Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 7

It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be, and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive himself, or be deceived by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur. This kind of deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of love-and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond-is liable to occur in any relation of life. For most people, however, and those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts of life.[66]

Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to deception or disappointment with the larger question of a metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by Renouvier and Prat in La Nouvelle Monadologie (pp. 216 et seq.). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not, dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential error which presided over the creation of the idol, for the idol is only what in all things the ideal is. But to realize the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a degree of perfection that would have ent.i.tled us justly to claim so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws, are far greater than we deserved.

We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the pa.s.sions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare (in the Tempest) and of Calderon (in La Vida es Sueno), who felt that ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream. But short of that large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of s.e.x. If we admit the action of s.e.xual selection-as we can scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential accretions[67]-love has moulded the precise shape and color, the essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.

If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure-our social feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art-are, in some degree at least, also built up on the impulse of s.e.x, and would have been, if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than s.e.xual methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to refuse to accept the fact of love.

It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of the s.e.xual emotions for the moral life. "The pa.s.sions are the heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote Helvetius long since in De l'Esprit. "The activity of the mind depends on the activity of the pa.s.sions, and it is at the period of the pa.s.sions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or of genius." "What touches s.e.x," wrote Zola, "touches the centre of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of others has a s.e.xual origin, Professor Thomas argues (Psychological Review, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the altruistic side of life. "The appearance of s.e.x," Professor Woods Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution," Monist, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his Physiology of Mind, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete," says Nietzsche (Der Wille zur Macht, p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values: the lover is worth more, is stronger. In animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors, and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left over in poetry and music? L'Art pour l'art perhaps, the quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All the rest is created by love."

It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that s.e.xual love (including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to inquire.

It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of s.e.xual exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the refinements of s.e.xual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in his remarkable drama L'Abbesse de Jouarre, his conviction that, even from the point of view of chast.i.ty, love is, after all, the supreme thing in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde, the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life. "But will it always be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his own Mecanique Celeste, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love. One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be worthily filled-even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain." And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed her among the most distinguished of her s.e.x, pathetically wrote: "Why can no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say, is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote The Imitation of Christ or The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. And how many others!

[45]

Meditationes Piissimae de Cognitione Humanae Conditionis, Migne's Patrologia, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De Dignitate Animae et Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os et nares caeterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum numquam vidisti.... Attende, h.o.m.o, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam. Profecto fuit quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est h.o.m.o quam sperma fetidum, saccus stercorum, cibus vermium.... Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere pna, mori angustia?"

[46]

See (in Mignes' edition) S. Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis Collationes, lib. ii, cap. IX.

[47]

Duhren (Neue Forshungen uber die Marquis de Sade, pp. 432 et seq.) shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted, for instance, in Schopenhauer and De Sade.

[48]

In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these Studies, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the s.e.xual and excretory centres were fully dealt with.

[49]

"La Morale s.e.xuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907.

[50]

The above pa.s.sage, now slightly modified, originally formed an unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in The New Spirit, first issued in 1889.

[51]

Even in the ninth century, however, when the monastic movement was rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a treatise (Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est) to prove that Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her s.e.xual organs, and not, as some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible, through the more conventionally decent b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The s.e.xual organs were sanctified. "Spiritus sanctus ... et thalamum tanto dignum sponso sanctificavit et portam" (Achery, Spicilegium, vol. i, p. 55).

[52]

Paedagogus, lib. ii, cap. X. Elsewhere (id., lib. ii, Ch. VI) he makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.

[53]

See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien, pp. 112 et seq.

[54]

De Civitate Dei, lib. xxii, cap. XXIV. "There is no need," he says again (id., lib. xiv, cap. V) "that in our sins and vices we accuse the nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and degree the flesh is good."

[55]

St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, lib. xiv, cap. XXIII-XXVI. Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in Paradise human beings would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted Catholic doctrine.

[56]

W. Capitaine, Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien, pp. 112 et seq. Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity and no salvation. The soul itself is corporeal. He carries, indeed, his idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.

[57]

Rufinus, Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum, cap. XII.

[58]

Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.

[59]

Even in physical conformation the human s.e.xual organs, when compared with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see "The Mechanism of Detumescence," in the fifth volume of these Studies).

[60]

It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (Die s.e.xuelle Frage, p. 208), that the word "b.e.s.t.i.a.l" is generally used quite incorrectly in this connection. Indeed, not only for the higher, but also for the lower manifestation of the s.e.xual impulse, it would usually be more correct to use instead the qualification "human."

[61]

Loc. cit., Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907.

[62]

It has, however, become colored and suspect from an early period in the history of Christianity. St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, lib. xiv, cap. XV), while admitting that libido or l.u.s.t is merely the generic name for all desire, adds that, as specially applied to the s.e.xual appet.i.te, it is justly and properly mixed up with ideas of shame.

[63]

Hinton well ill.u.s.trates this feeling. "We call by the name of l.u.s.t," he declares in his MSS., "the most simple and natural desires. We might as well term hunger and thirst 'l.u.s.t' as so call s.e.x-pa.s.sion, when expressing simply Nature's prompting. We miscall it 'l.u.s.t,' cruelly libelling those to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder. For, by foolishly confounding Nature's demands with l.u.s.t, we insist upon restraint upon her."

[64]

Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis (lib. viii, Quaestio vii) had likewise puzzled over "the incredible desire of coitus," and asked how it was that "that divine animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body." It is noteworthy that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science, and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to the French mind.

[65]

Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii, pp. 608 et seq.

[66]

"Perhaps there is scarcely a man," wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798, Ch. XI), "who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again. The superiority of intellectual to s.e.xual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and essential."

[67]

The whole argument of the fourth volume of these Studies, on "s.e.xual Selection in Man," points in this direction.

[68]

"Perhaps most average men," Forel remarks (Die s.e.xuelle Frage, p. 307), "are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at most on the level of the gourmet, which is by no means necessarily an immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry."

CHAPTER V.

THE FUNCTION OF CHASt.i.tY.

Chast.i.ty Essential to the Dignity of Love-The Eighteenth Century Revolt Against the Ideal of Chast.i.ty-Unnatural Forms of Chast.i.ty-The Psychological Basis of Asceticism-Asceticism and Chast.i.ty as Savage Virtues-The Significance of Tahiti-Chast.i.ty Among Barbarous Peoples-Chast.i.ty Among the Early Christians-Struggles of the Saints with the Flesh-The Romance of Christian Chast.i.ty-Its Decay in Mediaeval Times-Auca.s.sin et Nicolette and the new Romance of Chaste Love-The Unchast.i.ty of the Northern Barbarians-The Penitentials-Influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation-The Revolt Against Virginity as a Virtue-The Modern Conception of Chast.i.ty as a Virtue-The Influences That Favor the Virtue of Chast.i.ty-Chast.i.ty as a Discipline-The Value of Chast.i.ty for the Artist-Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation-The Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chast.i.ty.

The supreme importance of chast.i.ty, and even of asceticism, has never at any time, or in any greatly vital human society, altogether failed of recognition. Sometimes chast.i.ty has been exalted in human estimation, sometimes it has been debased; it has frequently changed the nature of its manifestations; but it has always been there. It is even a part of the beautiful vision of all Nature. "The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind," said Th.o.r.eau with his fine extravagance. "To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in Nature." Without chast.i.ty it is impossible to maintain the dignity of s.e.xual love. The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in the last stages of degeneration. Chast.i.ty has for s.e.xual love an importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.

It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many men of high moral and intellectual distinction p.r.o.nounced very decidedly their condemnation of the ideal of chast.i.ty. The great Buffon refused to recognize chast.i.ty as an ideal and referred scornfully to "that kind of insanity which has turned a girl's virginity into a thing with a real existence," while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is "the most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature." Blake, though he seems always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense, felt nothing but contempt for chast.i.ty, and sometimes confers a kind of religious solemnity on the idea of unchast.i.ty. Sh.e.l.ley, who may have been unwise in s.e.xual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often seems to a.s.sociate religion and morality, not with chast.i.ty, but with unchast.i.ty, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69]

But all these men-with other men of high character who have p.r.o.nounced similar opinions-were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional forms of chast.i.ty. They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.