The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

While the pathology of love, in many cases of lasciviousness, shows the last declining remains of a promiscuous hermaphroditism, imagination, a forerunner of science, causes us to divine that in more complex creatures sexes may be more than two, and generation presents a deeper subdivision of work, in the same manner as in the cynical or skeptical distinctions between platonic and sensual loves and in the most daring polygamies of soul and senses we perceive in the distance other lights which disclose to us the horizon of new and monstrous generative possibilities, some of them reaching the suprasensible and some as base and brutal as the most repelling atavic regressions.

When the science of the future will permit our posterity to connect all the phenomena of nature, from the most elementary to the most complex, from the simplest motion of a molecule to the flash of the most sublime genius, in an uninterrupted chain of facts, then perhaps the first origins of love will be sought in the elementary physics of dissimilar atoms which endeavor to find each other and combine, and with opposite motion generate the equilibrium. The positive electric body seeks the negative, the acid seeks the base, and in these conjunctions, with great development of light, heat and electricity, new bodies are formed, new equilibriums obtained; it seems that Nature renews her forces and, rejuvenescing, prepares herself for new combinations and new loves.

And is not love perhaps the combination of two dissimilar atoms which seek each other and combine, notwithstanding all the adverse forces of heaven and earth? And in the same manner as the molecule of potassium snatches the oxygen away from water with a great development of light and heat, is not the union of those two molecules, which we call man and woman, accompanied by a hurricane of passion, by flashes of genius, by infinite glittering of flames and ardor? Do we not perceive a pandemonium of physical and psychical forces accumulating, battling and equilibrating around that point where a man and a woman are attracted toward each other, to rejuvenate the human matter and rekindle the torch of life?

A particular motion, originated in the ovary and in the testis, accumulates such energy in the nervous centers as eventually to bring the masculine element in contact with the feminine, so that the generative gemmulæ produced in the slow laboratory of two different organisms reunite in that nest which is the maternal womb and where the fecundated egg must transform into a human being.

The poet and the metaphysician may define love in whatever manner they choose. There is only one definition for science: Love is the energy which must bring in contact the egg with the seed; without ovary and without testis there can be no love.

That forward movement which is called generation is so powerful as to oppose and even destroy the minor motion, that is, the preservation of the individual; and while each individual rotates, it is carried forward with a movement a hundred times more irresistible and powerful through space and time. The first motion represents the narrow life of the individual and is protected by egotism; the second is the great life of the species, and love defends it.

The most superficial study of the generative function is sufficient to convince us that love is always a phenomenon of high chemistry, in which the generating atoms, in order to combine, must be neither too similar nor too dissimilar. No sooner has sex manifested itself in animals than we have in the same individual, but in two distinct laboratories, the formation of two generative elements. Sex, which, at first thought, appears to us as one of the deepest mysteries of life, is nothing but a laboratory which attracts the elements generated by every element of the organism, and encloses and preserves them in itself in order to pour them into the bosom of other elements, similar but not equal, generated in another laboratory, that is, the opposite sex. When the two generative laboratories are separated in two distinct organisms, it is probable that the diversity of their gemmulæ is greater. If in individuals closely resembling each other, but of different races, we combine the generative elements, we still will probably have fecundity; while, if we pass to different species, fecundity will be more difficult; if we pass to different genera it will in most cases become impossible.

But let us set aside the words species and genera, which, in nature, have not the same value as we assign to them in our museums and in our books, and let us, instead, take from the world of the living a handful of animals, haphazard, so that we may gather together brothers, cousins, nephews, individuals of the same or affinitive classes, genera, orders, and let us place them in line, in the order of their degrees of similarity. Should we try to couple them, or study their spontaneous loves, we would find cases of sterility in beings too similar and in beings too dissimilar; therefore, generation moves between these two opposite poles, too great similarity and too great dissimilarity. That is the reason why we may see a woman with a mustache, atrophied breasts and deep voice remain sterile with a robust man: they do not generate because they have too close a resemblance. That is the reason why a dog and a cat are sterile: they do not generate, because they are too dissimilar. Nature said to living beings: "If you wish to love, be neither too similar nor too dissimilar."

Let us try and discover the reason of this law. Germs that are too similar cannot concur in fecundation, or fecundate unsatisfactorily, perhaps through the same laws of elementary physics and chemistry which cause bodies to repel other bodies equally electrified or with which they have too close a resemblance in their physico-chemical characteristics. Try the combination of sulphur with phosphorus, of iodine with bromine, and, on the other hand, observe the ardent loves of chlorine and hydrogen, of potassium and oxygen. The fecundity of two different organisms is, besides, an energy bearing in one direction; it is the sum of resistances all of them equal, while two quantities, different but susceptible of being summed, give a greater number of diverse resistances and have, therefore, a greater possibility of living and resisting external enemies. An individual is the sum of many victories over exterior elements, the result of many and infinite adaptations to the ambient which surrounds it. Two individuals dissimilar, but not enough to impede generation, will bring together those adaptations and those victories through which the new creature enjoys the possibility of resistance and will meet with fewer dangers.

It is much easier to explain why forms too dissimilar cannot love each other. This impossibility is one of the most powerful means of preserving the living forms, extremely varied, in those conditions which are useful to their existence. When a living being has come out of the struggles of life, when it has yielded to external agents and enemies in a certain way, it transmits itself to future generations in that form and nature which are the fruit of a long and successful battle. Precisely for the same reason, an herbivorous animal, which is the offspring of another that has gained its flesh with herbs, cannot grow and multiply except by feeding on herbs. Imagine for a moment that organs and tissues feeding on meat should be grafted on to the organs and tissues of an herbivorous animal. What disorders would not arise! A fragment of carnivorous animal closed up in an organism which has teeth to chew herbs, gastric juice to digest herbs, intestinal tube to assimilate herbs, and olfactory nerves which find leaves and flowers delectable! The apparent stability of the species, which in fact resolves itself in a slow mutation, is nothing therefore but the unavoidable necessity for male and female to pour into the crucible of generation elements that can combine, metals that can fuse, forming a homogeneous and compact alloy.