I will never admit that we should speak of _equal_ rights in the love of man and woman: there are no such equal rights. The reason is that man and woman understand something different by the term love,--and it belongs to the conditions of love in both sexes that the one sex does _not_ presuppose the same feeling, the same conception of "love," in the other sex. What woman understands by love is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely devotion) of soul and body, without any motive, without any reservation, rather with shame and terror at the thought of a devotion restricted by clauses or associated with conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is precisely a _faith:_ woman has no other.--Man, when he loves a woman, _wants_ precisely this love from her; he is consequently, as regards himself, furthest removed from the prerequisites of feminine love; granted, however, that there should also be men to whom on their side the demand for complete devotion is not unfamiliar,--well, they are really--not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes thereby a slave: a woman, however, who loves like a woman becomes thereby a _more perfect_ woman.... Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the conceptions of "possession" and "possessed"; consequently she wants one who _takes,_ who does not offer and give himself away, but who reversely is rather to be made richer in "himself"--by the increase of power, happiness and faith which the woman herself gives to him. Woman gives herself, man takes her.--I do not think one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract, or with the very best will to do justice, however desirable it may be to avoid bringing the severe, frightful, enigmatical, and unmoral elements of this antagonism constantly before our eyes. For love, regarded as complete, great, and full, is nature, and as nature, is to all eternity something "unmoral."--_Fidelity_ is accordingly included in woman's love, it follows from the definition thereof; with man fidelity _may_ readily result in consequence of his love, perhaps as gratitude or idiosyncrasy of taste, and so-called elective affinity, but it does not belong to the _essence_ of his love--and indeed so little, that one might almost be entitled to speak of a natural opposition between love and fidelity in man, whose love is just a desire to possess, and _not_ a renunciation and giving away; the desire to possess, however, comes to an end every time with the possession. 321-323 Everything that is thought, versified, painted and composed, yea, even built and moulded, belongs either to monologic art, or to art before witnesses. Under the latter there is also to be included the apparently monologic art which involves the belief in God, the whole lyric of prayer; because for a pious man there is no solitude,--we, the godless, have been the first to devise this invention. 328