Many great thinkers have complained of the alleged impairment of pure spirituality by the sexual life, and have recommended asceticism in order to arrive at a truer internal enlightenment. This, however, would imply pulling up the roots of spiritual poietic[36] activity, the suppression of a rich inner life of thought and feeling, the destruction of all true poetry and art. There would be left behind only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. Look at the letters of Abelard before and after his emasculation. Sexuality first breathes into our spiritual being the warm and blooming life. “The world,” says Philipp Frey, “would be conceived by us in sharply bounded intellectual pictures, unless we saw it in the changing lights of our sexuality. From the green of gently dreaming desire, through the yellow of surging emotion, and from the blood-red of eager desire to the cool blue of satisfaction--all things appear to us in the light of our sexuality. Life would be better ordered if we were purely intelligible machines for the purposes of nutrition, work, and production. But without the dualism of desire and satisfaction, the world would become torpid in a great yawn.” This intimate connexion between the psychic-emotional being and the sexual impulse gave rise to a deepening, a concentration, and an increasing intensity, of the feeling of love, whereby the latter becomes the most powerful influence affecting mankind in bodily and spiritual relations. Voltaire, in his “Pensées Philosophiques,” says aptly: “L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur, et le corps.” That it is in love that the immediate admixture of organic processes most clearly manifests itself is a fact pointed out already by Aristotle, and among modems emphasized by Griesinger.[37] Thus love discloses itself as a =nucleus=, the =axis= of the individual, and therewith also of the social life, a fact indicated already in Schopenhauer’s phrase, describing love as the “focus of the will,” and in Weismann’s expression “the continuity of the germ-plasma.” And we can easily understand that there are literary advocates of a consequent “=sexual philosophy=,” who base their view of the universe solely and entirely upon the sexual. To them the sexual problem becomes a world problem, eroticism expands into metaphysics. These sexual philosophers start from love to unveil the mysteries of life. The most celebrated advocate of such a sexual philosophy was the Marquis de Sade, of whom I have myself given an account in a pseudonymous work entitled “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (Berlin, 1904). According to de Sade, it is only through the sexual that the world can be grasped and understood.