III
Yet what we consider our highest activities arise out of what we are accustomed to regard as the lowest. That is, indeed, merely a necessary result of evolution; bipeds like ourselves spring out of many-limbed creatures whom we should now regard as little better than vermin, and the adult human creature whose eyes, as he sometimes imagines, are fixed on the stars, was a few years earlier merely a small animal crawling on all fours. The impulse of the philosopher, of the man of science, of any ordinary person who sometimes thinks about seemingly abstract or disinterested questions—we must include the whole range of the play of thought in response to the stimulus of curiosity—may seem at the first glance to be a quite secondary and remote product of the great primary instincts. Yet it is not difficult to bring this secondary impulse into direct relation with the fundamental primary instincts, even, and perhaps indeed chiefly, with the instinct of sex. On the mental side—which is not, of course, its fundamental side—the sexual instinct is mainly, perhaps solely, a reaction to the stimulus of curiosity. Beneath that mental surface the really active force is a physiologically based instinct urgent towards action, but the boy or girl who first becomes conscious of the mental stimulus is unaware of the instinct it springs from, and may even disregard as unimportant its specific physiological manifestations. The child is only conscious of new curiosities, and these it persistently seeks to satisfy at any available or likely source of information, aided by the strenuous efforts of its own restlessly active imagination. It is in exactly the same position as the metaphysician, or the biologist, or any thinker who is faced by complex and yet unsolved problems. And the child is at first baffled by just the same kind of obstacles, due, not like those of the thinker, to the silence of recalcitrant Nature, but to the silence of parents and teachers, or to their deliberate efforts to lead him astray.
Where do babies come from? That is perhaps for many children the earliest scientific problem that is in this way rendered so difficult of solution. No satisfying solution comes from the sources of information to which the child is wont to appeal. He is left to such slight imperfect observations as he can himself make; on such clues his searching intellect works and with the aid of imagination weaves a theory, more or less remote from the truth, which may possibly explain the phenomena. It is a genuine scientific process—the play of intellect and imagination around a few fragments of observed fact—and it is undoubtedly a valuable discipline for the childish mind, though if it is too prolonged it may impede or distort natural development, and if the resulting theory is radically false it may lead, as the theories of scientific adults sometimes lead, if not speedily corrected, to various unfortunate results.
A little later, when he has ceased to be a child and puberty is approaching, another question is apt to arise in the boy’s mind: What is a woman like? There is also, less often and more carefully concealed, the corresponding curiosity in the girl’s mind. Earlier this question had seemed of no interest; it had never even occurred to ask it; there was little realisation—sometimes none at all—of any sexual difference. Now it sometimes becomes a question of singular urgency, in the solution of which it is necessary for the boy to concentrate all the scientific apparatus at his command. For there may be no ways of solving it directly, least of all for a well-behaved, self-respecting boy or a shy, modest girl. The youthful intellect is thus held in full tension, and its developing energy directed into all sorts of new channels in order to form an imaginative picture of the unknown reality, fascinating because incompletely known. All the chief recognised mental processes of dogma, hypothesis, and fiction, developed in the history of the race, are to this end instinctively created afresh in the youthful individual mind, endlessly formed and re-formed and tested in order to fill in the picture. The young investigator becomes a diligent student of literature and laboriously examines the relevant passages he finds in the Bible or other ancient primitive naked books. He examines statues and pictures. Perhaps he finds some old elementary manual of anatomy, but here the long list of structures with Latin names proves far more baffling than helpful to the youthful investigator who can in no possible way fit them all into the smooth surface shown by the statues. Yet the creative and critical habit of thought, the scientific mind generated by this search, is destined to be of immense value, and long outlives the time when the eagerly sought triangular spot, having fulfilled its intellectual function, has become a familiar region, viewed with indifference, or at most a homely tenderness.
That was but a brief and passing episode, however permanently beneficial its results might prove. With the achievement of puberty, with the coming of adolescence, a larger and higher passion fills the youth’s soul. He forgets the woman’s body, his idealism seems to raise him above the physical: it is the woman’s personality—most likely some particular woman’s personality—that he desires to know and to grasp.
A twofold development tends to take place at this age—in those youths, that is to say, who possess the latent attitude for psychic development—and that in two diverse directions, both equally away from definite physical desire, which at this age is sometimes, though not always, at its least prominent place in consciousness. On the one hand there is an attraction for an idealised person—perhaps a rather remote person, for such most easily lend themselves to idealisation—of the opposite (or occasionally the same) sex, it may sometimes for a time even be the heroine of a novel. Such an ideal attraction acts as an imaginative and emotional ferment. The imagination is stimulated to construct for the first time, from such material as it has come across, or can derive from within, the coherent picture of a desirable person. The emotions are trained and disciplined to play around the figure thus constructed with a new impersonal and unselfish, even self-sacrificing, devotion. But this process is not enough to use up all the energies of the developing mind, and the less so as such impulses are unlikely by their very nature to receive any considerable degree of gratification, for they are of a nature to which no adequate response is possible.
Thus it happens in adolescence that this new stream of psychic energy, emotional and intellectual, generated from within, concurrently with its primary personal function of moulding the object of love, streams over into another larger and more impersonal channel. It is, indeed, lifted on to a higher plane and transformed, to exercise a fresh function by initiating new objects of ideal desire. The radiant images of religion and of art as well as of science—however true it may be that they have also other adjuvant sources—thus begin to emerge from the depths beneath consciousness. They tend to absorb and to embody the new energy, while its primary personal object may sink into the background, or at this age even fail to be conscious at all.
This process—the process in which all abstract thinking is born as well as all artistic creation—must to some slight extent take place in every person whose mental activity is not entirely confined to the immediate objects of sense. But in persons of more complex psychic organisation it is a process of fundamental importance. In those of the highest complex organisation, indeed, it becomes what we term genius. In the most magnificent achievements of poetry and philosophy, of art and of science, it is no longer forbidden to see the ultimate root in this adolescent development.
To some a glimpse of this great truth has from time to time appeared. Ferrero, who occupied himself with psychology before attaining eminence as a brilliant historian, suggested thirty years ago that the art impulse and its allied manifestations are transformed sexual instinct; the sexual impulse is “the raw material, so to speak, from which art springs”; he connected that transformation with a less development of the sexual emotions in women; but that was much too hasty an assumption, for apart from the fact that such transformation could never be complete, and probably less so in women than in men, we have also to consider the nature of the two organisms through which the transformed emotions would operate, probably unlike in the sexes, for the work done by two machines obviously does not depend entirely upon feeding them with the same amount of fuel, but also on the construction of the two engines. Möbius, a brilliant and original, if not erratic, German psychologist, who was also concerned with the question of difference in the amount of sexual energy, regarded the art impulse as a kind of sexual secondary character. That is to say, no doubt,—if we develop the suggestion,—that just as the external features of the male and his external activities, in the ascending zoölogical series, have been developed out of the impulse of repressed organic sexual desire striving to manifest itself ever more urgently in the struggle to overcome the coyness of the female, so on the psychic side there has been a parallel impulse, if of later development, to carry on the same task in forms of art which have afterwards acquired an independent activity and a yet further growth dissociated from this primary biological function. We think of the natural ornaments which adorn male animals from far down in the scale even up to man, of the additions made thereto by tattooing and decoration and garments and jewels, of the parades and dances and songs and musical serenades found among lower animals as well as Man, together with the love-lyrics of savages, furnishing the beginnings of the most exquisite arts of civilisation.
It is to be noted, however, that these suggestions introduce an assumption of male superiority, or male inferiority—according to our scheme of values—which unnecessarily prejudices and confuses the issue. We have to consider the question of the origin of art apart from any supposed predominance of its manifestations in one sex or the other. In my own conception—put forward a quarter of a century ago—of what I called auto-erotic activities, it was on such a basis that I sought to place it, since I regarded those auto-erotic phenomena as arising from the impeded spontaneous sexual energy of the organism and extending from simple physical processes to the highest psychic manifestations; “it is impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilisation generally, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse,” though I was careful to add that the transmutation of sexual energy into other forms of force must not be regarded as itself completely accounting for all the finest human aptitudes of sympathy and art and religion.[[42]]
It is along this path, it may perhaps be claimed,—as dimly glimpsed by Nietzsche, Hinton, and other earlier thinkers,—that the main explanation of the dynamic process by which the arts, in the widest sense, have come into being, is now chiefly being explored. One thinks of Freud and especially of Dr. Otto Rank, perhaps the most brilliant and clairvoyant of the younger investigators who still stand by the master’s side. In 1905 Rank wrote a little essay on the artist[[43]] in which this mechanism is set forth and the artist placed, in what the psycho-analytic author considers his due place, between the ordinary dreamer at one end and the neurotic subject at the other, the lower forms of art, such as myth-making, standing near to dreams, and the higher forms, such as the drama, philosophy, and the founding of religions, near to psycho-neurosis, but all possessing a sublimated life-force which has its root in some modification of sexual energy.
It may often seem that, in these attempts to explain the artist, the man of science is passed over or left in the background, and that is true. But art and science, as we now know, have the same roots. The supreme men of science are recognisably artists, and the earliest forms of art, which are very early indeed,—Sir Arthur Evans has suggested that men may have drawn before they talked,—were doubtless associated with magic, which was primitive man’s science, or, at all events, his nearest approximation to science. The connection of the scientific instinct with the sexual instinct is not, indeed, a merely recent insight. Many years ago it was clearly stated by a famous Dutch author. “Nature, who must act wisely at the risk of annihilation,” wrote Multatuli at the conclusion of his short story, “The Adventures of Little Walter,” “has herein acted wisely by turning all her powers in one direction. Moralists and psychologists have long since recognised, without inquiring into the causes, that curiosity is one of the main elements of love. Yet they were only thinking of sexual love, and by raising the two related termini in corresponding wise on to a higher plane I believe that the noble thirst for knowledge springs from the same soil in which noble love grows. To press through, to reveal, to possess, to direct, and to ennoble, that is the task and the longing, alike of the lover and the natural discoverer. So that every Ross or Franklin is a Werther of the Pole, and whoever is in love is a Mungo Park of the spirit.”