Sensuality first gives life colour, brings out the nuances and the finer tones of feeling, without which life would be tinted a uniform grey, would be a monotonous waste, and lacking which the joy of existence and creative activity would be annihilated, or, at least, would be reduced to a minimum. Even the most ideal love must be nourished upon sensuality, if it is to remain poietic and full of vitality. Of this Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is an interesting example--a woman and poet in whom in other respects sexual influences can have played only a very modest part. But she lost on the instant all poetic capacity, all artistic creative power, when her lover, Lewin Schücking, became engaged to Louise von Gall. The mere idea of the =possibility= of physical possession was to her a spur to poetic activity without its being necessary for this possibility to be translated into reality. But when the possibility was for ever removed, her muse at once became dumb. An absolutely convincing proof of the intimate connexion between sexuality and æsthetics is the fact that great artists and poets have, in the majority of cases, possessed thoroughly sensual natures. The previously described relationship between the sexual impulse and the poietic impulse, comprised in the “function impulse” of Santlus, is especially manifest in the case of artists. In these artistic natures the perceptive æsthetic power is associated with an ardent sensuality, which derives its most powerful impulse directly from the beautiful. We agree with von Krafft-Ebing when he denies the possibility of genius, art, and poetry except upon a sexual foundation. We do not believe in a so-called purely æsthetic contemplation and perception without any sexual admixture. Even Volkelt, who is inclined to sever art and the sexual impulse each from the other, is unable to deny the genetic connexion between the two. Oskar Bie makes the interesting observation that “in æsthetic relationships the cord of the will does not become thinner to the breaking point, but stronger, until it becomes blind passion” (_Neue Deutsche Rundschau_, 1894, p. 479). Nietzsche and Guyau have also declared themselves opposed to Schopenhauer’s theory regarding the absence of a will-element in æsthetic perception. Nietzsche speaks even of an “æsthetic of the sexual impulse.” Guyau bases his æsthetic upon the love of life and upon sexual love (“Les Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine,” Paris, 1897). Magnus Hirschfeld alludes in his “Wesen der Liebe” (“The Nature of Love”), p. 48, to a work by G. Santayana entitled “The Sense of Beauty,” in which the theory is propounded that “for human beings the whole of nature is an object of sexual perception, and it is chiefly in this way that the beauty of nature is to be explained.” Finally, Gustav Naumann (“Sex and Art: Prolegomena to Physiological Æsthetics,” Leipzig, 1899) says most convincingly that the sexual is the =root= of all art, of all æsthetics.