The Evolution of Love Part 19

It is obvious that even an equilibrium between s.e.xuality and love cannot always be established, while a genuine and complete unification is very unusual and may, perhaps, be called utopian. In the previous chapters I have dealt with the blending of both elements in the highest form of eroticism; in the following I will attempt to throw light on some of the princ.i.p.al phenomena resulting from a defective union of s.e.xuality and love, phenomena which I am convinced have never been correctly interpreted. I allude to perversions which are not inherently pathological, although they are as a rule only observed and described in their pathological form.

The fundamental form of so-called sadism may be discovered in an erotic type which I will call the seeker of love. A lover of this type is characterised by an unappeasable longing for pure, spiritual love; he pa.s.ses from woman to woman in the hope of realising this desire, but owing to his own material disposition he is unable to do so. Time after time he succ.u.mbs to s.e.xual promptings. Thus groping, frequently quite unconsciously--for a fict.i.tious being, he hates every woman whose fate it is to rouse his desire, for each one cheats him out of that which he seeks. A genuine illusionist, he knows nothing of the woman of flesh and blood, and continues seeking his ideal, only to be again and again disappointed. He blames every woman he conquers for what is really his own insufficiency; he despises her or revenges himself on her, punishes and ill-treats her; we recognise the true Don Juan and his morbid caricature, the s.a.d.i.s.t. But even the most brutal representative of this type may still be psychologically described as "a man who seeks spiritual love in woman after woman and, finding only s.e.xuality, revenges himself on her." Quite a number of men harbour s.a.d.i.s.tic feelings for only one woman, and that the one to whom they owe their great disillusionment. Doubtless many men have almost lost the psychical roots of their perversions and are completely involved in physical acts.

There is nothing remarkable in this fact; it occurs in every sphere of human life. The vague instinct of revenge on woman animates also, though perhaps unconsciously, the pathological s.a.d.i.s.t.

There is one thing which the seeker of love and the woman-wors.h.i.+pper have in common: both seek a higher ideal far beyond the woman of every-day life; but while the wors.h.i.+pper safeguards the purity of his feeling by putting the greatest possible distance between him and the object of his wors.h.i.+p (and is therefore never disappointed), the seeker of love, blinded by the illusion that he has at last found the object of his quest, draws every woman towards him and again and again discovers that he is nothing but a sensualist. Every fresh conquest destroys his dream afresh, and he revenges himself, if he is a Don Juan, by despising and disgracing the unfortunate victim, and if he is a s.a.d.i.s.t, by maltreating her. And yet he never entirely loses his illusion; he craves for complete satisfaction, and as he is incapable of self-knowledge, he never abandons the hope of meeting the woman he seeks. He differs very little from the type represented by Sordello, who loved one woman spiritually, but regarded all the others from the standpoint of s.e.x. It is the tragedy of Don Juan to revolt from the low erotic sphere which is his portion, and where he rules supreme, and for ever to aspire to a realm from which he is shut out. He is convinced that with the help of a woman he may redeem himself--and sinks deeper and deeper into the slough of his own sensuality. He becomes malevolent, cruel and callous; the pleasure whose slave he is repels him:

From craving to enjoyment thus I reel, And in enjoyment languish for desire.

He is insatiable, but not as the primitive hedonist, whose natural element is pleasure, but because he again and again mistakes pleasure for love. He knows only "women," and thus he sins against personality and the love which is the outcome of personality.

The opinion that Don Juan is no more than a votary of pleasure is not worthy of criticism; the famous Casanova, for instance, has nothing in common with him. Casanova was a sensualist without psychical complexity and without tragedy. His sole endeavour was to wring the utmost measure of enjoyment out of life. He knew the woman of reality and did not waste his time in running after phantoms. In his old age he revelled in the after-taste and settled down to write his memoirs. Don Juan, on the contrary, has such a loathing for all the women he betrays, that he hardly remembers them, and certainly has the strongest disinclination to evoke their memory. Casanova was an entirely unmetaphysical and unproblematical nature. His philosophy is clearly expressed in the preface to his Memoirs: "I always regarded the enjoyment of sensual pleasures as my princ.i.p.al object; I never knew a more important one."

Casanova, who, strange to say, enjoys such high erotic honours, was merely an ordinary, very successful man of the world, and is of no importance to the subject in hand. But even the greater and wilder Vicomte de Valmont (the hero of the famous novel of Choderlos de Laclos) is in spite of all his art and _esprit_ and perverse principles no seeker of love and no Don Juan, but a fop and a braggart, seducing women in order to boast of his success. He is moreover only a representative of the bored Upper Ten of the _ancien regime_, and not by any means unique.

Thoughtful critics contend that Don Juan was an autocrat, a destroyer, a criminal nature with satanic tendencies, bent on the enslavement of women, on their social and moral death; that conquest only, not enjoyment, was his pa.s.sion. I do not altogether reject this interpretation, but it fastens too exclusively on the external and the obvious, and overlooks the essential. What is the reason of his preposterous procedure? Is he really actuated by the evil desire to injure the women he woos? Such a motive may occur occasionally (the Vicomte de Valmont was so const.i.tuted), but it cannot be regarded as the guiding principle of a life--and above everything its pettiness is the exact reverse of so great and demoniacal a character as Don Juan. Were he conqueror in the highest sense, then--ascetic and proud--he would be content with the mere consciousness of victory. But his whole att.i.tude belies the idea of a conqueror; he is not in the least interested in the women to whom he makes love. They are as necessary to him as "the air he breathes," but they are unable to give him what he seeks. At the moment of disappointment he abandons them in disgust, innocent of any despotic desires (which would pre-suppose interest). As far as he is concerned, women exist only for the purpose of quickening something in his soul.

But his soul remains dead; divine love has no part in him, he cannot be saved and is doomed to eternal d.a.m.nation.

But what is the reason why women cannot resist him? Let us first settle the point as to why women are attracted to men. I will answer this question briefly, and though my answer may appear dogmatical, it need not therefore be wrong. Women know very little of man, but there is one thing they feel with unfailing certainty, and that is whether their s.e.x is of great or of small significance to him. (I am only alluding to the general effect of men on women, not to genuine personal love which is always incommensurable.) The greater the importance a man attaches to women, the more readily do they respond to his influence. They are attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual or physical qualities. Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much, everything. It is as if they were compelled to throw themselves into the chasm of his vacuity--every fresh victim with the fond hope of filling it--but all of them perish. And yet, at the moment of their defeat they are supremely happy, for they experience the full intensity of his pa.s.sion and the boundlessness of his longing. The erotic craving of a man simply means that women are to him the most important thing in life.

Women instinctively yield to that man who most eagerly desires them. The coa.r.s.e sensualist, to whom all women are alike, attracts sensual women, not exactly because they find in him the satisfaction of their craving, but because they themselves act on him indiscriminately. But a woman will adapt herself with the greatest ease to the needs of the differentiated erotic (for instance, she will become really sentimental to please the man who prefers sentimental women), for she loves to give herself to the man who most desires her and as he desires her.

Don Juan, animated by illimitable erotic yearning, is therefore the undisputed master of the other s.e.x. He has the power of bestowing absolute happiness, even if only for a brief hour, because in his boundless love (which is projected on anything but her) a woman receives the supreme value. Maybe he would be saved if a woman denied herself to him--maybe he would cease to be a seeker of love and become a wors.h.i.+pper, for he could not refuse to believe in the woman who rejected him; but it is his fate that no woman he woos can resist him, that all throw themselves into his arms without an exception and without a struggle.

Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes s.e.xuality--his portion--and yearns for a higher form of love. He shares this att.i.tude with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover.

The slave of love imitates the att.i.tude of the wors.h.i.+pper, but he infallibly sinks into the s.e.xual sphere. What the psychopathist since Kraft-Ebbing designates as masochism, is the pathological degeneration of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid. Certainly it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his pa.s.sionate admiration is roused by an imperious woman, who pa.s.ses him by like a queen without even noticing his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing calls this pageism) described so beautifully in Dostoievsky's novel, _A Young Hero_, and fairly common among troubadours and minnesingers. (I need only mention Ulrich von Lichtenstein.) There are numerous degrees of this feeling--we frequently come across it in the novels of Dostoievsky, Jacobsen, Strindberg, D'Annunzio, and others--but the essence of it is always contained in the fact that the man, although yearning to wors.h.i.+p the beloved woman, cannot maintain himself in the sphere of spiritual love, and aspires to direct physical contact. His att.i.tude, which closely imitates purely spiritual love, cannot be other than s.e.xual. The blending of love and s.e.xuality together with the incapacity of effecting a real synthesis, the confusion of value and pleasure is most clearly shown in the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t--far more clearly than in the case of the (rare) seeker of love. The outward modes preferred by the individual are a matter of indifference; for the most part they are symbolical acts, indicating the lover's inferiority and the loftiness and power of his mistress. What is really of importance is the spiritual att.i.tude which induces him to commit these strange acts, and in these we find the characteristic att.i.tude of the woman-wors.h.i.+pper: that of the slave before his queen. The slave of love is a sensualist incapable of approaching woman in a normally manly, instinctive and natural way, but requiring the pose of the spiritual wors.h.i.+pper. One might be tempted to believe that he harboured the secret wish to atone for his incapacity of feeling a pure love by being degraded and ill-treated. Thus from a human point of view the slave of love is a higher type than the seeker of love; all his transgressions, the fault of his morbid disposition, come home to him; he takes the blame of his sin upon his own shoulders, while the seeker of love revenges himself on his victims for his own shortcomings. The seeker of love is by nature polygamous, while the slave of love is, as a rule, monogamous (and consequently has little success with the opposite s.e.x). Both aspire to a union of sensual and spiritual eroticism, but in both cases the union is a failure. All the repulsive and terrible manifestations of these perversions which have been recorded, can easily be shown to fit my theory. In psychological research it is merely a question of selecting the great types from the ma.s.s of phenomena and determining them correctly.

The so-called _fetichist_, too, whose pa.s.sion is roused by indifferent objects which belonged, or might belong, to the beloved, or in fact to any woman, is a variant of the slave of love. The cla.s.sical representative of fetichism is the mediaeval knight who carried a handkerchief, a glove, or any other article of clothing belonging to his lady, next to his heart, thus believing himself proof against evil influences. There we see already spiritual love groping for material objects in order to gain earthly support; not every man is a Dante, not every man is capable of keeping his soul free from the taint of this earthly sphere. But even the "plait-cutter," so well known to the reader of newspapers, the collector of garters, and similar desperadoes, require a relic, a fetich which they apparently wors.h.i.+p. To the same category belongs the idolatrous cult which some men, especially artists--but also madmen--practise with female pictures and statues (more especially with heads). In this case the fundamental feeling of the love of beauty, which we know as an essential factor of purely spiritual eroticism, is made to serve sensual purposes. The desired illusion of spiritual wors.h.i.+p is facilitated, and is protected from self-revelation, owing to the fact that a painted head rouses in the normal individual no pa.s.sion, but inspires him with purely spiritual sentiments.

I have briefly touched on this subject because my theory of the two roots of eroticism permits of a new, and in my opinion plausible, explanation of erotic perversions; one might even go as far as to say that the existence of perversions follows as a necessary consequence; that they must exist because it obviously cannot _always_ be possible to maintain a harmonious balance of sensuality and love. This chapter is therefore a necessary supplement to the previous ones in which the perfection of modern love is dealt with. The seeker of love and the slave of love are phenomena of dualistic eroticism incapable of attaining to unity. For this reason they neither existed in antiquity, nor do we find genuine examples of them in the female s.e.x. All female perversions closely examined are hysteria--that is to say, want of inner balance--in various forms; a woman's subjection to the will of a man is in very many instances a natural symptom, and cannot be regarded as perverse. And thus we again perceive that the eroticism of woman is more harmonious and natural than that of the eternally groping and eternally erring man.

CHAPTER IV

THE REVENGE OF s.e.xUALITY

_The Demoniacal and the Obscene_

In conclusion I will attempt to elucidate a group of phenomena which play a part, important though often ignored, in the emotional life of the present day. They are related to the subject under discussion, inasmuch as they, too, are the result of a lack of harmony between sensuousness and love. As long as sensuousness is felt and understood as a natural element, and one which does not under normal circ.u.mstances enter consciousness as a distinct principle, the emotional sphere which may be designated as demoniacal-s.e.xual and obscene, does not exist. Not until sensuousness is confronted by a higher principle, a now solely acknowledged spiritual-divine principle, will natural life, and particularly normal s.e.xuality, be stigmatised as low and unG.o.dly, even as demoniacal. In proportion as the conception of G.o.d became more spiritual and divine, the conception of the devil became more horrible; the higher the soul soared, the deeper sank the body. This philosophy of pure spirituality was expressed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the following words: "Oh, soul, stamped with the image of G.o.d, adorned with His semblance, espoused to faith, endowed with His spirit, redeemed by His blood, the compeer of angels, invested with reason--what hast thou in common with the flesh, for which thou must suffer so much?... And yet it is thy dearest companion! Behold, there will come a day when it shall be a miserable, pallid corpse, food for worms! For however beautifully it may be adorned, yet it is nothing but fles.h.!.+" The man of the later Middle Ages, and especially the cleric, who was completely dominated by the contrast of the ascetic and the s.e.xual, feared the devil more than he loved G.o.d, and regarded the sensual temptations which beset his excited, superst.i.tious and eternally unsatisfied imagination as sent by the devil. The navete of sensuality had pa.s.sed away for ever; as goodness was looked upon as divine and supernatural, nature and natural instincts were condemned. Man was torn asunder.

But the devil was not only feared, he was also wors.h.i.+pped. A devil-wors.h.i.+p, the details of which have been little studied, existed from the tenth to the fourteenth century (when it reached its climax), side by side with the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d. The greater the dread of heresy and witchcraft, the greater became the number of men who, despairing of salvation, prostrated themselves before the devil, whom they seemed unable to escape (a single evil thought was sufficient to doom their souls to eternal d.a.m.nation), in the hope that he would at least save their bodies from the stake and vouchsafe them the pleasures of this world. Satan promised his wors.h.i.+ppers unlimited pleasure; he became the redeemer of those whom the clergy persecuted. It is a.s.serted that his wors.h.i.+p consisted in an obscene parody of the Ma.s.s; according to Michelet, the body of a female wors.h.i.+pper served as the altar on which a toad was consecrated and partaken of instead of the Host. The adept solemnly renounced Jesus and did homage to Satan by kissing his image.

Asceticism and libertinism always go hand in hand. They are convertible principles rending their victim. _Temptation_ is the fundamental motif of this condition. The devil was believed to send out his servants to win new souls; monks were visited by demons in the shape of a voluptuous woman, the _succubus_; Satan himself, or one of his emissaries, disguised as a fas.h.i.+onable gentleman, the _incubus_, appeared to the nuns. Undoubtedly the dreams of over-excited men and women played a very important part in this connection; many hysterical women felt the devil's kiss and embrace. All these women were themselves convinced of the truth of their hallucinations and imaginings, and once the belief in witchcraft was firmly established (in the thirteenth century) the obvious atonement for their hysteria was the stake.

The fear of witches, which existed parallel with the love of the Madonna, was typical of the declining Middle Ages. The first Christian centuries knew neither the Lady of Heaven in the later meaning of the word, nor did they know anything of witches. In the reign of Charlemagne the penalty for the belief in witchcraft was death. At all times man has exhibited a tendency to see in woman either a celestial or an infernal being, and nowhere was this tendency more strongly developed than in the soul of the mediaeval dualist: he created the beloved and adored Queen of Heaven, the mediator between G.o.d and humanity and, as her counterpart the witch, the despised and dreaded seducer, a being between man and devil. Powerless to effect a reconciliation between spiritual love and sensuous pleasure, he required two distinct female types as personifications of the two directions of his desire; love and the pleasure of the senses could have nothing in common, and once the highest value was realised in the spiritual love of woman, pleasure could not appear otherwise than degraded, sinful and diabolical. In this respect, also, woman submitted without a murmur to the dictates of male will.

Mary and the devil became more and more the real hostile powers of the thirteenth century; the cla.s.sical time of woman-wors.h.i.+p was also the climax of the fear of the devil and witchcraft. The Dominican monks who, above all other orders, contributed to the spread of the cult of Mary, proceeded, soon after the establishment of the Inquisition, against the witches, the enemies of Mary. In the second half of the thirteenth century the persecution of heresy gradually gave way to the persecution of witchcraft.

I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the demoniacally-s.e.xual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. Many people of the present day will not be able to understand this feeling, for it pre-supposes a completely inharmonious emotional life.

The consciousness of the obscene is allied to the conception of the demoniacal; it accompanies modern synthetic love as its temptation and its shadow. In personal love sensuality and soul are no longer independent, contrasted principles; personality, taking the spiritual as its foundation, includes the sensuous. In this highest stage all eroticism not hallowed by mutual affection is felt as unpardonable. The purely s.e.xual principle continues to exist, but whenever it appears in its impersonal and brutal crudity as an element hostile to personality, it creates the consciousness of the obscene. The obscene is, therefore, the purely s.e.xual, not in its nave normality, but as a force inimical to a value, as a rule to the value of personality. The obscene expresses scorn and hatred for personal love. It is the seduction of the primitive which is no longer something _earlier_, but something baser (for every age must gauge all things by its own standard). The aesthetic principle--in this connection the sense of the beauty of the human form--so powerful an element in nave sensuality as well as in every other form of eroticism, is excluded, because in this particular condition the beauty of the human body is not objectively realised, but is looked upon with the eyes of the senses. The moment personality is acknowledged as the only decisive factor in erotic life, chaotic impersonal sensuality stands condemned. The obscene is the darker aspect of modern love, and without modern love it could not exist. Its essence is negative, is the tendency to caricature and mock the highest form of love. The photograph of a nude woman is not obscene; but if the face is hidden, and thus the personal moment intentionally eliminated in favour of the generic element, it approaches the obscene. This accounts for the widely felt pleasure in obscene pictures; the beholder is not personally engaged, he can enjoy these pictures without taking upon his shoulders any kind of responsibility. Even that minimum of respect which the very dregs of humanity may claim is not required of him. The picture is capable of affording pleasure without claiming a grain of human kindness. Thus it would seem that sensual pleasure is possible without any sacrifice of the inwardly professed higher eroticism, a sacrifice which might be a bar to a primitive relations.h.i.+p with a woman of flesh and blood. Actually, however, it is not possible, for with the surrender to the base source of enjoyment, the spiritual position is abandoned, and personally conceived humanity inwardly annihilated.

It follows from the foregoing that the fascination of the obscene can only be fully felt by one who has completely acknowledged the principle of personality in eroticism, and who has also latent within him the possibility of erotic dualism. The more highly evolved the emotional life of a man (all these considerations apply only to a man in whom the possibility of dualism is latent), the more will he realise the purely s.e.xual, the emphasis of the element of pleasure, as something unseemly and disagreeable; something which he ought to deny himself, but which attracts him with the irresistible fascination of the obscene. The man who surrenders himself navely to sensuality does not realise it as obscene, but the man who, conscious of his higher concept, strives against it, experiences the reaction of sensuality with the full force of its perverse seduction. Even if only for a brief s.p.a.ce, he annihilates the higher element and gives himself up to the pleasure of the base and degraded.

In this connection we are face to face with the strange but still logical fact, that a man who has completely attained to the third stage of love, feels even the purely spiritual love as odious in its incompleteness. It strikes him as unnatural and forced, a feeling which must, however, not be confused with the ordinary contempt of spiritual love.

Primitively const.i.tuted man knows only undifferentiated s.e.xuality. He enjoys the nude, and sees no difference between a Venus by t.i.tian and an ordinary photograph of a nude figure; the aesthete, and more especially the artist, can never understand that a work of art may be sensually stimulating. That it may be so will always be bluntly denied by an individual capable of enjoying a beautiful form, but to the uncultivated mind the picture of the female body will only evoke memories of pleasure. This feeling, however, is quite distinct from the obscene; it is neither hostile to the higher spiritual life, nor is it criminal; it is natural and harmonious. But the same feeling may become obscene if a man, aware of higher aesthetic values, ignores art and enjoys the picture merely as a representation of a nude figure. Here, too, the seduction lies in a demoniacal element, namely in the destruction of the aesthetic value. The destructive characteristic of the obscene wars against all higher conceptions; it is the revenge of chaotic s.e.x deposed by a higher principle, and has the special charm of secret wrong-doing.

I might go even further, and maintain that because modern love does not admit pleasure as its foundation and content, and because the craving for pleasure is deeply rooted in human nature, love favours to a high degree the desire to reserve a sphere for pleasure distinct from personal love. This region is the obscene, and one might prophesy that it will grow in proportion as the principle of personal love acquires dominion; for pleasure will always need an undisturbed retreat untroubled by higher demands. This can only be found in the sphere of the obscene in which the element of personality is entirely eliminated.

Modern man is beset by another peculiar temptation. The beauty of woman, which in the days of the past was regarded as sacred, can be made a means of pleasure, and thus drawn from the realm of values into the realm of sensuality. This is a breach with the principle of personal love, for to the latter the beauty of a woman is so much part and parcel of the whole personality that it cannot be enjoyed separately, that indeed it can hardly be noticed as a distinct element. This cleavage has become so nearly universal that we are hardly conscious of its profound perversity. It is the arch-sin of all higher eroticism to realise beauty not as the undetachable and self-evident outward form of a beloved soul, but as a means of heightening pleasure. Although in its essence it is the same thing as the examination of a work of art merely for the sake of the pleasure it affords to the senses, the offence is here aggravated because personality is involved. This degradation of the higher values, whether of nature, art, beauty, knowledge, kindness, religion or the human soul, to serve the ends of sensual pleasure is the expression of a perversity which is possibly the most radical and characteristic of our age. To-day the soul of a woman has frequently the same effect on man as her physical beauty; he enjoys it as a subtile charm instead of respecting it as a mystery.

I can hardly expect to make my meaning quite clear to the mult.i.tude, but the tendency to enjoy beauty of form or soul as a distinct element represents a rupture with the principle of synthetic love, the love which does not separate but realises the personality of the beloved as an indivisible ent.i.ty. The enjoyment of beauty as a separate element pre-supposes a conscious, spiritual division, not only of the beloved, but also of the lover, and is therefore the destruction of the principle of unity. Aesthete and libertine alike sink to the lower level of pleasure, and their emotions become obscene. There is no question of a division when Tristan in his vision of Isolde exclaims, "How beautiful thou art!" For great love can create the beauty of the beloved out of its own soul.

Prudery is based on a similar duality. It expresses a consciousness that the nude can only be alluring, obscene, "indecent," and should therefore be feared and avoided. It is the defensive weapon of s.e.xually excited, for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely s.e.xual, whose sphere they often extend amazingly. Prudery conceives s.e.xuality as a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness. Such division is alien to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of inner discord, is clearly indicated. We may take it that the obscene which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, inwardly discordant women who try to take shelter behind prudery. To the normal woman the obscene does not exist as a spiritual principle; she turns with a feeling of displeasure from all the lower s.e.xual manifestations, and even finds them absurd. The elimination of personality of eroticism, the charm of which is felt by even the most highly differentiated man, has always been foreign to woman--she lacks the duality of erotic emotion which man is slowly and laboriously striving to overcome--a still further proof of the unbroken, synthetic emotion of woman.

CONCLUSION

THE PSYCHOGENETIC LAW

_The Individual as an Epitome of the Human Race_

The biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel teaches us that the human embryo pa.s.ses through all the stages of development traversed by its ancestors in their evolution from the lower forms of the animal world. Although each successive stage completely replaces the preceding one, the latter is there as its organic supposition. Man is not born as a human being until he has travelled over the princ.i.p.al portions of the road to evolution. This law, which establishes the natural connection of the individual with the whole chain of organisms, is continued in a psychogenetic law, not founded on the heredity of the blood but on the heredity of culture (and therefore quite independent of the doctrine of the origin of species). In the course of his development the individual repeats the psycho-spiritual stages through which the species has pa.s.sed. But while the human body cannot sustain life until it is perfectly developed, the degrees of psychic perfection vary very considerably; not every individual reaches perfection; most men attain to some degree, but there are others who do not even acquire the rudiments.

It would be an attractive and grateful task to point out the halting-places of the human race in the life of the individual; to fix the moment when for the first time in his life the child says "I"--a moment which usually occurs in his second year, and represents the humanisation of the race, the great intuition, when primitive man, divining his spiritual nature, severed himself from the external world; to perceive the child--like its primitive ancestors in their day--treating all weaker creatures which fall into its hands with almost b.e.s.t.i.a.l cruelty; to watch the boyish games reflecting the period when the nations lived on war and the chase, their eagerness to draw up rules and regulations and create gradations of rank and marks of distinction.

I am not able to carry out such a task in detail and, moreover, as I am dealing with the erotic life only, such a proceeding would be out of place here.

The psychogenetic law, then, comes to this: Every well-developed male individual of the present day successively pa.s.ses through the three stages of love through which the European races have pa.s.sed. The three stages are not traceable in all men with infallible certainty, there are numerous individuals whose development in this respect has been arrested, but in the emotional life of every highly differentiated member of the human race they are clearly distinguishable, and the greater the wealth and strength of a soul, the more perfectly will it reflect the history of the race. The evolution of every well-endowed individual presents a rough sketch of the history of civilisation; it has its prehistoric, its cla.s.sical, its mediaeval, and its modern period. Many men remain imprisoned in the past; others are fragmentary, or appear to be suspended in mid-air, rootless. The spirit of humanity has lived through the past and overcome it, so as to be able to create its future.

The gynecocratic stage actually survives to this day in the nursery.

Here the mother rules supreme; the father is an intruder, the brothers are dominated by their sisters, often their juniors. Women mature at an earlier age than men; this a.s.sertion applies with equal force to individual and s.e.x in connection with the history of civilisation. After he has left the nursery, there follows in the life of the boy a period during which he a.s.sociates only with his school-friends, shuns the society of his mother and sisters, and is ashamed of his female relatives. This represents the revival of the men's unions of remote antiquity in the life of the individual of the present day.

At the period of p.u.b.erty the s.e.xual instinct makes itself felt for the first time; as a rule, if its nature is not recognised, it is accompanied by restlessness and depression. I do not believe that the instinct is, as soon as it appears, directed to the other s.e.x, or anything else outside the individual. This fact cannot be explained by want of opportunity, shyness or bad example; there is a positive reason for it; the longing for a member of the other s.e.x is still unfelt.

Between his twentieth and thirtieth year a man is often dominated by an enthusiastic spiritual love quite unconnected with the sensuality which has. .h.i.therto ruled his emotions. I will not elaborate the growth of this love and the new feelings which arise in connection with it; just as in the remote past the sense of personality was born as the centre of a new consciousness, so the individual now undergoes a period of purification and regeneration; through the love for his mistress he discovers his inmost self, of which, until now, he had been practically ignorant. The generative, undifferentiated impulse is supplanted by the love for an individual and stigmatised as base and contemptible. Guincelli's words characterising the second erotic stage of the race: _Amor e cor gentil sono una cosa_, to-day apply to the second stage in the life of the individual. It also occurs that in the heart of a man whom reality has failed to satisfy an ideal woman gradually wins life and shape.

Sometimes it is the idealised counterpart of an actual woman, but not infrequently it is a vague, unsubstantial shadow. Here we have the deification of the woman reproduced in the heart of the individual. To ill.u.s.trate my point, I will quote the very pertinent conversation between Foldal, the embittered old clerk, and John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen).

_Borkman_: Indeed! Can you show me one who is any good?

_Foldal_: That's just the point. The few women I've known are no good at all.

_Borkman_: (with a sneer) What's the good of them if you don't know them?

_Foldal_ (excitedly): Don't say that, John Gabriel! Isn't it a magnificent, an enn.o.bling thought, to know that somewhere, far away, never mind where, the true woman lives?