The expression of erotic emotion does not involve activity on the man’s part solely, and absolute passivity on the woman’s. Passion and passive are etymologically the same word, but the natural inferences from this are erroneous. It happened that emotions were called passions by some old Roman pseudo-philosopher who was translating Stoic doctrines and used “passions” to translate patheia, which, in Greek, means “sufferings.” The Stoics believed that emotions were sufferings inflicted on men by Fate. Their great discovery was that men could conquer them by training (askesis). Hence comes “asceticism”: the training by which a man might free himself from the suffering which was caused by feeling anything. Now we are beginning to realize that there are emotions that ought to be felt, and repeatedly—emotions that are as necessary to the growth of the soul as food is to the growth of the body. Asceticism (training), therefore, of the future will be a training in the emotions of love.
§ 34
Women are said to be more emotional than men. In the sense that their actions are guided by their emotions more than by the verbal processes of logical reasoning this may be true. For there is a type of mental process that may be called logical in which verbal consistency is sought and with little difficulty maintained. But as words are only counters, symbols or representatives of things and are used in only a part of all the thinking, conscious and unconscious, that goes on in the mind continuously day and night, a term is needed with which to describe the wordless thought-processes that are quite as important causes of action as are the verbal processes; and to these has been given the term psychological.
Emotions are for the most part indescribable, not to be adequately represented by words, and are therefore to be regarded as psychological processes tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal thought or reasoning.
Men are characterized more than women by a tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal control, while women utter many words in the vain attempt to give verbal expression to their feelings. In men on the average words have more weight in the determination of action; in women feelings or emotions.
§ 35
In the sense, however, that women perceive with greater clearness and intensity the internal organic sensations (or emotions) it is not true that women are more emotional than men. Unconsciously, “down deep in their hearts” the members of one sex are as emotional as those of the other. Men have as many and as powerful emotions as women, but have controlled some emotions more than women have, by annihilating or attempting to annihilate, them by means of repression. But women too have been forced to repress certain other emotions, notably the erotic.
§ 36
The most vital emotion is the erotic. I hope I shall not be misunderstood in my use of the term “erotic.” I place it above all the other emotions in dignity and complexity. It is sex plus love and more than that. “All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem.” All the dynamics of the ages in the force of one feeling. It is the physical plus the spiritual, the combination of bodily and psychical, the paradox that makes the individual’s greatest personal happiness consist in his feeling the happiness of another person of the opposite sex, the spiritual force that vitalizes and sublimates every physical thing it touches, the psychical that completely evaporates, if not supported by the most physical, an emotion that, unlike any other emotion, comes from the experience not of other things but of another’s emotions, the only emotion that responds pleasurably to every manifestation of bodily and spiritual activity of the member of the other sex. Erotism is the most nearly perfect type of conjugal love.