Asceticism — Its origin — Metchnikoffs explanation of the origin of asceticism — Disharmonies of the sexual life — Psychology of ascetics — Their hypersexuality — Great antiquity and ubiquity of asceticism — The asceticism of the Indians, Mohammedans, and Christians — Preoccupation of Christian ascetics with sexual matters — Sexual visions — Dissolute sects — Monastic and cloistral life — Modern asceticism — Its difference from ancient asceticism — Its connexion with actual experiences — Example of Schopenhauer — Hitherto unpublished evidence of the relationship between his ascetic views and his own life — Tolstoi on the sorrows of voluptuousness — His relative asceticism — Weininger’s renewal of early Christian asceticism — Its cause — Characteristics of Weininger’s book.
The belief in witchcraft — The principal source of all misogyny and contempt of women — Not a Christian discovery — Primeval association between sexuality and magic — The sexual origin of the belief in witchcraft — Devil’s mistresses — The predisponents of the medieval belief in witchcraft — Continuance of this belief into our own times — Rôle of sexuality in pastoral medicine — External and internal causation of the theological treatment of sexual problems — Sexual casuistic literature — The religious factor in the sexual life of the present day — Sexual excesses of modern sects — The revival of romanticism — Experiences of an elderly physician regarding religion and sexuality — Deprivation of love and satiety of love as sources of religious needs — Significance of the religious factor in the history of love — Subordinate rôle of this in the individualization of the sentiment of love.
CHAPTER VI
If, with Friedrich Ratzel, we understand by civilization the sum total of all the mental acquirements of a period, then also human love, this specific product of civilization, is merely a mirrored picture of the mental activities of the existing epoch of civilization. We can follow this way of the spirit in love from the primitive age down to the present day, and we can detect, in each successive epoch of civilization, the association with sexuality of peculiar spiritual states; and after thus passing in review the thousands of years of human history, we can discern once more in our own epoch the individual psychical elements which characterize the love of modern civilized man.
The increasing spiritualization and idealization of sensuality in the course of civilization, notwithstanding the persistence of the elementary intensity of the sexual impulse, is associated with the fact to which we have already alluded—namely, the preponderance of the brain characteristic of the genus homo—a preponderance which was unquestionably gradually acquired, and arose in consequence of an accumulation of original variations which gave their possessors a certain advantage in the struggle for existence.
Thus very gradually the primary, instinctive, still powerful animal ego underwent expansion into the secondary ego (in Meynert’s sense), into the spiritual personality, to which a fixed foundation was given by the possession of speech. With some justice the origin of speech has been singled out as extremely significant for the development of the feeling of love; and the conquest of the primitive animal instinct has been, above all, attributed to this faculty. A. Cabral, in his interesting work, “La Vénus Génitrix” (Paris, 1882, p. 155), expresses the opinion that speech and song developed solely on account of sexual relations; and he alludes in support of this view to the well-known manifold noises made by various animals in conditions of sexual excitement. It is very significant in this connexion that anthropological science has proved, as an important fact in racial psychology, that the development of poetry preceded that of prose.[33] The original form of speech was rhythmical noise, a poem, a song. And we saw above that this was subservient to more suggestive purposes, and, above all, to sexual allurement. Thus the primitive natural connexion between speech and sexuality appears somewhat probable. With these earlier erotic noises and alluring tones were subsequently associated the first elements of intellectual comprehension, the first thoughts.
This “withdrawal of mankind from pure instinct,” which Schiller, in his essay on the earliest human society, describes as the “most fortunate and most important occurrence in human history,” from which time the struggle towards freedom may be said to begin, gradually enabled the higher feeling-tones of sensation to become more predominant. The elementary impulses became associated with sensations of pleasure and pain as psychical reactions. The “organic sensations” entered the sphere of consciousness, and so gave rise, in association and reciprocal working with the higher sensory stimuli, to the psychico-emotional roots of the impulses. Thus, in the sexual sphere, out of pure voluptuousness, the simple instinctive impulse towards copulation, arose love, whose essence is an intimate association of physical sensations with feelings and thoughts, with the entire spiritual and emotional being of mankind.[34]
“Love,” says Charles Albert, “is the result of all the forward steps of human activity in all departments, and in every direction, as manifested in their effects upon the sexual life. It is an advance which goes hand in hand with all other advances. Man is an inseparable whole, and in theory only can he be subdivided into separate faculties. In reality, indeed, all departments of human development are so intimately associated that progress in any one of them must place something to the credit of all.”
Increasing psychical refinement and differentiation of the human type, domination of the intelligence and of emotion over brute force, transformation of the social relations between man and woman in consequence of economic conditions or of religious and moral ideas, respect for personality, a secured provision for the most pressing vital needs, and a consequent elevation and complication of the sexual life, the influence of a longing for ideal beauty in a psychical and moral sense—all these and much more have contributed to constitute sexual love in the sense in which we understand and experience it at the present day. The speech of the lover of our own time is the comprehensive expression of all human progress. The difference between animal rutting and the lofty sensation of love corresponds exactly to the gulf which separates primitive man, capable only of chipping for himself a few almost useless flint tools, from civilized man who, with the aid of innumerable machines, has tamed to his service the elementary forces of Nature.