PSYCHOLOGICAL AND f:THICAL ASPECTS. 267 



emotional intensity ; and we have no means of measuring, much 

 less limiting, that glow of organic emotion which so manifestly 

 flushes the organism with colour and floods the world with 

 song. Who knows whether the song-bird be not beside the man 

 what the child-musician is to the ordinary dulness of our daily 

 toil and thought? The fact to be insisted upon is this, that 

 the vague sexual attraction of the lowest organisms has been 

 evolved into a definite reproductive impulse, into a desire often 

 predominating over even that of self-preservation ; that this 

 again, enhanced by more and more subtle psychical additions, 

 passes by a gentle gradient into the love of the highest animals, 

 and of the average human individual. 



But the possibilities of evolution are not ended, and though 

 some may shrink from that comparison of human love with its 

 analogues in the organic series, the theory of evolution offers 

 the precise compensation such natures require. Without recog- 

 nising the possibilities of individual and of racial evolution, we 

 are shut up to the conventional view that the poet and his heroine 

 alike are exceptional creations, hopelessly beyond the everyday 

 average of the race. Whereas, admitting the theory of evolu- 

 tion, we are not only entitled to the hope, but logically com- 

 pelled to the assurance, that these rare fruits of an apparently 

 more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of 

 the race have been privileged to gather, or it may be to see from 

 distant heights, are yet the realities of a daily life towards which 

 we and ours may journey. 



§ 4. Intellectual and Emotional Differences betiueen the Sexes. 

 — We have seen that a deep difference in constitution expresses 

 itself in the distinctions between male and female, whether 

 these be physical or mental. The differences may be ex- 

 aggerated or lessened, but to obliterate them it would be 

 necessary to have all the evolution over again on a new basis. 

 What was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be 

 annulled by Act of Parliament. In this mere outline we cannot 

 of course do more than indicate the relation of the biological 

 differences between the sexes to the resulting psychological and 

 social differentiations; for more than this neither space nor 

 powers suffice. We must insist upon the biological considera- 

 tions underlying the relation of the sexes, which have been too 

 much discussed by contemporary writers of all schools, as if 

 the known facts of sex did not exist at all, or almost if these 

 were a mere matter of muscular strength or weight of brain. 



