Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

The desirable method is to have free connection between it and the dominant ideas, so that its stimulation brings about a stimulation of them too. This leads, as a matter of experience, to the incorporation of the sexual emotion in the dominant ideas, or we had better say an interpenetration of one with the other, so that the sexual emotion is no longer simply sexual emotion, but is become part of something very much larger and very much better. Let the great writers say in their few words what I should say much worse in many.

Wordsworth’s “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” opens a window on to the general process of sublimation: and Blake’s description of the physical union of the sexes as “that ... on which the soul expands her wing” is an epitome of a particular aspect of our particular problem. Or again, when St. Paul says “Am I not free?” or “All things are lawful unto me,” he means that by subordinating all sides of himself to his highest ideals, he has reached that state in which what he does is right to him because he only wants to do what is right. (True that, as he himself confesses, he is not always able to keep in that state: but when he is in it, he attains that complete freedom which is the subordination of lower to higher desire.)

Physiologically speaking, the activation of the sex instinct, when the connection is made in this way, arouses the higher centres, and these react upon the centres connected with the sex instinct, modifying their mode of action. The nett result is thus that both act simultaneously to produce a single whole of a new type. Processes of this nature are common in the nervous system, as has been shown for instance by Hughlings Jackson, Head, and Rivers.[39]

Thus the higher, dominant parts of the mind are strengthened by their connection with such lower parts as the simple sex instinct, and the sex instinct is able to play a rôle in any operation of the mind, however exalted, in which emotion is in any way concerned. Rivers believes that the actual conflict between controlled and controlling parts of the mind is a potent generator of mental “energy”; and adds, “whatever be the source of the energy, however, we can be confident that by the process of sublimation the lives upon which it is expended take a special course, and in such case it is not easy to place any limit to its activity. We do not know how high the goal that it may reach.”[40]

The change is thus on the one side from the relative independence of the sex instinct towards its subordination to a position in a hierarchy of mental process, but on the other from a rigid limitation of its scope towards a greater universality by establishing connections with all other parts of the mind. Further, there is also a change towards greater dominance and “self-determination” of the mental as against the physical.

A great many of the difficulties which beset us, both as individuals and as communities, come from the fact that both these changes are only in process of being made, and are (even approximately) complete only in a very small number of persons.

Lack of restraint is failure to construct a properly-working hierarchy. That is a very simple example. Less easy to analyse but equally vicious, are the innumerable cases in which some sort of equilibrium is only attained not by a free interaction of dominant and subordinate parts, but by repression. Conflicts arise, which persist, either in an open form or in the subterranean regions of the unconscious. In either case they tend to be projected by the subject into his ideas of other people. This projection, or interpretation of external reality in terms of one’s self, is a curious and almost universal attribute of the human mind. The most familiar example is perhaps the anthropomorphism which in religion after religion has invested the powers of the universe with human form, human mental process, human personality—or at least with form, mind, and personality similar to those of man; while a very simple case is that in which certain neurotic types project their depression so as to colour everything that comes into their cognizance a gloomy black.

In the sphere of sex this process is, alas, most potently at work. The man in whom the sexual instinct still lives a more or less independent, uninhibited life of its own, tends—unless he has special evidence to the contrary, and often even then—to interpret the behaviour and the minds of others in the terms familiar to himself, and to suppose that they too must be stopped by the fear of punishment or of loss of caste if they are not to commit excesses.

On the other hand, those in whom there is a constant conflict with a sexual origin project it here, there, and everywhere into the breasts of those they know, and interpret others’ motives in terms of their own repressed wishes.

Furthermore, most of our existing laws and customs are based on a state of society in which the changes to which we have referred had not progressed as far as they have to-day, and man’s psychology was a little less removed from that of other mammals.