Asceticism -- Its origin -- Metchnikoffs explanation of the origin of asceticism -- Disharmonies of the sexual life -- Psychology of ascetics -- Their hypersexuality -- Great antiquity and ubiquity of asceticism -- The asceticism of the Indians, Mohammedans, and Christians -- Preoccupation of Christian ascetics with sexual matters -- Sexual visions -- Dissolute sects -- Monastic and cloistral life -- Modern asceticism -- Its difference from ancient asceticism -- Its connexion with actual experiences -- Example of Schopenhauer -- Hitherto unpublished evidence of the relationship between his ascetic views and his own life -- Tolstoi on the sorrows of voluptuousness -- His relative asceticism -- Weininger’s renewal of early Christian asceticism -- Its cause -- Characteristics of Weininger’s book. The belief in witchcraft -- The principal source of all misogyny and contempt of women -- Not a Christian discovery -- Primeval association between sexuality and magic -- The sexual origin of the belief in witchcraft -- Devil’s mistresses -- The predisponents of the medieval belief in witchcraft -- Continuance of this belief into our own times -- Rôle of sexuality in pastoral medicine -- External and internal causation of the theological treatment of sexual problems -- Sexual casuistic literature -- The religious factor in the sexual life of the present day -- Sexual excesses of modern sects -- The revival of romanticism -- Experiences of an elderly physician regarding religion and sexuality -- Deprivation of love and satiety of love as sources of religious needs -- Significance of the religious factor in the history of love -- Subordinate rôle of this in the individualization of the sentiment of love. CHAPTER VI If, with Friedrich Ratzel, we understand by civilization the sum total of all the mental acquirements of a period, then also human love, this specific product of civilization, is merely a mirrored picture of the mental activities of the existing epoch of civilization. We can follow this =way of the spirit in love= from the primitive age down to the present day, and we can detect, in each successive epoch of civilization, the association with sexuality of peculiar spiritual states; and after thus passing in review the thousands of years of human history, we can discern once more in our own epoch the individual psychical elements which characterize the love of modern civilized man.