CHAPTER I
The mystery of sexual love, of this “wonder of life,” from which both religious belief and artistic inspiration have drawn and continue to draw the major part of their force, may ultimately be referred to a single phenomenon in the sexuality of the great group of metazoa to which the major part of the animal world and the human species belong. This process is a conjugation of the female germ cell with the male sperm cell—the “well-spring of love,” to use Haeckel’s expression; in comparison with this conjugation, all other spiritual and physical phenomena, however complicated, are of a subordinate and secondary nature. From this primitive organic process of reciprocal attraction and conjugation of the two reproductive cells has arisen the entire complex of the remaining physical and spiritual phenomena of love. We have, in this process of cell conjugation, a picture in little of love, a greatly simplified representation of the nature of the relations between man and woman; moreover, the highest and the finest psychical experiences and impressions occurring under the influence of love are ultimately no more than the results of this “erotic chemotropism” of the sperm and germ cells.
Sexual differentiation existed already as a natural product in the early stages of organic evolution, and civilization has done no more than develop, increase, and refine that differentiation, which is typified in a manner at once simple and convincing—because directly visible—in the male sperm cell and the female germ cell. Herein the specific sexual differences are made visibly manifest.
Procreation results from the approach of the male sperm cell towards the female germ cell, and from the entrance of the former into the latter.
Thus, the sperm cell represents the active, the germ cell the passive, principle in sexuality. Already in this most important act in the process of procreation the natural relations between man and woman are very clearly manifested. This fact is clearly grasped already in the mythology and the sepulchral symbolism of antiquity. In these the man is always represented as the active principle; woman, on the contrary, as the passive principle.
“Peace reigns in the ovum, but when driven by the desire of creation the masculine god breaks through the shell and begins his work of fertilization, everything at once becomes movement, restless haste, impulsive force, unending circulation. Thus the male generative principle appears as the representative and embodiment of movement in the visible act of creation.... The active principle in Nature appears to be identical with the principle of motion.... Winged is the phallus, quiescent the female; the man is the principle of movement, and the woman the principle of repose; force is the cause of eternal change, woman the picture of eternal repose; for which reason the ‘earth-mother’ is almost always depicted in a sitting posture” (Bachofen).
The appearance of sexual reproduction in the history of the evolution of the organic world is an especially instructive example of the great importance of differentiation and variation as the most effective principle of evolution in general. The lowliest forms of life reproduce their kind in an extremely simple manner by a process of asexual cell division, which has not improperly been regarded as nothing more than a peculiar form of growth; and this simple process of cell division is retained as a mode of growth also in the higher organisms which reproduce their kind by sexual union. In some cases of simple cell division the secondary cell, the “daughter cell,” separates itself from the old cell, the “mother cell,” and forms a new complete individual; in other cases the cell division occurs as gemmiparous reproduction (budding or pululation), the daughter cell remaining united with the mother cell, so that a new organ is built up. Reproduction by cell division is found in many plants and lower animals side by side with sexual reproduction. This latter becomes the exclusive method of production in higher animals and in the human species, whose capacity for the procreation of new individuals by cell division, and for the replacement of lost organs by growth, has been lost. Thus, the progress and the gain which on the one hand are derived from the process of sexual reproduction, whose character we are about to investigate more closely, are balanced on the other hand by a loss. We shall often encounter this fact again in the history of the evolution of the sexual impulse, more especially in mankind and in relation to human love.
With the evolution of sexual reproduction is introduced the opportunity for a great step forward, since an incomparably greater sphere of action is opened to the differentiation and variability of specific forms than was possible in the case of species reproduced asexually (Kerner von Marilaun, R. Martin). By means of the sexual union of two differing independent individuals, each of which, again, has been brought into the world by the sexual union of two differing individuals, the way is freely opened for a progressive differentiation of the individuals of this species. No one of them is exactly similar to any other. Each one exhibits new peculiarities, new capabilities, and all of these play their part in the struggle for existence. This gradually results in a progress towards higher, better, more perfect forms. The persistence of specific type, due to inheritance, is largely counteracted by sexual reproduction, inasmuch as the conjugation of reproductive cells derived from two different individuals induces a tendency to progressive variation and improvement. Moreover, by this sexual mode of reproduction the preservation of the species is rendered much more secure than by asexual reproduction, whilst at the same time the possibility of differentiation or variation is indubitably increased. We have already insisted on the fact that in the striking difference between the sperm cell of the male and the germ cell of the female we must seek for the ultimate cause of the profound difference between the sexes. Those who maintain the theory of the absolute identity of man and woman must continually be reminded of this fact. Unquestionably the greater motility of the male reproductive cell as compared with the more passive quality of the female cell implies the existence of deeply founded psychical differences; and the existence of these may be assumed with more confidence since we know from experience to what a high degree the finest psychical peculiarities of father and mother can be transmitted by inheritance to the child.
For this reason, all attempts, whether initiated by some natural process or by some intentional guidance of the process of civilization, towards the obliteration of the distinction between the specific masculine and the specific feminine, must be regarded as futile, and as antagonistic to the process of development. The production of the so-called “third sex” is unquestionably a step backwards. For bisexual differentiation is an advance upon the more primitive form of sexual differentiation in which both the male and the female sexual elements were produced by a single individual (hermaphroditism). In the phylogeny of the human species unilateral sexual reproduction gave place to the bilateral type, the reproductive elements being formed within the bodies of two distinct individuals—the sperm cells within the body of the male, the germ cells within the body of the female. In this manner originated the contrast between the individuals of the two sexes, or bisexual differentiation, which, in the course of phylogenetic development, has become continually more definite, more extensive, and more characteristic, through the operation of the principle of sexual selection; and thus by inheritance and adaptation the mental and physical characteristics of sexuality, primitive and superadded, have gradually become defined and fixed. In the higher ranks of the animal kingdom and in the human species, this heterosexuality has, through inheritance, become continually more sharply defined; but the traces of the primitive hermaphroditic state have never been wholly obliterated. Love in the human species is manifested by pairing. Such is the normal condition, and the only condition in harmony with the progressive tendency towards perfection. But remnants of hermaphroditism, of bisexuality in a single individual, of the “third sex,” are to be found in every human being, and are disclosed by embryology and comparative anatomy in the form of vestiges of female reproductive organs in the male and of male reproductive organs in the female. Herein exists an indisputable proof of the originally hermaphrodite nature of the human ancestry. But these female organs in the male body, and their converse, the male organs in the female body, are stunted, are rudiments merely; whereas in the course of evolution the masculine reproductive organs of the male and the feminine reproductive organs of the female have been more and more powerfully developed, and more and more sharply differentiated in type, until they have come to constitute the expression of the specific differences between man and woman. They alone represent the more advanced stage. Moreover, these vestiges of an early hermaphroditic condition are in the human species far less extensive than in other mammals; and the sexual discrepancy in the human species, as compared with the lower animals, becomes still more noticeable when we take into account the fact that certain parts of the reproductive system are peculiar to mankind, are new acquisitions, and, above all, the hymen, which is non-existent even in the anthropoid apes.
The original purpose of the hymen, which unquestionably must at the time of its appearance have represented an evolutionary advance, is still undetermined. Metchnikoff has propounded an interesting hypothesis on this subject. According to him, it is very probable that human beings, during the earliest period of human history, began sexual relations at an extremely youthful age, at a time when the external genital organs of the boy were not yet fully developed. In such a case the hymen would not only have been no hindrance to the act of copulation, but rather, by narrowing the vaginal outlet, and thus accommodating its size to the relatively too small penis of the male, would have rendered pleasure in sexual intercourse possible. In such cases, moreover, the hymen would not have been brutally lacerated, but gradually dilated. Laceration of the hymen represents a later and secondary phenomenon.
It is a fact that, even at the present day, among many primitive races, marriages commonly take place in childhood, and it is further true that even in civilized races in a considerable number of cases (15 per cent., according to Budin) the hymen is not always lacerated during sexual intercourse, but is retained; thus some support is given to Metchnikoff’s hypothesis.
It is unquestionable that evolution and the progress of civilization have resulted in an extremely marked differentiation between the two sexes, and for this reason the formation of a so-called “third sex,” in which these sexual differences are obscured, can only be regarded as a markedly retrogressive step. Ernst von Wolzogen, in a well-known romance, to which he gave the name of “The Third Sex,” described a kind of barren, stunted woman, capable, however, of holding her own at work in competition with men; but in our opinion such women represent merely a stage of transition in the great battle of women for the independent, free development of their peculiar personality. Such types as these are certainly not the final goal of the woman’s movement; they are caricatures, products of a false and extreme conception of woman’s development. This “third sex,” which Schurtz very justly compares to the stunted, barren workers among ants and bees, is incapable of prolonged existence, and will give place to a new generation of women, who, while fully retaining their specific feminine peculiarities, will share with men the rights and duties of the great work of civilization; and thus this work will unquestionably be enriched by a number of new and fruitful elements.
It is indeed possible that this “third sex,” that hermaphrodites, homosexual individuals, sexual “intermediate stages,” also play a certain part in the great process of civilization. But their significance is slight and limited, if for this reason alone because from these individuals the possibility of transmission by inheritance of valuable peculiarities is cut off, and hence the possibility of a future perfectibility, of true “progress,” is excluded. There are two sexes only on which every true advance in civilization depends—the genuine man and the genuine woman. All other varieties are ultimately no more than phantoms, monstrosities, vestiges of primitive sexual conditions.
Very ably has Mantegazza described the intimate relationship between these dreams of the “third sex” and the fantastic aberration of the sexual impulse. He writes:
“While the pathology of love recognizes in many sexual aberrations the obscure traces of a general hermaphroditism, imagination, which works faster than science, shows us the possibility that in more complicated creations sexual differentiation might be more than twofold, so that in such worlds sexual reproduction might be effected by a more elaborate division of labour. Thus, in the cynical or sceptical distinction between platonic, sexual, and licentious love, we see the first traces of new and monstrous possibilities of sexual union, on the one hand reflecting the sublimity of the supersensual, and on the other more brutal than the most horrible sexual aberration.”
In reality, it is only for normal heterosexual love between a normal man and a normal woman that it is possible to find an unimpeachable sanction. Only this love, continually more differentiated and more individualized, will play a part in the future course of civilization.
Heterosexuality arises from the reciprocal attraction and the coalescence of the reproductive cells of two individuals of distinct sexes; it forms the foundation and constitutes the most important element of the sexual relations of the higher animal world and of the human species; and it obtains through inheritance continually a more sharply defined expression. Since this fundamental phenomenon of the sexual impulse has been transmitted from the most ancient and simplest forms of the organic world and has been modified only in the direction of heterosexuality, it has come to pass, as Ewald Hering says at the end of his celebrated lecture on “Memory as a General Function of Organic Matter,” that organic matter has the strongest memory of the impulse of conjugation in its most ancient and most primitive form; thus this impulse at the present day continues to dominate mankind as an intensely powerful physical imperative, endowed with the strength of an elemental force, which, notwithstanding the gradually higher development of the brain, has remained during thousands of years undiminished in its potency, and indeed by the accumulative influence extending through thousands of generations has acquired a notable increase in intensity. We must assume that for untold generations always those animals and men have had the most numerous descendants in whom the sexual impulse was the most powerful; this powerful impulse being inherited, was transmitted once more to the next generation, and tended by natural selection continually to increase.
This explanation of the indisputable gradual increase in the intensity of the sexual impulse, first given by the moral philosopher Paul Rée, is more illuminating than the theory propounded by Havelock Ellis of the increase of the sexual impulse by civilization, which was long ago maintained by Lucretius (“De Rerum Naturâ,” V. 1016). In support of this latter theory, it is asserted that among savage people the genital organs are less powerfully developed than among civilized races, but this can by no means be regarded as an established fact. Civilization has done no more than cause a fuller development of all sides of sexual love by a multiplication of physical and psychical stimuli; but it appears extremely doubtful if civilization itself is to be regarded as the immediate causal influence in the increase of the intensity of the sexual impulse.
Having studied the elementary phenomena of human love dependent upon the phylogenetic history of the human race, namely the union of the male and female reproductive cells, the question now arises as to the nature of the psychical processes, the character of the sensations that accompany this union of the sperm cells and the germ cells. What is the most primitive psychical elementary phenomenon of love?
It is apparently that sensation in which the actual contact of the psyche with the material occurs—an immediate sensation of the nature of matter—namely, the sense of smell. The metaphysical significance of the sense of smell has been aptly indicated by describing that sense as the “sublimated thing-in-itself,” as a sense which, like no other sense, allows us to enter immediately into the nature of matter; it is, in fact, the sense of personality.
“Smell,” says Heinrich Steffens, “is the principal sense of the higher animals; it represents for them their own inner world; it envelops their existence. Upon smell, wherein sympathy and antipathy are represented, is based the whole security of the higher animal instinct; for carnal desire is comprehended in this sense.... Indeed, in sexual union the subjective sensation which is developed by means of smell blends completely with the objective, and from the monistic union of the two arises the intenser libido, wherein the unfathomableness of the procreative force and the whole power of sex are absorbed.”
Ernst Haeckel ascribes to the two sexual cells a kind of inferior psychical activity; he believes that they experience a sensation of one another’s proximity; and indeed it is probably a form of sensory activity analogous to the sense of smell that draws them together. The sensation of the two sexual cells, which Haeckel believes to be situated especially in the cell nuclei, he denotes by the term “erotic chemotropism.” He attributes it to an attraction of the nature of smell, and considers that it represents the psychical quintessence, the original being of love.
A later investigator, Eugen Kröner, holds the same view. In the conjugation of two vorticellæ he recognizes the influence of the chemically operative sensation of smell; to him smell is the most important element in the sexual impulse of animals.
This theory is strongly supported, and indeed elevated to the rank of a natural law, by the circumstance that in the higher animals the sense of smell, in the course of phylogenetic development, has attained a continually greater significance in relation to sexuality; and by the fact that, according to the discovery of Zwaardemaker, there exists widely diffused throughout Nature a distinct group of sexual odours, the so-called capryl odours, which have a natural biological connexion with the vita sexualis. These capryl odours, which already in plants play a sexual part, are in animals and in the human species localized in or near the genital organs (odoriferous glands of the beaver, the musk-ox, etc., the secretions of the male foreskin and the female vagina), or in other cases are found in the general secretions, such as the sweat. Recently Gustav Klein has succeeded in proving that a definite group of glands in the female genital organs (glandulæ vestibulares majores, or glands of Bartholin) must be regarded as a vestige from the time of periodic sexual excitement (rutting). At that time in the human species, as now in the lower animals, the sexual impulse was periodic in its activity, and the secretion of these odoriferous glands of the human female then served as a means of alluring members of the male sex. At the present time these glands have for the most part lost their significance as specific stimuli. Now it is rather the exhalation from the entire surface of the female body which exercises the erotic influence. Cases in which such stimuli proceed exclusively from the female genital organs are regarded by Klein as a phylogenetic vestige of the primitive relations between the rutting odours of the female and sexual excitement in the male. Friedrich S. Krauss, in his “Anthropophyteia” (1904, vol. i., p. 224), reproduces a Southern Slavonic story in which a man is described who obtained sexual gratification only by enjoying the natural smell of the female genital organs. The remarkable classification of Indian women according to the various odours proceeding from their genital organs must not be forgotten in this connexion.
That this primitive phenomenon of love has even to-day a certain significance, although, in consequence of the enormous development of the brain and the predominance of purely psychical elements in man, its influence has been very notably diminished, is shown by the existing physiological connexion proved by Fliess to exist between the nose and the genital organs. On the inferior turbinate bones there exist certain “genital areas,” which, under the influence of sexual stimulus and excitement, as in coitus, during menstruation, etc., swell up. From these areas it is also possible to influence directly certain conditions of the genital organs.
It is noteworthy that civilization has to a large extent replaced the natural sexual odours by artificial scents, so-called perfumes, whose origin is partly due to the imitation or accentuation of the natural odours, in part, however, and especially in recent times, to an endeavour to conceal these natural odours, especially when the latter are of a disagreeable character. For this reason, in addition to penetrating perfumes, such as civet, ambergris, musk, etc., we have also mild perfumes, for the most part vegetable in origin. The markedly exciting influence of these artificial scents is employed especially by women, above all by professional prostitutes, in order to excite men.[3] Frequently also the simple perfume of flowers suffices for this purpose. Krauss tells us that in the kolo-dance of the Southern Slavs the girls fasten strong-scented flowers and sprigs in the front of their dress, and thereby excite intense sexual desire in the young men. In the East sexual stimulation by means of the sense of smell plays a far more extensive rôle than in Europe.
In the human species, however, as a specific elementary phenomenon of sexual reproduction, smell has long been thrust into the background by the strong development of other senses, especially that of sight. This fact is very clearly exhibited by the notable reduction which has occurred in the size of the organ of smell. In man the frontal lobes of the brain, the seat of the highest intellectual processes and of speech, have taken the place of the olfactory lobes in the lower animals. Besides, by means of clothing, the natural odours of men and women, which previously had such marked sexual significance, have been rendered almost imperceptible, and nowadays sexual stimulation may result merely from the senses of touch and of sight, so that the hands and the lips and the female breasts have been transformed into erotic organs. Notwithstanding, however, the notable weakening of the sexual significance of smell, this most primitive sense (actually associated, as we have shown, with the activity of the germinal cells) will never completely cease to influence the sexual life.
“Still, there always surrounds us a now gently moving and now stormy sea of odours, whose waves without cessation arouse in us feelings of sympathy or antipathy, and to the minutest movements of which we are not wholly indifferent” (Havelock Ellis).
Inasmuch as we have pointed out as the single primæval basis, as the most important elementary phenomenon, of human love, the conjugation of the male sperm cell with the female ovum (dependent probably upon a sensation analogous to that of smell), we denote this particular phenomenon of sexuality as primary, and we separate all the other phenomena as secondary, as more remote. Wilhelm Bölsche has also expressed this difference by denoting the union of the two reproductive cells as “fusion-love,” whilst all that has occurred later, in the course of many thousands of years of evolution, and that has transformed this primary process, by innumerable new influences, stimuli, and perceptions, into the love of modern civilized man, he denotes by the apt name of “distance-love.”
According to him,
“the ultimate act of love in a member of the most highly civilized community assumes the form of a sudden withdrawal from the entire world of surrounding artifacts, of alphabets, posts, telephones, submarine cables, etc.... At this instant the principle of union is once again victorious, as it were, in an ultimate posthumous vision in a vital experience of a portion of primæval Nature, of the primæval world, of an instant’s profoundest self-absorption into the great mystery of the obscure original basis of Nature, to which neither time nor old and new is known, but which is ever renewed in us in its elemental force—the procreative principle. At this instant the loving individual must return home to the heart of the all-mother—it is useless to resist. It must draw from the fountain of youth—must descend like Odin to the Norns, like Faust to the Mothers—and there all civilization is swallowed up; there cell body must join cell body, in order in the ardent embrace to reduce to a minimum the distance which usually sunders such large bodies. Indeed, in reality the sexual act goes further and deeper than this reduction of separation to a minimum. Within the body of one of the partners of the sexual act the ovum and the spermatozoon undergo an ultimate perfect fusion of soul and body, in comparison with which even the closest approximation of the great halves of the love partnership is no more than a mere mechanical apposition. The ultimate aim of the loving union is attained only in the coalescence of ovum and spermatozoon.”
To express the matter briefly, fusion-love fulfils the purpose of the species, while distance-love subserves rather the purpose of the individual. Thus the natural course of the development of love, which in the next chapter we propose to follow further, affords already the proof of the thesis propounded in the introduction regarding the duplicate nature of human love.
[3] According to Laurent (“Morbid Love,” pp. 133, 134, Leipzig, 1895), common prostitutes generally use musk; young working women, violet or rose-water; ladies of the bourgeoisie, penetrating perfumes, such as white heliotrope, jasmine, and ylang-ylang; women of the half-world, finer perfumes, or such “as are complex, like their own mode of life”—for example, lily-of-the-valley, or mignonette.
CHAPTER II
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF LOVE (BRAIN AND SENSES)
“From these considerations it follows that man, in the course of his phylogenetic development extending through lengthy geological periods, has lost numerous advantages; and the question arises whether, in exchange for these, he may not also have gained certain other advantages. Such must, indeed, have been the case if the human species was to remain capable of survival. There has been a process of exchange, by means of which man has gained an equivalent for all the qualities he has lost. And the gain consists in the unlimited plasticity of his brain. By this he is fully compensated for the loss of the large and long series of advantages which his remote predecessors possessed.”—R. Wiedersheim.