The individualization of love is principally a product of recent times. A talented author, H. T. Finck, has dealt with this fact in a comprehensive work in two volumes.[134] This individual love, containing the spiritual elements of all the successive epochs of civilization, he denotes by the term “romantic” love, whereas we ourselves generally understand by that term a special variety of the more comprehensive individual love. Every one who is interested in the numerous “overtones” of individual love will find in Finck’s book a rich, though not very well arranged, supply of material. Independently of Finck, I shall endeavour in this chapter to describe very briefly the most =important= elements and the developmental phases of modern love. First, however, let us consider the “=idealization of the senses=,” this expression being used by Georg Hirth to denote the capacity of the senses for self-government; for independent feelings of pleasure and pain; for the development of peculiar imaginations, ideas, and talents; and for the utilization at will of other sensory areas and foci of impulse--indeed, of the entire individual--for the purposes of purely sensual self-command. The lower senses, among which Hirth also reckons the sexual impulse, can only be idealized in consequence of the centripetal spontaneous activity of the higher senses.[135] This artistic idealization of the senses and impulses also plays an important part in the process of the individualization and spiritualization of love. The sexual impulse becomes “the source of rich joys and imaginative tragedy” by means of the “veil of imagination,” the “heaping up of emotions,” and the “helmet of reason” (Hirth). The libido sexualis also takes part in the idealization of all the human senses and impulses. This is the indispensable preliminary and foundation of the transformation of the sexual impulse into love.