Page:B20442294.djvu/270

242 who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only one case of shamelessness—a declaration of love the sincerity of which a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their readiness to believe such protestations.

The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in aesthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract truth which is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good which furnishes the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of the good is established by the determination to link the will with the good. In aesthetics beauty is created by love ; there is no determining law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is no abstract, no super-individual "right" taste).

All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the requirements of love; and so the beauty of woman is not apart from love, it is not an objective to which love is directed, but woman's beauty is the love of man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing.

Just as hatefulness comes from hating, so love creates beauty. This is only another way of expressing the fact that beauty has as little to do with the sexual impulse as the sexual impulse has to do with love. Beauty is something that can neither be felt, touched, nor mixed with other things; it is only at a distance that it can be plainly discerned, and when it is approached it withdraws itself. The sexual impulse which seeks for sexual union with woman is a denial of such beauty; the woman who has been possessed and enjoyed, will never again be worshipped for her beauty.