148 SEX 



carries with it the advantages of that season, 

 in that enhanced intensity of individuality 

 and life of which we have given ample in- 

 stance in our opening biological chapters. 

 Here, then, as everywhere, our difficulties of 

 life are also our opportunities. 



But there is probably a yet deeper reason, 

 that the sex-impulse remains more or less 

 apart from the general life of civilised man. 

 Though it can be caught up into what is best 

 in him, it remains in great part pristine, 

 uncivilised, untutored. Just as the ultimate 

 sexual functions, e. g. conception and birth 

 themselves, are reflex and automatic, not 

 controlled, so the sex-impulses retain their 

 wildness. Even in the best of us there has 

 surely to be recognised a volcanic element in 

 sex, quite underlying the rest of our nature, 

 and for that very reason shaking it from its 

 foundations with tremor, if not catastrophe. 

 There always must be some measure of rever- 

 sion and even of wholesome reversion to 

 the savage and the animal. The pathological 

 enters when this reversion sweeps us too far. 

 There is a terrible truth in Walt Whitman's 

 image of man emerging " stuccoed all over 

 with reptiles and quadrupeds," and in Tenny- 

 son's picture of " Reversion ever dragging 

 Evolution in the mud." 



Stanley Hall has done well to emphasise 

 the degree in which youth is loaded with 

 palseo-atavistic qualities. Many growths that 

 we do not like seem to spring from " the 

 partly lapsed and unreclaimed, partly virgin 

 and never cultivated Bad Lands of the state 

 of Man-Soul. . . . We are influenced in our 



