The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

The mole-cricket is so well organized for digging with her short powerful bow legs that she could cut sandstone: she frequents only the soft soil of gardens. The antophore, on the other hand, with no instruments save her mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws, forces the cement which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hardened earth of the slopes by the roadside.

Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than to do nothing and to let their tools sleep; the xylocope, that fine violet bumble-bee, who ought to bore into wood, a gallery twice a hand's length wherein to lay her eggs, if she finds a suitable hole ready made, confines herself to the meagerest possible works of accommodation. In sum, the insects who like the saw-fly (tenthredes) use a precise instrument for a precise job, are almost rare.

Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to him because he is intelligent. In itself the hand is nothing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their hands only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broadcast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the saurians have them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. It is without fingers, without hands, without members that the larvæ of insects construct for themselves marvellous mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk-floss, exercise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter. But this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine it, complicate it, in order to obtain obedience to the increasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the hand created machines? Man's intelligence immeasureably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it demands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the railway, the telegraph, the microscope and everything which multiplies the power of organs which have become rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the brain being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual organs more than they were able to give: it is to satisfy these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with so many dreams and rose-leaves.

It is difficult to make people understand that the eye sees, not because it is an eye, but because it is situated at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive to light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the eye would hear. Doubtless it is adapted to its function, as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an effect, not a cause. Insects' eyes are very different from ours. One has spoken of the experiments of a German savant who wished to throw visual images on the brain without the eye's intervention. This is suspicious, but not absurd: insects are gifted certainly with the power to smell, but one has never been able to discover the organ in any single one of them; and, also, the rôle of the antennæ which seems very considerable in their life, remains very obscure, since the removal of these appendices has not always a measurable effect on their activity.[2]

Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed in a position which diminishes their value. Notice a resting horse, and another horse coming toward him (observation can be made quite easily in the streets of Paris), what is he to do to gauge the danger, and reconnoitre the movement? Look at the other horse? No. His eyes are made to look sideways, not forward. He uses his long ears, raises them, shifts their open side toward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and re-establishes his calm. The horse looks with his ears. The blinkers by which people pretend to make him look forward, merely blind him, and perhaps, thereby diminish his impressionability. Blind horses moreover do the same work as the others.

The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for the other, in a certain degree; but in the normal state they seem rather to reinforce each other mutually, and lend each other a certain support. One does not shut the eyes to hear better, save when one has determined the source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better? Is it not rather to reflect and to hear at the same time, to manage an interior concentration with which the eye, essentially an explorative organ, would interfere?

It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most intimately exercised. In superior animals, as well as in man, each sense, together or in groups, comes to reinforce the genital sense. None remain inactive, eye, ear, scent, touch, even taste come into play. Thus one explains the gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual odours. The female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye; the contrary is true of humanity; but female birds and women are particularly moved by song or words. The two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to scent; sight seems to play but an insignificant rôle in their sexual access, since minuscule canine beasts do not fear to address themselves to monsters, which for man would be in proportion more than that of a mammoth. Insects before mating often caress each other with their mysterious antennæ; the male is sometimes given a sounding apparatus: cricket and grasshopper drum to charm their companions.

It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially in the male, all the senses concur in the amour, at least when moral and religious prejudices do not stop their impetus. It should be so, in an animal so sensitive, and of so complex and multiple a sensibility. The abstention of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many women may proceed less from a diminution of their genital sense, than from the general mediocrity of their senses. Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit of the general sensibility, its intensity is very often found to be in a certain relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute coldness might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many exceptions for one to generalize in this matter. It happens indeed that intelligence instead of being the sum total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the deviation or transmutation. There remains very little sensibility; it is nearly all turned into intelligence.

Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system; and there is, doubtless, no real life save where a nervous system exists, be it the magnificent infinitely branching tree of mammals and birds, be it the double, knotted cord of the mollusks, or the nail head which is planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice. As soon as this new matter appears, it reigns despotically, and the unforeseen appears in the world. One would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder, a parasite come in by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal rôle.

Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their master asks fewer things. Often it only asks one: to create a being in its exact likeness. The animal is sane, that is to say, ruled; man is mad, that is to say, out of rule: he has so many orders to execute at once, that he scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he can hardly reproduce himself and the specie is in danger. It would disappear, if the means of protecting it did not compensate the sterility.