This course is, to put the matter shortly, from the general to the individual, from the remote to the proximate. We can further divide the history of human love into two great epochs. In the first epoch, love was, above all, a =transcendental relationship= of a religio-metaphysical nature. The transcendental relationships played a more important part than the purely human and personal. Everywhere an ulterior element played its part. In the second epoch, love underwent an evolution into a more =personal= relationship, in which the human being himself took foremost place, as compared with any transcendental considerations. The history of love is, in fact, an illustration of Compte’s replacement of the theologico-metaphysical epoch of mental development by the anthropological. In individual love, however, there still remain active and demonstrable many transcendental elements. The oldest spiritual elements of love continue to form a portion of the content of modern love, and to play a more or less dominant part in its genesis. To this primeval and psychical phenomenon belongs, above all, an intimate association between =religious= ideas and feelings and the sexual life. In a certain sense, the history of religion can be regarded as the history of a peculiar mode of manifestation of the human sexual impulse, especially in its influence on the imagination and its products. Certain modern writers, members of the laity far from learned in the history of civilization, have considered the Roman Catholic Church pre-eminently responsible for the appearance of this sexual element in ritual and dogma. This, however, is grossly unjust. A =scientific= study of these relations teaches us that =all= religions exhibit to a greater or less degree this sexual admixture, and if this appears more prominent in the Roman Catholic Church, it is due, in the first place, to the fact that this religion is nearer to us in time than many of the religions of antiquity, and, in the second place, it is explicable on the ground that the Roman Catholic Church has always displayed greater openness and less hypocrisy than, for example, the Protestant pietists, who, as the Königsberg scandal, the Eva van Buttler affair, etc., show, are no less blameworthy in respect of sexual vagaries. A really =objective= basis for an opinion regarding the relations between religion and sexuality can only be obtained when we cease to consider these relations as an affair of dogma and of the confessional, and study them upon the basis to which they properly belong--to wit, the =anthropological=. For these relationships are peculiar to the genus homo as such. The sexual element is quite as prominent in the religions of primitive peoples as in those of modern civilized nations.