apotheosis of this perfect love Lucka finds in the _Liebestod_ (the
death of the lovers in the ecstasy of love), in Wagner's _Tristan und
Isolde_.

An interesting chapter on erotic aberrations, the demoniacal and the
obscene, completes the third part of the book.

There may be much in Lucka's theories which will rouse the scepticism of
the monists; some of his deductions may appear to his readers a little
strained, but no thinking man or woman can read his brilliant
_Conclusion_ without denying him the tribute of sincere admiration. In
this last chapter he applies Haeckel's biogenetic law to the domain of
the spirit. As the human embryo passes through the principal stages of
the development of the individual from lower forms of life, so the
growing male must pass through the stages of psychical development
through which the race has passed. The gynecocratic government of
prehistoric time is revived in the nursery, where the mother rules
supreme and the sisters dominate. The normal, healthy school-boy,
preferring the company of his school-fellows to all others, shunning his
mother and sisters, ashamed of his female relatives, is the modern
individual representative of those early leagues and unions of young men
who opposed matriarchy and finally brought about its overthrow and the
establishment of male government. The promiscuous sexuality
characteristic of adolescence reproduces the first, merely sexual, stage
of the erotic life of the race in the life of the individual. As a rule
this phase is followed by a period of woman-worship; love has conquered
the sexual instinct and the latter is felt as base and degrading.
Atavism is not so much the persistence of the earlier, as the absence of
the later stages of psychical development.