it, so as to be able to create its future. The gynecocratic stage actually survives to this day in the nursery. Here the mother rules supreme; the father is an intruder, the brothers are dominated by their sisters, often their juniors. Women mature at an earlier age than men; this assertion applies with equal force to individual and sex in connection with the history of civilisation. After he has left the nursery, there follows in the life of the boy a period during which he associates only with his school-friends, shuns the society of his mother and sisters, and is ashamed of his female relatives. This represents the revival of the men's unions of remote antiquity in the life of the individual of the present day.