In the non-fecundating periods in the lives of the lower animals they spend their energies in either seeking food or hibernating. We humans, after the work of providing food and shelter is finished, have a surplus of energy to work off. After procreating our children we need to develop, in a sense to create, ourselves as humans advancing above the animals, not as humans descending to animal levels. This development has been tried in various ways by different men and women in different ages. Some have given their energies to religion, to philanthropy, to charity, to arts, to commerce. Few have seen the importance of developing the proper human emotions.
At the present stage of civilization all objects of study, except the last, have been worked over so thoroughly that there is nothing new under the sun. Religions have been analyzed, codified, classified; philanthropy and charity have been endowed, institutionalized and organized. There seems no longer any development possible in the technique of the various arts comparable to what was done centuries ago. Commerce and applied science are already elaborated into an almost incomprehensible complexity. Human emotions, however, and par excellence love, have only just begun to be sensed as a new field and source of human welfare.
It would seem a strange prophecy to make (yet all prophecies are strange) that, inside of five hundred years, or even fifty years, men’s excess energies would be devoted to love-making, instead of almost exclusively to the pursuit of egoistic-social ends. And yet that is what the renaissance of the erotic values of life will certainly bring about. Tarde says that “if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or European millionairism once seemed nobler, love now more and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men and the politicians and will one day succeed in driving them back. That surely will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution; the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover’s side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been the problem of love.”
§ 95
Let it not be thought that truly and sublimely intense erotic occupation is a thing that weakens men for the carrying out of great projects. The greatest project is the successful living together of men and nations, and this has not been approached, being as far from us now as the nearest fixed star. The union of man and woman into the complete binary individual is the first and essential step toward the formation of the social group which will have its first perfectly successful existence when all its individuals are binaries consisting each of a man and a woman who have become fused into an individual.
Then and not until then will questions of class, nationality and race be settled. There will probably be no separate and mutually antagonistic nations. Men will not be strong enough to create the hologamous[17] binary individual until they are emotionally strong enough and simple enough to realize the supremacy of erotic over egoistic-social values.
§ 96
A fundamental principle of erotics is that in the relation of husband and wife, this condition of preparedness for the husband’s relaxation of his erotic tension is the erotic acme of the wife herself. This is the pattern referred to at the beginning of the last section.
The emotional relaxation of the husband is, from the biological viewpoint, essentially inept and silly if it occurs in the presence of a woman unprepared for it. It is ridiculous enough anywhere else than in the woman’s presence; but she is not all present, spiritually, mentally, psychically, no matter how close physically, if she be not herself in the very climax of erotic acme. His emotional relaxation, occurring at any time previous to the complete alignment of the totality of her personality solely in the erotic direction is as inept as falling into the water completely clothed.
It is as if Nature had said unambiguously to man: