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.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER II
The secondary phenomena of sexuality — Their connexion with the nervous system and the sense organs — The brain as criterion of human sexuality — Its development proportional to the retrogression of other parts — Example of the organ of smell and of the mammary glands — Relative retrogression of the female clitoris — Variation of the female genital organs — Reduction of the hairy covering of the skin — Theory regarding the origin of the comparative baldness of the human species — Assumed connexion with climate — With dentition — Influence of artificial clothing — The hygienic and æsthetic significance of the loss of hair — The reason why the axillary and pubic hair have been retained — Sexual influence of the hair of these regions and of the hair of woman’s head — Gradual retrogression of the male beard — The change of bodily type under the influence of the brain — The way of the spirit in love — The pure instinctive in the sexuality of primitive man — His lack of the idea, “love” — Analogy of this state among the lower classes of the present day — Periodicity of the sexual impulse in the time of primitive man — Periodicity amongst savage races of to-day — The researches of Fliess and Swoboda — The twenty-three day “masculine” and the twenty-eight day “feminine” periods — Menstruation — A peculiarity of the human female — The origin of enduring love in mankind — Love rendered more enduring by the spirit — Kant’s views on the subject — Hypothesis of W. Rheinhard and Virey — The complication of the sexual impulse through sensory stimuli — Buddha’s speech to the monks — The prepotency of the higher senses — The sense of touch — The skin as an organ of voluptuous sensation — Erogenic areas of skin — The kiss — Its erotic significance — An Arabian poet (Sheik Nefzawi) on this subject — Burdach’s definition of the kiss — The kiss on the boundary-line between erotism and actual sexual enjoyment — The origin of the kiss — The primitive elements of contact, licking and biting — Its connexion with the nutritive impulse — European origin of the kiss of contact — The smelling kiss of the Mongols — The kiss and sexuality — Voltaire’s genito-labial nerve — The sense of taste and sexuality — The preponderant importance of the higher senses in the love of civilized man — The beautiful explanation of Herder — Liberation from the material in the higher senses — The sense of sight as the true æsthetic sense — Beauty as the product of love — Its perception by the sense of sight — Rôle of the sense of hearing in love — The investigations of Darwin — The voice as a sexual lure — The rhythmical repetition of alluring sounds — Origin of song and music — Greater susceptibility of women to impressions received through the sense of hearing — The charm of woman’s voice — An experience of the natural philosopher Moreau.
CHAPTER II
As we have learnt in the first chapter, the primitive phenomenon of sexual attraction and reproduction, the conjugation of the male and the female germinal cells, persists unaltered in man as the most important part of the act of procreation; but this process of “fusion-love” derived by inheritance from unicellular organisms, is associated in man with a number of new secondary physical and psychical phenomena of sexuality. This inevitably results from the nature of the human organism as a cell society, from the development of man as one of the order of mammalia, and finally from man’s elevation above the other mammalia as a being of enormously enhanced brain powers. The complex of these secondary physical and psychical phenomena of love, dependent upon the process of evolution, has, as we have already said, been denoted by W. Bölsche by the apt name of “distance-love,” which he thus distinguishes from the primary elemental phenomenon of “fusion-love.” These superadded elements play an extremely important part in human civilization, and, indeed, actually characterize that civilization which is in no way dependent on the primitive qualities shared by man with plants and lower animals.
This secondary sexuality of mankind is, in correspondence with the differentiation of the various organs of his body, extremely complicated, and it is by no means solely dependent upon the structure of the special reproductive or copulatory organs; it is also intimately connected with other parts of the body, and more especially with the sense organs and the nervous system. Thus it has accommodated itself to all the external influences to which the species has been subjected in the long course of its development history. We may say that the criterion, the characteristic mark of distinction between the human body and that of the lower animals, is also the distinctive differential characteristic between human sexuality and that of the lower animals. And this criterion is the brain.