This evolutionary moment gives the complete type of love. As it goes on, a breach of equilibrium is produced at the expense of the physiological and instinctive elements, which gradually efface themselves before a more and more intellectualised image.
Certainly, there lies at the root of all love the unconscious search for an ideal, but for an ideal perceived in a concrete, personal form, incarnate for the moment in an individual. By a process of mental abstraction similar to that which draws from perceptions the most general ideas, the concrete image is transformed into a vague scheme, a concept, an absolute ideal, and we have a purely intellectual, Platonic, mystical love; the emotion is totally intellectualised. Let us remark that this last stage of evolution is not so very rare. Not only do we meet with it sporadically, but it has been fixed and expressed, at certain moments of history, in institutions, such as the chivalric love, of which Geoffrey Rudel seeking the Lady of Tripoli is the most perfect example; the troubadours, the Provençal Courts of Love, deciding that true love cannot exist in marriage, and excludes all cohabitation, etc. We must not, however, allow ourselves to be misled by appearances. Platonic and mystic lovers have always maintained that their sentiment is perfectly pure, and has nothing in common with the senses; the contrary opinion seeming to them a profanation and a sacrilege. Yet how could love exist without physical conditions, however attenuated we may suppose them? If they are wanting, all we have or can have is a purely intellectual state, the representation of an ideal conceived but not felt. Besides, we have more satisfactory evidence than suppositions and arguments; facts of tolerably frequent occurrence show how rapidly we may fall from the ideal plane. It is only because all the circumstances are in its favour that the fall is so easy.[[160]]
In this ascending evolution from the instinctive to the idealistic form there is a decisive moment—viz., the appearance of the individual choice. This is the special criterion which differentiates instinct from emotion. Sexual instinct contents itself with a specific satisfaction; sexual love does not. And as choice manifests itself among the superior representatives of the animal kingdom, not only by sanguinary combats between the males, or by the more pacific tournaments which precede sexual selection, but, in the absence of all rivalry and competition, by the exclusive preference of one male for one female, chosen among many others whom he might possess, we may admit a fortiori that primitive humanity must very soon have left behind the stage of Venus Volgivaga. We know that Schopenhauer, and after him Hartmann, have tried to determine the reasons of choice; but such attempts must always be partial failures, because we can never be sure of discovering all the unconscious factors.
For the rest, the psychology of love contains many other mysteries. Whence comes the blind violence which astonishes and sometimes terrifies the calm spectator? Bain thinks it can be explained by the concentration of the attention on an individual, and by the fact that intensity and unity of object are associated in love. But this applies also to other passions, such as ambition and hatred. Herbert Spencer, in the analysis already quoted, attributes it to the complexity of the passion, love being an aggregate of heterogeneous tendencies all converging to one end and carrying the individual in the same direction. At bottom, the irresistible element is in the sexual instinct, and only exists in virtue of it; instinctive activity alone has such power. This is what Schopenhauer calls, in metaphysical terms, the Genius of the species, which makes of the individual an instrument for the furtherance of its ends. We might also call it, in biological terms, according to the hypothesis of Weismann now in vogue: the continuity of the germ-plasm which energetically manifests and affirms itself, safeguarding the rights of the species against individual fancies. But all these metaphors explain nothing, add nothing to the simple verification of the fact. Sexual instinct remains the centre round which everything revolves; nothing exists but through it. Character, imagination, vanity, imitation, fashion, time, place, and many other individual circumstances or social influences give to love—as emotion or passion—an unlimited plasticity. It is the task of the novelists to describe all its various shapes, and one which they have not failed to perform.
II.
Though love, even in its average manifestations, is inseparable from obsession and impulsion, I see in these two characteristics no legitimate reason for placing it unrestrictedly—as some writers have been pleased to do—in the category of pathology.[[161]] It has its natural end, and tends to fulfil it by appropriate means. Every one knows that it sometimes reaches the confines of madness; but in this it does not differ from the majority of the emotions. There are the impulsive and irresistible forms of love (erotomania), but they remain within natural limits; the true pathology of love is elsewhere—outside nature.
On the deviations and interversions of the sexual instinct so many observations have been published,—especially in our own day,—so many books written, so many medico-legal theses discussed, that we might think the psychology of the subject had thereby been cleared up. Nothing of the sort; and it is this alone which interests us.
Reduced to its simplest expression, the psychological problem is this: The sex-instinct having a clearly-defined and easily-verifiable end, how can it deviate therefrom? Other instincts—that of conservation under its offensive and defensive forms, that of self-feeling—have no mechanism exclusively appropriated to them, and are susceptible of various and multiple adaptations. This, on the contrary, is confined by nature within strict limits. No doubt every instinct has its oscillations; but it is only the means which vary, the end remains the same. The ant, the bee, the beaver, the spider, modify their manner of acting in accordance with their environment, because they are confronted with the dilemma that they must either adapt themselves or perish; but they always arrive at the same end. The nutritive instinct in man utilises animals and vegetables—the raw caterpillars of the savage or the scientific cookery of the civilised man—but the same end is always aimed at and attained. With the deviations—at least the extreme ones—of the sex-instinct it is otherwise: everything changes, means and end alike. The normal end, generation and the perpetuity of the species, is ignored or annihilated. This aspect of the question does not appear to me to have been sufficiently noticed. How can an instinct so solidly based, and having its own special mechanism, go astray?
This subject deserves a purely psychological monograph, a very difficult piece of work for which this is not the proper place. I would only seek to inquire into the principal causes of the alteration of this instinct. I shall cite no facts—they are sufficiently well known, or will suggest themselves; besides, the choice lies between excessive abundance and nothing. I pass over the extreme cases, those of necrophily, or of sexual erethism accompanied by a craving for violence, destruction, or blood. These are the equivalent of the animal manifestations already mentioned, in which the state of general excitement, so far from producing tenderness, awakens by preference the aggressive tendencies. These are merely insane impulses. I am limiting myself to deviations and interversions—i.e., to cases where the natural mechanism of instinct is falsified (excitations caused by impressions having nothing to do with sexuality, attraction towards the same sex, etc.).
We may pass over in silence the general causes, which are not particularly instructive: degeneracy, brought in, as usual, to serve as an explanation, and heredity, which is no explanation at all, being merely a repetition, and brings us back to the primary case, which states the question afresh. The inquiry can only be profitable when directed to particular causes.