“Taking union as the main point, we may look upon the idealized sex-love as a sense of contact pervading the whole mind and body--while the sex-organs are a specialization of this faculty of union in the outermost sphere: union in the bodily sphere giving rise to bodily generation, the same as union in the mental and emotional spheres occasions generation of another kind.” Proof of the fact that love, in its purely individual relations, is also of great importance for human civilization, that it is profoundly significant for the higher evolution of humanity, =in addition to= its importance for the perpetuation of the species--the proof of this thesis is very important in view of certain problems connected with the theory of population and in view of the practical conclusions deduced from that theory, as, for example, the doctrine of neo-malthusianism. =Love and love’s embrace do not exist only for the purposes of the species: they are also of importance to the ego; they are necessary for the life, the evolution, and the internal growth of the individual himself.= And we must not fail to recognize to what extent the fact that the individual has gained much from love ultimately reacts also to the advantage of the species. For the species, as well as for the individual, the true path of progress lies in the direction of the individualization of the sexual impulses. * * * * * When we study in detail the gradual permeation of sexuality with spiritual elements, the gradual development of love, and its advance towards perfection by means of civilization, we ascertain that for the love of the modern civilized man there exists a kind of biogenetic, or rather psychogenetic, fundamental law. In modern love we encounter all the spiritual elements which were actively operative in the love of past times; the love of the civilized man of the present day is an extracted, shortened, compressed repetition of the entire developmental course of love from the earliest times to the present day. And the general course of this development reappears also in the love of the individual.