At the present day, notwithstanding all the adverse opinions and jeremiads of infatuated apostles of morality, the epoch of our amatory life through which we are passing is by no means one of decadence. On the contrary, we are now actually engaged in its re-constitution, reform, and ennoblement. All the tendencies of the time proceed towards such a radical perfectionment of love, towards its free, individual configuration, not by the unchaining of sensuality, but by its idealization; and when we have once attained a natural view of sensuality, it loses all its terrors. We fight at first against the elemental force of the wild impulse, and against the elemental force of life-denying asceticism. In this struggle the artistic element in modern love plays a notable part. By this we do not signify “sugary” æstheticism, nor yet the completely non-sensual Platonic Eros, but that æsthetic tendency in human love, bringing about an intimate association of the bodily and spiritual, which W. Bölsche denotes by the term “rhythmotropism.” It is “an impulsive, forced reaction of the higher animal brain to rhythmical beauty,” to which art also owes its origin. This æsthetic natural impulse is of great importance to love, as Darwin recognized many years ago. It was he who expressed the great thought that beauty is love become perceptible. The sexual is in no way hostile to æsthetic contemplation, as the unhappy Weininger quite erroneously maintained in the confused chapter “Erotism and Æsthetics” of his book. He curtly denies that sexuality has any æsthetic value whatever, yet Plato himself deduced from the physical Eros the highest æsthetic contemplation of a spiritual nature. In the world of the senses he discovered the reflection of the Divine. The well-known fact that with the awakening of the sexual life, spiritual creative activity also awakens, and an artistic tendency becomes kinetic, that at the time of puberty every youth is a poet, confirms the suggested existence of this intimate relationship between sexual and æsthetic perception. “There appears to me to be no doubt,” says J. Volkelt in his “Æsthetics” (vol. i., p. 523; Munich, 1905), “that in the youth or the maiden the awakening of sexuality induces an individualization and invigoration of artistic perception. Hand in hand with the first love of youth, somewhere about the sixteenth or seventeenth year, the sense of grace and beauty in the landscape, the appreciation of the charm of poetry, painting, and music, are strengthened and refined to such a degree, that in comparison with what is now felt, all earlier experiences and enjoyments seem to be as nothing.”