Whether the opinion of genius expressed here is correct or not, does not, however, affect the general situation. For the genius will always go his own way, which is never that of the average man. From the point of view of the ordinary individual an effacement of the spiritual sex character would be in still higher degree a misfortune for culture and nature. For it is the difference in the spiritual as well as in the physical sex-characteristics that makes love a fusion of two beings in a higher unity, where each finds the full deliverance and harmony of his being. With the elimination of the _spiritual_ difference _psychical_ love would vanish. There would be left, then, upon the one side, only the mating instinct, in which the same points of view as in animal breeding must obtain; on the other, only the same kind of sympathy which is expressed in the friendship between persons of the same sex, the sympathy in which the human, individual difference instead of sexual difference forms the attraction. In love, on the other hand, sympathy grows in intensity, the more universally human and at the same time sexually attractive the individual is: the “manly” in man is charmed by the “womanly” in woman, while the “womanly” in man is likewise captivated by the “manly” in woman, and _vice versa_. But when neither needs the _spiritual sex_ of the other as his complement, then man, in erotic respects, returns to the antique conception of the sex relationship, of which Plato has drawn the final logical conclusion. The “humanity” in the soul of man was strengthened when he felt himself necessary to mother and child. When woman by sweetness and tenderness taught man to love, not only to desire, then his humanity increased immeasurably. In our time the average man is beginning to learn that woman does not desire him as man, that she looks down upon him as a lower kind of being, that she does not need him as supporter. He does not at all grasp what it is the woman of highest culture seeks, demands, and awaits from his sex. But he learns that even the mediocre woman rejects the best he has to give her erotically; that imbued as she is with ideals of “universal humanity,” she no longer needs him as the supplement to her sexual being. Then brutality awakes in him anew; then his erotic life loses what humanity it had won; then he begins to hate woman. And not with the imaginative, theoretical hatred of thinkers and poets; but with the blind rage which the contempt of the weaker for the stronger arouses in him. And here we encounter what is, perhaps, the deepest reason for the present war between the sexes, appearing already in the literary world as well as in the labour market.