The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization / Translated from the Sixth German Edition

by Iwan Bloch

“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.