being, differs very essentially from either of these types.  The profounder the emotional depth of the soul, the greater is the difficulty of finding a complementary being.  The erotically undifferentiated nature (whose intellectual level may, however, be a high one) finds, and in case of loss replaces, the complementary being comparatively easily.  The difficulty both of finding and of substitution increases in proportion to the differentiation and the intensity of feeling.  The true erotic, once he has found his complementary being, is overwhelmed by the will to the perfect realisation of his passion.  It appears with the unanswerable logic of the unique and final, carrying in its train supreme happiness and infinite sorrow.  A love able to deliver a soul from its solitude is rare; once there, the whole world is as nothing to it.  All life is embraced and brought under its spell. (In this connection I need only mention Michelangelo.) A lover of this type surrenders himself to love unconditionally—­love shall completely annihilate, completely renew him.

But it is just in this overwhelming love that the impassable barrier becomes apparent.  The lovers are two beings and not one indivisible entity.  The fundamental fact of individuality stands between them as the last obstacle to their complete union.  The more intense the emotion, the more desperately it tilts against this barrier, against the impossibility of complete mutual absorption, and the more passionately it demands another common form of existence.  Individuality and the eternal duality of being is felt as a curse.  The lovers cannot endure the thought of continuing life as distinct personalities.

The great erotic who, against all expectation, finds the being to whom he can surrender himself unreservedly and with a sense of immortality, discovers within himself the supreme and only happiness, and by that very fact has himself become the source of his unhappiness.  Personality, the greatest gift bestowed upon the children of man, has flashed its light upon the tragedy of life:  solitude, eternal duality.  The soul recognises with unspeakable dismay in its own fundamental principle the cause of its isolation and the impossibility of final union with the beloved.  The supreme value of European civilisation, the value of complete personality, into whose gradual development and perfecting all human forces had been built, and in whose interest countless sacrifices had been made, knows itself as the cause of supreme suffering, as an element which ought on no account to exist.  Not its completion, but its annihilation is what should really be desired.  We have here arrived at the very confines of humanity.  If the great thinker has found the boundaries of all knowledge in the limitations of the intellect, and is thus the representative of the human mind with its unattainable goal:  knowledge of the secret of being, the erotic has gone a step further.  He has found the boundary in the very perfection of