The first important enrichment of the sexual inclinations by means of a higher spiritual, individual element, which continues to-day to form a constituent of modern love, is, I consider, the =Platonism= of Greek antiquity and of the Italian renascence. It is a metaphysic of love resting upon the individual, æsthetic contemplation of the beloved personality.[136] For that is the true sense of “Platonic love.” It ennobles physical love to the heavenly Eros, which is nothing else than the idea of =beauty= in the highest sense of the word. Kuno Fischer, in his first published writing, “Diotima” (Pforzheim, 1849), has erected a beautiful monument in honour of this Platonic love. And did not the immortal Darwin restate the thought of Plato, when he described beauty as the testimony of love? In Platonism, at any rate, is to be found the first intimation of a =higher= individual significance of love. In Dante’s Beatrice, in Petrarch’s Platonic lyrics, this idea is reillumined after the long night of the middle ages, to shine forth still more clearly at the time of the renascence in the new Platonism and in the cult of the beautiful, thus attaining a much more powerful individual colouring than it had among the Greeks. In the sphere of love, as elsewhere, the plastic genius of the Greeks manifested itself in the form of peaceful æsthetic contemplation; romantic individualism, on the other hand, was foreign to the Greek mind. The latter is a modern sentiment. Jean Paul, in his “Vorschule der Aesthetik” (Hamburg, 1804, vol. i., p. 139), has aptly characterized the difference between antique and modern sensibility in the words: “The plastic sun (of the ancients) illuminates universally, like waking; the romantic moon (of the moderns) gleams fitfully, like dreams.” These first traces of =romantic-individual= love may be detected already in Christian medievalism, among the troubadours and the minnesinger. The heartfelt song, “Thou art mine, I am thine,” gives the clearest expression to the individual, purely personal nature of the love-relations between man and woman, and discloses also the “romantic” sentiment, as in “Thou art locked within my heart; lost is the key: now must thou stay there for ever,” and discloses the intimate association peculiar to romanticism between the nature-sense and the feeling of love. It is the beloved who first fills for us the joy of summer; her love is like the rose. An enormous range is thus opened to the subjectivity of this sentiment. The romanticism of the =secret= element in love is first perceived at this time, and finds perception in the words: “No fire, no coal, can burn so hot As secret love, of which no one knows anything.”[137]