This physical dissonance is not even the worst. Too often it is simply boredom which kills love in married life. Like Nora in “A Dolls’ House,” one waits for the “wonderful,” and the wonderful does not happen. Instead of this the years pass by; sexual passion, greatly influenced as it is by the spiritual environment, gradually disappears, and with it disappears also the last possibility of spiritual sympathy. Thus, the character of most marriages is =solitude=. They represent the tragedy of desolation, of the eternal self-seeking of husband and wife. What disastrous consequences, finally, may result from the part played in marriage by =disease=, what tragic conflicts may here rise, can be studied in the great book “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State” (Rebman, 1906), an encyclopædic work edited by H. Senator and S. Kaminer, discussing in detail the relation between disorders of health and the married state. The calamities of modern marriage are strikingly illuminated in the following psychologically interesting account given by the alienist Heinrich Laehr (“Concerning Insanity and Lunatic Asylums,” p. 44 _et seq._; Halle, 1852): “How, as a matter of fact, do marriages come about? In heaven certainly a very small number indeed, if by that phrase we understand marriages undertaken with the full understanding of the nature of the sacrifice involved, under the impulsion of an inner necessity, and based upon deep mutual inclination founded upon self-respect and respect for each other; in social circles, and not in heaven, on the other hand, the majority of marriages are made. The question upon which ultimately so many marriages depend is, what each will gain by it, whilst inner sensations and mutual liking are regarded as subordinate matters.... A man is fully informed about such matters in early years; a woman is full of dark perceptions, uncertain as to what she is to receive and what she is to give. She is naturally impelled by her sense of inward weakness to yield to anyone more powerful than herself, and, in the intoxication of sensual excitement, under conditions in which both, in order to please, tend to show the best side only to each other, she is far less able than man to weigh beforehand the significance of such a step. Later, indeed, when, in the trodden path of marriage, the current of love runs more slowly, her eyes are opened, naked reality takes the place of the pictures of imagination, which formerly caused self-deception, and what appeared to be love, but was not love, takes flight for ever. What has not been hidden under the name of love! It conceals the pretence of egoistic impulses, vanity it may be, the life of pleasure, avarice, indolence; and what a number of marriages are entered into on the part of the woman in order to escape from the oppression of repugnant domestic conditions, because the imagined future appears to them more pleasant