[31] E. Heinrich Kisch (“The Sexual Life of Woman,” English translation, Rebman, 1908) names the ovaries “regulators of the sexual impulse.” In the ovary, and in the periodical changes that occur in that organ, are to be found the fundamental cause, and the means of regulation, of the sexual impulse; in the clitoris is the seat of voluptuous sensibility.

[32] Georg Hirth remarks very aptly (“Ways to Love,” Munich, 1906, p. 570): “For it is the task of the man to summon his whole power of self-command, to employ all his skill, to take all the care in his power, that the woman may be, as one says, ‘ready.’ The man who thinks only of his own gratification, and who leaves his partner ungratified, is a brutal being, or, if not brutal, he is simply ignorant of the harm he is doing.... In general, the man has the tempo of gratification much better and more securely under control than the woman; in many women, indeed, the sexual orgasm is very difficult to induce, and in such cases the man must help with skill and tenderness.”

CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—RELIGION AND SEXUALITY

“The more dearly we understand how the indeterminate sexual attractive force of the most lowly organisms has, by a continuous addition of psychical elements, slowly developed into the love of the higher species of animals and of mankind, the sooner shall we be inclined to attribute to this sentiment the importance which it deserves. Then we shall no longer be able to regard it as an individual imagination, which has no relation to reality and no roots in the depths of life. It will become to us a measuring rule for the stage of evolution to which we have attained.”—Charles Albert.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VI

Influence of the development of the brain upon the sexual impulse — Relations between speech and love — The psychic-emotional roots of love — Love as a product of civilization — Relation between the physical and the spiritual poietic impulse — The “function-impulse” of Dr. Santlus — Psychical sexual equivalents — Schopenhauer, Hirth, and Mantagazza, on this subject — Rôle of sexuality in the feelings of life — The organic necessity of love — Sexual philosophy — The Marquis de Sade — Otto Weininger — Max Zeiss — Relations of love to the individual feelings of personality — The reproductive impulse and the conjugative impulse — Love and love’s embrace as a personal aim.

The psychogenetic fundamental law of love — The way of the spirit in love — Its tendency from the general to the individual — From the remote to the proximate — Love as a transcendental and as a personal relationship.

The association of religio-metaphysical ideas with the sexual life — A general anthropological phenomenon — Anthropomorphistic-animistic explanation of the relation between religion and the sexual life — Billroth’s scientific analysis of religious perception — L. Feuerback, M’Lennan, and Tylor on this subject — My own description of the psychological processes in the association between the religious and the sexual life — The deification of love according to E. von Mayer — Strongest in women — Vicarious religions and sexual perceptions — History of religio-sexual phenomena — Religious prostitution — Single and repeated acts of religious prostitution — Sexual self-surrender to the deity or his representative — Defloration by divine symbols — Defloration deities among the Indians, the Jews, and the Romans — Religious defloration by representatives of the deity — The Babylonian Mylitta-cult — Diffusion and explanation thereof — Religious prostitution in India — Among primitive peoples — Bachofen’s brilliant explanation of religious prostitution as a counteraction to the individualization of love — Contempt for virginity among primitive peoples — Permanent religious prostitution — Sexual intercourse as a consecrated act — The temple-girls of the Greeks, Phœnicians, and Indians — The Indian “nautch-girls” — The sense of eternity in the religious and the sexual impulse — Sexual mysticism — Religio-erotic festivals — Their wide diffusion — Examples from antiquity, from India, and from Central and South America — Sexual mysticism in Christianity — Religio-sexual sects — The “unio mystica” — The primiz, or mystical marriage — Mariolatry — A religious poem.