In the present connection, then, the chief interest of the work of Freud and Jung on infantile phenomena associated with sex, in so far as it is not exaggerated, lies in the fact that here too we have an instance of the working of von Baer’s Law of Recapitulation. In the animal the sense of relation begins with sex; in the child we have strange, fragmentary primitive sex-phenomena (if these psychoanalysts be right), dissociated from many of their natural concomitants; phenomena suggesting some close analogy with the temporary appearance in the embryo of structures that disappear again, having lost their significance. Can it be that the purely animal basis on which man’s great structure of relationship is raised, is merely a foundation, becoming gradually hidden, covered up?
Love is, no doubt, in origin an impulse of sex. Yet the highest love we know and experience in ourselves has nothing sexual in it. When a man and a maid fall in love there is no thought of such things in the mind of either. Primarily, true love is utterly pure from admixture with animal instincts, though it may be, and is, founded on them in the evolutionary sense, and though they still play a vastly important part, made beautiful by the love they subserve. But the love that begins as conscious sex-instinct is no love at all. There is love between men and women, even young men and women, as well as between those of the same sex, that is either utterly free from all sexual content, or in which that content is so trivial in amount, and so completely dismissed from attention, that it is practically non-existent. If one is conscious of it at any moment, one is so by a definite effort of the mind, and for the specific purpose of bringing before oneself the wonderful emergence of the purest and highest activity of the spirit from so lowly and physical an origin. Such love is far higher than the love between husband and wife often is, where the sexual side is primary as well as primitive, and friendship secondary. Only when husband and wife are first friends, and then, after that, live together with a full realisation of the sacramental meaning of sex as the foundation on which the eternal temple of love has been and is being built, can their union approach the highest level. Then it is indeed the best of all in this life. It takes them closer to the heart of things than mere friendship would, and enables them to make their other friendships perfect through the understanding which it brings. The physical subserves the spiritual, and even in the physical the two are united. The physical and the spiritual are for them one—parts of a whole. Their own friendship is perfect as far as anything human can be perfect, and by it their friendships with others are made perfect.
We see, then, in the founding and development of the sexual impulse the first movement of the élan vital along its true path of evolution. The élan vital determines progress; it is the unrest, the divine discontent of spirit creating itself in matter[32]. It progresses along various roads, but the road that leads it to its own fulfilment lies through sex. The élan vital becomes libido in an even narrower sense than that, almost co-extensive with Bergson’s term, which Jung gives to the word. For through sex the sense of individual, and subsequently personal, inter-relationship comes into being[33]. With the arousing of self-consciousness we find the dawn of love. This is the beginning of understanding. In the intuition of love is born the knowledge of Reality. Faint, partial, obscured by the sex-basis on which it is built up, it is yet the key to the mystery of being. Gradually, slowly, amid disappointing foulness and blind passion, it still grows. In its insistence on relationship it is manifested as the human aspect of religion. Side by side with it grows the knowledge and love of God. This is the divine aspect of religion, and the two together make the world and the activity of the spirit an intelligible whole. The “What is Truth” of jesting Pilate finds here its answer. All truth, all life, all process, in short Reality itself, is known in the knowledge of the creative love which is the activity of spirit. We see sex growing to greater and greater importance until we reach man. Then self-consciousness intervenes; the ideas of relation and of fellowship dawn; love finds a beginning, and then sex begins to lose its privileged place. From pre-eminence it sinks to a secondary position. Its spiritual part is nearly played, and something higher carries on the work. Love is more than passion. Sex must continue to function, for man has still a physical body; but its spiritual significance is understood, and that is a thing far greater than itself. As love grows, passion sinks and sinks from its first prominence, till love is all. “They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels.” If this means anything at all, it means that in the end the physical body will have played its noble part and pass away, with its passions and its failures; while the life goes on, revealed in a body spiritual.
In the light of this understanding nothing is left unclean. Even in the work of Freud, in so far as it is true, and not coloured by the overstrained interpretations of a pathologist, there is nothing to shock, though much to sadden us. Where in man there is over-emphasis of sex there is a return to the lower, animal stage. Men are regarding life in terms of what has been, and not of what shall be. They are falling short of their own possibilities. In what degree this phenomenon is pathological, due to some neurosis or psychosis, we may not judge them; in what degree their over-concentration on animal passion, to the exclusion of true spiritual activity, is under the control of the will we are in presence of sin. For, from the evolutionary point of view, sin is the refusal to live up to the standard that is at present possible, the acquiescence in a standard that belongs properly to a stage outgrown; lower; more animal, less divine. It is content with an anachronism; the willing acceptance, the welcome of failure to progress—and this means refusal to progress[34].
But to see in the sex-impulse the explanation of love is to fall into the same error as do the materialists, though the error has assumed a new and more subtle guise. You can no more explain love by sex than you can explain mind by matter. In both cases you are using terms to which you can attach no meaning. Ultimately I cannot think of matter and yet exclude mind; I cannot think of sex and yet exclude relation, and so, ultimately, love. For scientific purposes no doubt I can do both, for science is a process of abstraction in which we disregard everything that is not relevant to an immediate and narrow purpose. But philosophy may not abstract. She deals with the concrete and the real.
We have apparently lost sight of the question of beauty; but those who have followed the thought of the first chapter will realise that we have not in fact gone far afield. Upon the foundation of sex, as we have seen, the sexless activity of love is being slowly reared; and love is relation—relation is the reciprocal, creative activity which is spirit, and spirit is Reality. God is Love; men perfected are, or will be, love. The being of God and men alike is the activity of personal relationship, made perfect in union while yet each retains his self-identity[35]. The knowledge of this relation, the expression of it, is Beauty; and in Beauty the whole theoretic activity is comprehended in the ultimate resort, when intuition, the immediate contact, and logic, the mediate contact, are made one through perfect knowledge.
Since then, the first origin of the realisation of relationship is born in the sex-impulse, here the beginnings of beauty must be sought. But to search for them in any developed form—to search for what we understand by beauty—in the animal consciousness is vain. There can exist in it only some dim fore-shadowing, some preference. Not until true self-consciousness arises can there be any real sense of beauty, if beauty be the intuition of a relation expressed to the self and to others. And arguing from the psychological effect of beauty upon ourselves—the longing it produces, and the creative impulse—we have been driven to define beauty as the expression of a relation. The germ from which love and beauty will spring is already there in the relation between animals, but who would guess that from the least of seeds should be born so great and noble a tree?
Many have sought the origin of the sense of beauty in the attraction of sex, and have then hanged Beauty under this bad name. To do this is to proclaim oneself a materialist. Our idea is far different. Reasoning from the standpoint to which we are driven by an examination of evolution that does not neglect the phenomenon of personality; finding the only explanation of evolution itself in free personal relationship; we see in sex the primitive ground-work of that relationship. Physically, the sex relation subserves many purposes; it provides a chief mode of introducing variation, it blindly helps on the evolutionary process through selective mating, it provides the chemical stimulus to the development of a new organism from the gamete or sex cell. But it does more. In the light of the end we see in sex a far nobler function; of a significance not transient but abiding. In the great adventure of Creative Love, to sex is given the task of bringing about those relations which constitute the ground-work of the personal union which is Love. Of the understanding and the expression of this relation is born the sense of beauty, destined gradually to transfigure the world for man, as he learns to see order and purpose and significant relation in the whole, and to endure eternal and yet always new.