SEXUAL CEREBRATION. 295 



evolution of sex physically there is a corresponding evolution psychi- 

 cally. The one is necessary to the organic part, the other is neces- 

 sary to the mental part, of i-eproduction. This development of the 

 possibility of love with structural completion is one of the most strik- 

 ing examples of the evolution of organic life into consciousness. The 

 mental awakening is gradual. Vague and undefined desires exist long 

 before they have taken definite shape in the consciousness ; there is a 

 satisfaction, too obscure and gradually evolved to startle the subject 

 into consciousness, in the society of the other sex. These undefined 

 desires become a part of a self-conscious act when one object is selected 

 from the many and is associated with the most sacred emotion love. 

 In order to prove that this emotion can exist independent of conscious- 

 ness, and antedate it as it were, it is only necessary to allude to the 

 fact that, in human beings, the instinct attains a knowledge of its aim, 

 and even a sort of satisfaction, in dreams, before it does so in real life. 

 Upon this Dr. Maudsley remarks as follows : " This fact might of 

 itself suffice to teach psychologists how far more fundamental than 

 any conscious mental state is the unconscious mental or cerebral life." 



Physiologically, this is the origin of the beautiful emotion called 

 love. In a healthy brain and body, one in which all organic impulses 

 find a reaction in normal consciousness, the emotion of love is allied 

 with all that is pui-e and noble in the character of the individual. 

 Men find in it an incentive to exertion, and a spur to their ambitions, 

 while women without thought array themselves in all the graces of 

 dress and manner to attract the beloved one. But we can say of love, 

 what Bacon says of it, that " the mind in its own nature would be 

 temperate and staid, if the affections, as winds, did not put it in tu- 

 mult and perturbation." This may be the effect of love even in its 

 healthy manifestations. In those cases and they are not rare in 

 which the organic appetites affect unduly and too persistently the con- 

 sciousness, it becomes the source of great unhappiness or of bad health. 

 It would be indeed hard to recognize as love the exhibition of this 

 emotion in the depraved. Among this class it is exhibited as love 

 brutalized. Revolting as it is in this form to all that is elevated in 

 our mental character, I yet believe it to be love in its rudimentary 

 form. It is love stripped of its refinements, of its singleness of object, 

 of its purity. It is often said that man is but little lower than the 

 angels ; if there is any thing which tends to this imaginary elevation 

 it is this faculty of identifying another with all earthly hopes, of 

 making the happiness and well-being of a fellow-creature the aim and 

 motive of a lifetime. But this same emotion, when it finds expression 

 in these abnormal states of consciousness, allies man to the brute, and 

 tends to show from what depths the present moral and intellectual 

 nature of man was elevated by the slow progress of evolution. 



As I have already tried to show that mentally men and women 

 define two opposite types of mind, we shall find strong confirmation 



