Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/326

312 the collection and transferring of the pre-existing general attraction to the other sex, to a certain incarnation of it, ordinarily the first with whom one has an opportunity to become well acquainted. By this I mean chaste women and honorable men, as I repeat expressly. I am not referring to women who have a disposition to wantonness, nor to men born with a superficial, sensual temperament} whose number is far larger than the conventional moralists like to admit. Unconditional fidelity is not an attribute of human nature. It is no physiological companion phenomenon of love. That we exact it, is an outcome of our egotism. The individual wishes to reign entirely alone in the heart of the beloved, to fill it completely, to see only his own reflection in its mirror, because this effect upon another is his highest sphere of activity, his most powerful out-living, as selfishness or vanity can conceive of no more perfect gratification than the observation of such a phenomenon. As man feels himself a complete individual most profoundly and thoroughly, when he has conquered some antagonist in a free single combat, strength pitted against strength, man against man, he thus appreciates his own individuality most intensively and at the same time delightfully, when he knows himself to be the complete possessor of another individual. To exact loyalty is thus nothing else than the wish to extend the limits of one's own personality into another and to rejoice in their compass; jealousy is the intensely painful recognition of the limitations to this extension. We can therefore be jealous, without being ourselves in love, as we can wish to surpass a competitor in the race, without hating him personally; in both cases the point is to become conscious of ourselves as superior individuals, thus gratifying our vanity; it is a question of superiority, of strength, of physical training; and thus we exact