The influence of the moral element is also strikingly shown by an evil peculiar to the human race, viz., suicide or insanity as the result of unhappy love.
The growing power of the mental element over sex in all the higher races of mankind is demonstrated by the ennobling friendships between men and women which increasingly brighten life in our own Anglo-Saxon civilization. The free and friendly intercourse of self-respecting youth of both sexes satisfies the complex wants of early man and womanhood; there is physical as well as mental refreshment in such honourable and natural human intercourse.
In the young man or woman, just entered into the full possession of all the human faculties, where the special attraction of two tends towards marriage, this moral or mental predominance is still remarkable. The attraction towards the other sex is rich in mental delights. The passing sight of the object beloved, a word, a look, a smile, will make sunshine in the gloomiest day. The consciousness of spiritual attraction will sustain and guard through long waiting for more complete union.
The physical pleasure which attends the caresses of love is a rich endowment of humanity, granted by a beneficent Creative Power. There is nothing necessarily evil in physical pleasure. Though inferior in rank to mental pleasure, it is a legitimate part of our nature, involving always some degree of mental action. The satisfaction which our senses, sight, hearing, touch, etc., derive from all lovely objects adapted to the special sense, indicates that beneficence latent in the ‘cosmic process’ which enters into the physical manifestation of our present earthly life. The sexual act itself, rightly understood in its compound character, so far from being a necessarily evil thing, is really a Divinely created and altogether righteous fulfilment of the conditions of present life. This act, like all human acts, is subjected to the inexorable rule of moral law. Righteous use brings renewed and increasing satisfaction to the two made one in harmonious union. Unrighteous use produces satiety, coldness, repulsion, and misery to the two remaining apart, through the abuse of a Divine gift.
At a public table in the Tyrol I once heard an Austrian officer, a most repulsive spectacle, dying of his vices, boast of his ruined life, and declare that he would take the consequences and live it over again had he the power to do so. This is the insanity of lust. But it illustrates the inseparable union of soul and body in human sex.
It is the mental element dominating the physical impulse in man, for evil, which produces that monstrous creation, cold, selfish, and cruel, which is seen only in the man or woman abusing the creative powers of sex.
It will thus be seen that in the varieties of degradation of our sexual powers, as well as in their use and ennoblement, it is the predominance of the mental or spiritual element in our nature which is the characteristic fact of human sex. The inventions and abuses of lust, as well as the use and guidance of love, alike prove the striking and important distinction which exists between the sexual organization of man and that of the lower animals.
CHAPTER II
Equivalent Functions in the Male and Female
In examining the characteristics of sex in Man under its dual aspect, male and female, Nature’s primary or rudimentary aim in establishing sex must be clearly recognised. This aim is the reproduction of the species.
Pleasure in sexual congress is an incident depending largely on mental constitution. In the varying ranks of the animal creation it may or may not exist in connection with reproduction; for it is not essential to the one all-important dominating fact in nature, viz., parentage.