i62 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



We are now, I think, owing to our taking this 

 broad biological view, in a better position to make 

 up our minds as to some at least of the difficulties 

 which beset us to-day in any attempt to deal squarely 

 with the relation of sex to human life. It is true 

 that some of these difficulties are permanent. The 

 synthesis of a unitary and comprehensive mental 

 organization can never be an easy task. The child 

 is endowed with a number of instinctive tendencies 

 which, as in animals, each tend whenever aroused to 

 occupy the whole mental field to the exclusion of all 

 others, producing divergence and lack of co-ordina- 

 tion instead of unity and organization. Then again, 

 the experience of any one individual may be highly 

 unusual. For the child to co-ordinate his various 

 tendencies with each other and with his own experience 

 and with the tradition and experience of the race must 

 always be difficult, and there will always be some 

 failures. There is another permanent difficulty, a 

 biological disharmony, in the fact that sexual maturity 

 in man comes several years before general maturity, 

 and that again, at least in any state of civilization 

 which we can at present imagine as practicable, 

 several years before the economic possibility of 

 marriage. There will always be crises of adoles- 

 cence ; there will always be suffering and difficulty 

 due to this disharmony in time between the origin 

 of the full sexual instinct and the possibility of its 

 proper satisfaction. 



