[A] James (Psychology, 1890, II. p. 449) asserts that emotions follow and do not precede the bodily state. We fear because we run away, reverence because we kneel, love because we kiss.

B The tendency of the mind is to project in imagination upon the world about us what we possess in our own souls. An accentuated mental attitude in an individual is, as a rule, proof that in its subconsciousness dwells a type of reversed feeling to the one that is active in consciousness. The excessive prude is generally at heart a sensualist.

C This quality may explain the Talmud’s (Berachoth 60a, Nidah 31) assertion that if the female orgasm occurs first, the child is of the masculine sex, while when the male orgasm precedes that of the female, a girl is born. When the male orgasm occurs first, the semen is discharged within the acid vaginal contents. The spermatozoa are, therefore, weakened, and a girl is born. When the woman’s orgasm occurs first, the semen is then ejaculated into the alkaline cervical secretion which was expelled with Kristeller’s plug. Hence, the spermatozoa remain strong and vigorous and a boy is born. The modern theory of sex is that it is determined by the germ-cells as every other unit character. Every spermatozoön and ovum possess originally male and female determiners. But during the maturition the determiners of one sex are cast off, and the gametes are either male or female. Hence, when the ovum is male, only a male spermatozoön will be admitted within its interior, and a boy will be the result. If the ovum is female, only a female spermatozoön will be able to penetrate it, and a girl will be born.

D Explanatory remarks: When a voluptuary thought originates in the centre of voluptas 11, it is transmitted by fibre 12 to the vasodilatory centre 4 in the medulla oblongata, hence by fibre 14 in the spinal cord to the centre of erection 16 in the lumbar part of the cord; hence through the nervi erigentes 17 to the genitals at the periphery 10, where it responds by an erection. The excitation of the erection is then, if strong enough, transmitted through the centripetal or sensory nerve 9 to the centre of ejaculation 7; hence again through the centrifugal ejaculatory nerve 8 to the periphery, where ejaculation takes place.

When an excitation originates at the periphery 10, as in sleep, it is transmitted through the sensory nerve 18 to the centre of erection 16, and through nerve 15 to the vasodilatory centre 4; hence back to the periphery by the nerves 14 and 17, after the inhibitory nerve 13 has been paralyzed. The excitation of the erection is then transmitted, as previously described, through nerve 9 to centre 7 and nerve 8 to the periphery where ejaculation takes place. In either case the excitation of the ejaculation is then carried through the sensory nerve 5 to the centre of libido 3 and is there experienced as a pleasurable feeling.

When the centre of erection 16 is directly irritated, for example, by electricity, after the spinal cord has been severed, the stimulus is directly transmitted through nerve 17 to the periphery 10 to respond with erection. The same road is taken by the excitation of the centre of erection 16 during sleep.

In spermatorrhoea the stimulus at the centre of voluptas 11 is directly transmitted through nerve 6 to the centre of ejaculation 7, hence through nerve 8 to the periphery 10, and ejaculation takes place without erection.

E Many authorities (among others Rohleder, Berliner Klinik, 1909, Heft 257) claim that the libido, or the pleasurable sensations, originate at the orifices of the ejaculatory ducts during the passage of the thick semen through these narrow openings. This hypothesis will not stand a critical analysis. People who began to masturbate in early childhood relate that for years they experienced orgasm without noticing the least trace of an ejaculation. One day, usually between the fourteenth and sixteenth year, they were surprised by the first ejaculation. Still there was no material change in the quality of the libido during the orgasm accompanied by ejaculation from that experienced during the previous orgasms without ejaculations. This tends to show that the libido experienced at the sexual paroxysm has its cause not in the removal of the material congestion but in the relief from the nervous tension. The orgastic paroxysm has its analogy in the epileptic crisis. The nervous tension in the epileptic patient is gradually increased until one day an explosion ensues, and the epileptic attack removes, so to say, the accumulated nervous energy. The patient is then relieved for a certain time. An analogous relief from the nervous tension is effected during the orgastic crisis, and the cause of the libido in men and in women is this discharge of nervous energy. The ejaculation of the few drops of semen or of Kristeller’s plug is only an accidental incident, which may contribute to the well-being of the individual, just as the discharge from bladder and rectum, but which is not the cause of orgastic libido.

F This monthly periodicity is attributed by some authorities to cosmic influences (the new moon and full moon). But since other vital processes also show a certain undulatory increase and decrease in strength (e. c. the systole and diastole of the heart), it is more probable that the periodicity of ovulation is due to an undulatory motion, where the length of the wave is about four weeks.

G According to Pflüger (Veit’s Handb. der Gyn. 1908, Vol. 3, p. 25) the pressure of the periodically growing Graafian follicle causes a continual irritation of the ovarian nerves, which, by reflex action, is the cause of the great congestion of the genitals. When the stimulus has reached a certain height, the congestion leads, on the one side, to the rupture of the follicle, on the other hand, to the menstrual change of the uterine mucosa. This theory has been abandoned, and the modern trend of opinion is to attribute the general congestion to chemical substances, thus returning to Brown-Sequard teachings that the periodical congestion is caused by a chemical substance which, produced within the ovary, enters the blood circulation.

According to L. Meyer, under the influence of ovulation, a continual production of substances, oophorines, necessary for the growth of the foetus, takes place. These substances circulate in the blood, and, when they are present in large amounts, cause a stimulation of the entire nervous system. This explains the nervous irritation and other phenomena of this period. During menstruation these substances are excreted.

G. Klein (Münch. med. Wochenschr. 1911, p. 997) thinks that the oophorines cause a chemical change of the uterine mucosa and of the blood circulating in the latter, and are themselves chemically changed. They then leave the body simultaneously with the menstrual blood. Hence menstruation is a real catharsis, in the sense of Hypokrates, a freeing of the body from the toxic effects of the oophorines. The presence of the oophorines during this period accounts for the different smell of menstrual blood from ordinary blood. The peculiar smell from the mouths of some menstruating women may also be attributed to the presence of the oophorines in the body.

When pregnancy has once been established, menstruation ceases for the entire period the mother is nursing her offspring, be the nursing within the uterus during gestation or later on during lactation, with the breast. Both periods comprise the time when the mother has to give her vital fluids for the nutrition of her offspring.

H The Hindus recommend the marriage of the girl before the first menstruation has set in. Among many savages the first menstruation is the signal for marrying off the girl. Such women become impregnated with each succeeding child immediately after they have finished nursing the preceding one. By the time propagation ceases, the climacerium sets in. In this way these women only menstruate a few times during their lives.

I Another reason why menstruation is so rarely observed among animals is their posture. If the preparations preceding menstruation are for the purpose of ingrafting the fertilized ovum, it follows that menstruation must occur in all those animals in which the fertilized egg is fully developed to complete maturity within the interior of the mother. This is indeed what happens. All animals with so intimate an attachment of the foetal and maternal organisms that the foetal placenta cannot be detached from the mother without a haemorrhage, show the phenomenon of menstruation.

Menstruation was formerly regarded as the exclusive prerogative of woman, but we know now that woman shares the privilege with many animals. All warm-blooded animals that stand or walk erect, without exception, menstruate. The appearance of the discharge is simply due to posture. The process is going on in all quadrupeds, as the sheep, the cow, the dog, the cat, etc., but on account of the position of the uterus (in quadrupeds the fundus of the uterus is situated lower than the neck) the blood is usually retained in that organ, reabsorbed through the lymphatics into the blood, and consumed in the vital process or eliminated through excretory glands.

In some animals the discharge consists of mucus. In dogs the writer saw real blood. It is only a play of nature, that in one species the congestion of the genitals manifests itself by a sweating of viscous mucus, in the other by a flow of blood.

Even the lower animals shed the same degenerated material. They menstruate through the lymphatics, if for one cause or another impregnation has been prevented. But as a rule, in animals, living in freedom, impregnation always follows the preparation of the uterus, and the phenomenon of menstruation fails to appear. It is only among domesticated animals that the discharge from the genitals is sometimes observed.

J According to Bischoff, at the moment of the highest excitement the uterus is pressed down into the small pelvis, and the uterine orifice opens and receives the sperma by a kind of suction.

Eichstedt claims that the uterus, which is usually flattened in the sagittal direction, assumes a round, pear-shaped form during the excitement and for some time afterwards. In this way a real cavum uteri is produced, where previously only a virtual cavity existed. The vacuity then sucks in the sperma by means of aspiration like a pump.

Kisch says: During the orgasm the uterus descends deeper into the pelvis. It is assisted in its descent by the pressure of the abdominal muscles. The muscles of the uterus open then the uterine orifice, and the formerly flat opening becomes round. At the same time the uterine orifices of the tubes also open. Simultaneously the secretion of the cervical glands is expressed, and a suction of a small amount of sperma into the cervix ensues.

Rohleder says: The plicae palmatae of the cervix form an obstacle to the penetration of any fluid into the uterus. But during the excitement, this obstacle is overcome by the increased secretion of the cervical glands. At the same time the uterine orifices of the tubes, which are generally closed, open widely through the excitement and almost challenge the entrance of the spermatozoa.

Kristeller describes the secretion of a clear transparent mucus in the form of a cord about one to four millimeters thick and one to six centimeters long in the uterus of every mature woman, who never was pregnant. This cord is hanging out of the orificium externum uteri.

According to Wernich, a preparatory erection of the vaginal portion and of the neck of the uterus takes place in the beginning of the act. Then in the moment of the highest orgastic excitement, and almost simultaneously with the mutual ejaculation, the cervix becomes flabby and soft again. This sudden relaxation of the erected cervix is made possible by a particular arrangement of the nerves and causes the aspiration of the sperma. The erection of the lower part of the uterus during the sexual excitement has, therefore, almost the same importance for propagation as the erection of the penis for copulation. It serves the purpose of expelling Kristeller’s slimy plug from the cervix, in the moment of the highest orgasm.

Mundé has seen the gushing, almost in jets, of clear viscid mucus from the external os during evident sexual excitement, produced by the rather prolonged digital and specular examination, in an erotic woman. The lips of the external os alternately opened and closed, with each gasping emitting clear mucus, until the excitement, which was intentionally prolonged by gently titillating the cervix with a sound through a Sims speculum, reached such a height as to cause the woman to sit up on the table and thus end the experiment.

Beck (St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, Sep. 1872, p. 449) observed an orgasm while examining a woman with prolapsus uteri. The orifice of the uterus was just inside of the vulva and could be observed without a speculum. The woman was very prone, by reason of her passionate nature, to have an orgasm produced at the slightest contact with the fingers. The action of the uterus during the two observations was almost identical. The cervix of the uterus had been firm, hard, and generally in a normal condition, with the os closed so as not to admit the uterine probe without difficulty. But immediately when the orgasm began, the os opened to the extent of fully an inch, made five to six successive gasps, drawing the external os into the cervix, each time, powerfully and at the same time becoming quite soft to the touch. After about twelve seconds all was over. The os had closed again, and the cervix hardened. During the crisis an intense congestion of the parts could be noticed. The sensations experienced were described as being of the same quality as they ever were during coition. But they were not the same in quantity, the normal orgasm lasting longer.

Talmey (New York Medical Journal, June, 23, 1917) observed an orgasm while examining a case where the cervix was found to be of normal consistency, and the external os was just passable for a uterine sound. Suddenly the cervix became red, congested, and soft, and the sound within the uterine cavity began to execute certain movements, resembling pendulum swings. The os opened so wide as to admit the index finger besides the sound, and the cervical lips made three gasps, each time drawing the lips within the canal. After a few seconds the paroxysm was over.

These direct observations on the uterus by the last named American authors place the uterine action during the orgasm into the realm of scientific facts and entirely remove it from the province of theoretical speculation. The fact has been established beyond the shadow of a doubt that propagation is greatly facilitated by the suction-movements of the uterus during the orgasm.

This suction is also the cause why douches which are often recommended as anti-conceptional remedies must fail, even if they are made immediately after congress. By the uterine suction the spermatozoa are drawn within the uterine cavity and immediately removed from any action the douches could have on them. Hence when the female orgasm follows the male, as it usually does in the normal woman, anti-conceptional douches will always be a failure. Only when the female orgasm precedes that of the male, and the spermatozoa are left upon their own resources to reach the uterine cavity, then there is a chance to kill the spermatozoa by an immediate antiseptic, acid or bacteriocide douche.

K The Bartholinian gland, not being under muscular control, an ejaculatory discharge of its contents would seem to be impossible. Still in a patient, a married lady of 35 years, after a protracted contact stimulation of the external genitals the author observed an ejaculation-like discharge from the left gland, resembling the flow from an hypodermic syringe under pressure. In four other cases, the only ones in which the author had the opportunity to observe the Bartholinian glands in action, the secretion appeared in small drops, slowly oozing out from the pin-head-like orifices.

L One of the author’s patients, a young lady 22 years of age, mother of one child, lost consciousness for half an hour every time after the production of the summa libido.

M According to Moll, the highest orgasm may be induced and complete satisfaction enjoyed by the female without ejaculation. The satisfaction may be experienced when the corpora cavernosa of the clitoris, after their erection, relax again.

N One of the author’s patients bit his wife in the breast that she had to be treated for some time afterwards. Another patient bawled every time she reached the state of orgasm. Another young woman lost consciousness every time at the moment of the orgasm.

O Thus woman commands over a greater number of erogenous zones than the man. Hence the intensity of her libido ought naturally to be higher than that of the man.

According to Hammond the neck and mouth of the uterus are supplied with sensibility in its character, like that possessed by the clitoris. On the other hand, Roubaud says that many women have confessed to him that they are perfectly insensible to the titillations of the clitoris, and experience libido only by the touch of the walls of the vaginal entrance. One of the author’s patients experiences a painful sensation by the titillation of the clitoris, while the touch of the vaginal wall induces magnam libidinem.

P Some women know how to train the sphincter cunni that it becomes as strong as the sphincter ani. This art is especially studied by the Parisian demi-mondaine, and it is said that therein lies a great deal of her much vaunted piquancy. The author had occasion to observe the regular voluntary contractions of the sphincter cunni during the vaginal examination of a young erotic woman of thirty years of age.

Q Women, says Hagen, in his “Sexuelle Osphresiologie,” are like the flowers who spread their intoxicating fragrance during dawn and dusk—at the first rays of the rising and the last rays of the setting sun. With some the sweetest odors emanate during night-time. Before a thunder storm, when the air is close, the “parfum de la femme” is particularly pronounced. The transpiration of lean women is less pronounced than in the stout, who possess usually large sudoriparous pores and sebaceous glands. Brunettes have a stronger odor feminae than blondes, and both are surpassed by the red-haired.

According to Jaeger, the balmy fragrance of the pure, innocent virgin is of an extraordinary purity. As soon as the girl falls in love, the fragrance at once changes.

Long sexual continence is claimed by Galopin to increase the transpiratory odor feminae.

According to Monin, the woman’s respiration at the time of menstruation has the odor of onions.

Before and after conjugation the natural odor corporis of the woman is more intense. Two of the author’s patients were reported to exhale an odor somewhat resembling that of onions, immediately after the orgasm.

R Roubaud says: Whatsoever the degree of coldness and aversion may be that the woman brings to ad concubitum, the mere presence of the mentula within the vagina will produce in her organs a certain action, which although in the beginning only local, will, if prolonged, change into a libidinous excitation.

S For the same reasons stuprum cum fornicatricibus to appease the passions is highly deleterious to the man’s health, even if he escapes infection. No man has any real affection for his temporary chance acquaintance of the street. This lack of affection, together with the fear of infection, renders meretricious venery highly unhygienic in the long run.

T The complicated actions, executed by the new-born baby at the first nursing, are the most marvelous the author can imagine. As soon as the mother presents her breast to her baby, its mouth closes air-tight around the nipple, by the prompt action of the muscle orbicularis oris (innervated by the facialis). Thereupon the tongue is retracted like the piston of a syringe. In this way a vacuum is created in the cavity of the mouth, and the milk is thus drawn out of the breast. This retraction of the tongue is effected by the help of the muscles hyoglossus and styloglossus.

The tongue is now pressed toward the palate, pushing the fluid backward toward the pharynx. First the top of the tongue is pressed to the palate by the M. longitudinalis linguae, then the middle tongue, by lifting the hyoides bone by means of the M. mylohyoideus (N. trigeminus) and finally the root of the tongue by the muscles styloglossus and palatoglossus (N. facialis).

When the fluid has passed the two arcs, the arcus palatoglossus and the arcus palatopharyngeus, the latter contract and close the way back to the front, while the soft palate or uvula closes up the cavity of the nose by the action of the M. levator veli palatini (facialis) and the M. tensor veli palatini (trigeminus).

The fluid or the morsel is thus confined in the head of the pharynx. The larynx is now drawn upward and forward by the Mm. geniohyoideus, digastricus and mylohyoideus. In this way the root of the tongue presses the epiglottis down upon the orifice of the larynx, and prevents the food from entering into the lungs.

The food enters now the oesophagus which by a peristaltic movement presses the same down into the stomach.

Arrived in the stomach, the epithelia of the latter begin to secrete hydrochloric acid and pepsin by which the albumen of the food is changed successively into syntonin, propeton, and pepton. By a peristaltic movement of the stomach, the solution is then forwarded into the duodenum.

At the arrival there the pancreas sends its ferments, trypsin, to dissolve the still unchanged albuminates, and the fat-ferment to break up the fatty substances (the diastatic ferment for changing the carbohydrates into sugar is not found yet in the infant). At the same time the liver sends in its secretion, the bile, which serves to effect an emulsion of the fatty substances. The other intestinal glands also contribute their secretions to effect all these necessary changes, so that the chyle can now be imbibed by the intestinal villi, by a kind of osmosis, and forwarded into the lymphatic current to serve as nourishment for the new-born individual.

Now, all these organs, the nerves, muscles, and glands, must work in coördination and perfect harmony to accomplish the task of the preparation of the young animal’s food. It would take a physicist and chemist years of hard study to be able to accomplish all the different tasks, just described, which the new-born baby is able to effect, without any effort, in the first hours of its new existence.

This wonderful instinct of hunger for food and its satisfaction is really awe-inspiring. It is an inexplicable mystery as life itself. In fact, it is, as Bergson truly says, the prolongation of the life-principle. The author is unable to agree with the last named philosopher, who claims that intellect is the highest in men and instinct in the hymenoptera. It seems to the author that the instinct of taking in food and its preparation into chyle by man is no less wonderful than the knowledge of the digger-wasp to sting the caterpillar just in the right place to ensure paralysis without death.

The objection that all these actions are merely reflex-actions does not detract an iota from the marvel. Then the coördination of all these reflexes is miraculous. It only changes the name of instinct into reflex, just as the change of the name of the creative power from the old name of God into that of the atheist’s “Nature,” or of Plato’s “idea,” or Nietzsche’s “Wille zur Macht,” or Bergson’s “Élan vital,” or Shaw’s “Life force,” etc., does not in the least change the nature of the creative power.

U Hegar says that in civilized men we can not speak at all of an instinct of propagation. For with them so many reflexions and considerations enter into play that to speak of anything impulsive is to ignore the state of mind of the society of our days.

V The old German law punished adultery or granted a divorce only when intermissio penis in vaginam has been witnessed.

W M. Maupus (Archives de Zoologie expérimentelle, 1889) has shown that without conjugation, the members of an isolated family of infusoria eventually cease to feed and divide and pass through the stages of degeneration and senility to extinction. (In the train of conjugation there is always death. Non-conjugating protozoa are immortal. Eve and Death.)

X Colonies arise when the individual animals do not leave each other, after their division, to live a separate life but remain together. After the second division there are four animals or members, after the third division eight, then sixteen, thirty-two, etc., until an entire colony of millions of cells has risen. The human body is composed of some twenty-six trillions of cells (26,000,000,000,000,000,000). Brain and spinal cord alone contain two billion cells.

Y It must be quite a shock to the prude, in the knowledge that the much admired flower represents in its ensemble the sex-organs of the plants, or those parts which in men possess for the sensualist a peculiar aesthetic attraction. Most perfumes, so generally used by the sensual, are extracts from flowers, i. e., the sexual parts of the plants; some perfumes are taken even from the sexual organs of the animal, e. g., musk. This fact may account for the exaggerated love of the sensualists for flowers and perfumes.

Z Weissman believes that in each individual, produced by sexual generation, a portion of germ-plasm, derived from both parents, is not employed in the construction of the cells and tissues of the soma, or personal structure of the individual, but is set aside, without change, for the formation of the germ-cells of the succeeding generation.

According to Boveri, the ovum has all the organs and qualities necessary for the development of the foetus, except that its centrosome, which starts segmentation, is in a state of inactivity, while the spermatozoön possesses the active centrosome but lacks the protoplasma or the material by means of which this organ could begin its activity.

AA Among animals, says Walker, there are species that never marry and those that do. Those male animals whose young are easily fed, such as the horse, the bull or the dog, never approach the female except when under the influence of rut, never cohabit with one exclusively, rarely, if ever, repeat the reproductive act with the same individual, and commit the care of the offspring entirely to their temporary mates.

AB In some animals the rôles are changed. The part of the female in fishes, for instance, is ended when she has let fall the roe on the spawning-bed, while the male swims constantly over this bed and watches over the fertilized eggs against the attack of enemies until the eggs have developed into new fishes.

AC The error committed by the radicals is that they read human history and neglect to read natural history. In the beginning of history permanent mating was already abolished. Permanent mating was a necessity only as long as the couples lived separated. When, however, already before the dawn of civilization, mutual aid was added to self aid, when for the sake of protection men began to live in herds, and all the males had the responsibility to procure the food for the entire herd, the individual father was released from such responsibility, and there was no necessity any longer for permanent mating. The result was promiscuity, as found by Caesar (Bell. Gal. v. 14), among the Britons: “uxores habent deni duodenique inter se communes et maxime fratres cum fratribus, parentesque cum liberis,” and by Strabo among the Celts of Ireland: “καὶ φανερῶς μίσγεσθαι ταῖς τε ἄλλαις γυναιξὶ καὶ μητράσι καὶ ἀδελφαῖς.” From promiscuity the sexual relations run through a certain cycle of consanguineous marriage, punaluan family, pairing family, polygamy back again to monogamy, as now practised in most of the civilized countries. All these changes were made in the interest of the progeny, although often unconsciously, just as the growing affection of two lovers is, in reality, already the will for life of the new individual which they could or might beget.

AD When a man, for instance, is attached to a woman because of her outward harmonious appearance, i. e., beauty, it means that she pleases his sense of sight. If he is fascinated by her beautiful voice, then his sense of hearing has been appealed to. When he falls in love by the touch of her soft little hand, then his tactile sense has been excited. The meaning of all such attachments is the desire to satisfy the senses. Hence the love is sensual. For any of the five senses may be the starting point of sexual desire.

The generative centre is in communication with the centres of all the other senses and may be excited by them.

Certain odors occasion pleasurable sexual feelings. The love of sensual women for perfumes indicates a relation between the olfactory and the sexual centres.

The sense of taste is sometimes in the service of sexuality. One of the author’s patients had sexual sensations of a pleasurable character when eating liver-sausages.

The sight of a beautiful specimen of the other sex, or even its picture only, may frequently excite the sexual centre.

Emotional persons are often sexually excited by certain music. An exaggerated fondness for music is always suspicious of being of a sexual nature.

The tactile sense is the main sense in the service of sexuality. The touch of any part of the male body by a soft female hand will cause sensual excitement. The touch of the nipple in woman often causes intense libido, a fact which plays an important part in the nursing of the young throughout all the types of mammals. The sexual sphere may also be excited by a stimulation of the gluteal region. The practice of the Flagellants was suppressed by the church when it was discovered that sensual motives played an important part in their exercises. Rousseau in his confessions describes the pleasure he felt when spanked by his nurse. Spanking often incites children to masturbation. The main irritation of the genitals is induced by touch. Erection, orgasm and ejaculation may be induced by the tactile irritation of the penis in the man and of the clitoris in a virgin, and after defloration, by the excitation of the anterior wall of the vagina. Certain zones of the skin become secondarily related to sexuality, mostly at such points where the skin turns into mucous membrane. These are the erogenous zones.

AE The word love is, as a rule, employed very loosely and made to do duty for almost any attraction, whether purely physical or wholly sentimental. Even great philosophers and distinguished writers do rarely differentiate between animal passion and human love or between pure sensuality or the somatic part of sex, and mental attraction or the psychic phenomenon.

Plato says that love between a man and a woman is mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, friendship or filial, parental or brotherly love. According to Plato, Socrates understood nothing by love except its science, Ta Erotica. Eros Uranios incites to love youths only, the more intelligent sex, and this only at a time when their good character and high culture are beyond doubt.

Plutarch says: The passion for women causes at the best the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty. The Greeks, therefore, applied the celestial kind of love only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women.

Sergi finds the cause of love in the stimuli of the reproductive organs, and in the senses of touch and temperature.

Haeckel says: The oldest source of sexual love is found in the erotic chemotropismus, in the attraction the male and female sexual cells are exercising upon each other. This sexual affinity is found even in the lowest stage of plants as in the protophyts, where both cells swim toward each other to unite.

Rosenkranz finds in nature only an empire of love, of a love that penetrates all things and leads them to a common end. Gravitation is love dominating nature. Organic life is a continued phenomenon of love. Even in inorganic nature the combination of substances, one with the other, is a trait of love. The appearance of heat and the flash of light that accompany the chemical process are, in a manner, the heralds of lust felt by the substances while uniting. Love of the sexes is a love for things that is ignored and unknown and which is not yet even in existence. The lovers must perish that love may continually rise to new life; the individual dies that the species may live. Love is not the aim but the means, serving life and development.

Love is the joy at another’s existence and is stronger than the delight at one’s own existence. Love transforms the nuptials into a jubilee even where it is the eve of death. It is hence as strong as death. There exists not only a natural love, but also a spiritual love which is stronger than death. Natural love is not the true love, but only a stepping-stone. True love is no longer blind and necessary, but conscious and free.

Teichmüller says: In sensual love, Nature makes use of the individual only incidentally, by making the propagation of the species a personal concern of the individual. She gains her end by a mystification. The individuals, by virtue of the innate impulse, consider the external aim of nature as their own personal concern, for which they voluntarily hazard everything, even life itself. Teichmüller further claims that in physical love only the state of irritability and the sensibility of the nerves of the subject are important. The object is only concerned as a soliciting casualty. The natural impulse cannot aim at lust, for lust is not an end, but only expresses the coördinate state of the subject during the actions. Every desire aims at a specific action as its end. The musician does not long for lust but for music. The pleasure connected with it ensues coördinately with the success of the performance.

Of sentimental love, Teichmüller says, the individual loves an ideal which it has itself created in its thoughts and fancy and with which the actual need not harmonize at all. For that reason the “treasure” (in German the lovers call each other “Schatz” or treasure) lies not without but within the lover. The beloved person outside is only the key that understands to unlock the treasure. The key is not able to create the wealth. Whoever is poor and desolate within, for him no key can unlock the treasure of love.

Schopenhauer sees in amorousness an individualized sexual impulse. The growing affection of the two lovers is, in reality, already the will for life of the new individual, which they could and might beget. The species has a prior, nearer and greater claim upon the individual than the frail individuality itself. The exact destiny of the individuals of the future generation is a much higher and worthier end than the extravagant and transient bubbles of the enamored. The beauty or the ugliness of the mate has nothing to do with the gratification itself, so far as it is a sensual pleasure depending upon a pressing necessity of the individual. Yet beauty is a matter of great consideration, because it represents the will of the species. Every lover finds himself deceived after the accomplished great work. For the delusion has vanished by which the individual was deceived by the species.

In defining human love, Schopenhauer says that every individual exercises a sexual attraction proportionate to the moral and physical perfection it possesses which we attribute to the ideal of the human species. The attraction of two individuals will be the more energetic the more the deficiencies of the one will be counterbalanced by the virtues of the other, and the union of the two promises a child more conforming to the type of the species. Thus the greater the disparity the stronger will be the attraction.

Danville, on the other hand, finds that alliances are more generally concluded among individuals of the same education and of a similar intellectual development. He, therefore, claims that love is the most differentiated modality of the instinct of reproduction. Intellectual development, education and culture, however, have carried it so far away from its origin as to be entirely hidden.

Rousseau says: The physical desire is the one which drives one sex to unite with the other. The moral one is that which determines the desire and fixes it upon a single object exclusively, or at least gives a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easily seen that the moral element in love is a factitious sentiment born of the usage of society and glorified with assiduity and care by women to establish their dominion.

Delboeuf looks for the basis of love in the chemical action by which the female sex cells or ova exercise an attraction, magnetic in nature, upon the spermatozoa, and vice versa.

Spinoza defines love as “laetitia concomitante idea externae causae,” a pleasure accompanied by the thought of its external cause.

Bain finds the cause of love in the charm of dissimilarity.

Mantegazza defines love as a desire for a particular beauty.

Hartman says: Man is moved by instinct to look for an individual of the other sex to satisfy his physical necessity, imagining that in this way he will enjoy a pleasure he would look for in vain elsewhere. This pleasure, one lover dreams to find in the arms of the other, is only a delusion. Subconsciousness uses these deceiving means to oppose the egotistic reflection and to dispose the individual to sacrifice its own interest to the interest of the future generation.

Spencer says that the passions which unite the sexes are the most complex and the most powerful of all feelings. Admiration, respect, reverence, love of approbation, emotion of self-esteem, pleasure of possession, love of freedom, love of sympathy, they all unite in the one powerful feeling of love. They represent a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but have an organized relation to the amatory feelings. The complex sentiment, termed affection, can, therefore, exist between those of the same sex, but it is greatly exalted in love.

Sidney declares love to be the most intense desire to enjoy beauty, and where it is reciprocal, is the most entire and exact union of hearts. The instinct, on the other hand, is absolutely sensual; it makes the exterior its object and has no other end than sensual pleasure. Every individual, therefore, loves more or less spiritually or sensually in proportion as it approaches to the spiritual or bestial nature.

Hegel says: Love is the complete surrender of the “ego” to another “ego” or to an ideal. Not the sacrifice of the possession or wealth of the ego, but the “I” itself must be given away.

Finally, Janet declares love to be complete madness in its origin as well as in its development and mechanism.

The same sentiment is expressed in a poem by Heine:

AF This common every-day kind of love, which is nothing else but a refined sexuality, pure and simple, has been elevated to a fetich by the modern so-called intellectuals and extolled in and out of season. The advocates of the new love-morality show by the attributes, as love at first sight, that what they understand by love is sensual love. Yet upon this prosaic attachment they try to build up their new system of sexual ethics.

Every union not based upon this kind of sensual attachment is decried as mere prostitution in marriage. Any marriage influenced by such motives as loneliness, poverty, welfare of the nearest relatives, the advance in social position, advance in business or in the professions, without the obligatory romance, which after all is only refined animalism, is considered contemptible. Such motives are held to be honorable enough to govern any other action in the life of the individual, but when it comes to marriage the line is drawn. Without the quickly wearing off glamor of a silly moon-light romance, the best of motives for contracting marriage relations are nowadays considered ulterior, and the sought-for party regards itself as having married under a misapprehension.

Even eugenic power is attributed to this wonderful love. Two intellectual and physical giants will beget weaklings, so we are told, if their union has not preceded by love’s desire; while if two weaklings marry upon short notice, guided only by their pent-up sex promptings, the offspring, as a child of love, is prophesied to become a physical and intellectual giant. As if the chromosomes, the carriers of the determiners of the unit-characters, could be influenced by love’s perjuries.

AG Those feminists who clamor for the wife’s right to her individuality show that they have never experienced the emotion of true love.

AH If Samson’s love for Delilah would have been of the sentimental kind and not mere infatuation, his love would have been turned into contempt and resentment, long before his betrayal, for her, who, he must have seen, was trying to elicit the secret of his strength for some sinister purpose. But being of a sensual nature, he was betrayed by two women whom he thought he loved but with whom he was only deeply infatuated.

AI Sorrow is an only child, but happiness was born twins; one can be sad, it takes two to be happy.

AJ Thus capitalism has been evolved from primal communism, feudalism, industrialism, capitalism; and we are gradually verging to state socialism.

Marriage has been evolved from original permanent mating of the prehuman state to primal promiscuity, consanguine family, punaluan family, pairing family, patriarchal family, to strict female and loose male monogamy, and is gradually reaching, through the modern feminine movement, not, as some radicals seem to think, to variety, but to strict male and female monogamy.

Through the entire range of higher animals, even among the polygamous, the female is always monogamous, at least for the period between one impregnation to the other. As soon as she has been impregnated by one male, during the period of rut, she does not admit any other male until the next period, and woman is no exception. If she has the power she will force men to monogamy, but she will never return herself to promiscuity.