164 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



creasingly unitary, in which it is seen that honesty 

 is also beautiful and useful, that intellectual satis- 

 faction is in the long run serviceable to the com- 

 munity, that unselfishness to be effective requires 

 thought and will besides mere altruistic emotion, 

 that one of the greatest aids to any genuine righteous- 

 ness is an aeesthetic love of beautiful things that pre- 

 vents our doing ugly things, and so ad infinitum. 



The proper way, then, to build the sex instinct into 

 the mental system is not to have its stimulation cause 

 a merely physiological and uninhibited desire for its 

 gratification, nor to bring about a forcible repression 

 and an attempt to break connection between it and 

 the other parts of the mind. 



The desirable method is to have free connection 

 between it and the dominant ideas, so that its stimu- 

 lation brings about a stimulation of them too. This 

 leads, as a matter of experience, to the incorporation 

 of the sexual emotion in the dominant ideas, or we 

 had better say an interpenetration of one with the 

 other, so that the sexual emotion is no longer simply 

 sexual emotion, but is become part of something very 

 much larger and very much better. Let the great 

 writers say in their few words what I should say 

 much worse in many. 



Wordsworth's "sense sublime of something far 

 more deeply interfused" opens a window on to the 

 general process of sublimation: and Blake's descrip- 

 tion of the physical union of the sexes as "that . . . 

 on which the soul expands her wing" is an epitome 



