iigo LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



of the psychological and ethical purification of sex throughout the 

 course of individual life and of sex-relations throughout society. 

 Towards all this we have high examples from past traditions and 

 disciplines of sex ; and these on all forms and levels of sex-expression 

 or of restraint, and in their various alternations. Expression is 

 necessarily elemental, as in the organic world: and so far in the 

 main normally: yet with that intensification and prolongation of 

 sex throughout all seasons which has arisen with man's domestica- 

 tion to increased material well-being, restraints have been needed 

 also, and these increasingly; whence even to utmost contrasted 

 extremes as from phaUic orgiast to self-mutilant ascetic, and these 

 from antiquity to modern cases, as in India and Russia. Yet high 

 expression and noble restraint have each great records ; and we have 

 now to readapt and coadjust these. vSince sex is the veritable 

 flowering of life, its intuitive impulses and formative influences are 

 incipient from childhood, and potent in youth. They are determinant 

 of adolescence, and formative of maturity; and in each and all with 

 its appropriate psychic moods and expressions. The problem of 

 social evolution is primarily to normalise all these, and to aid their 

 development towards their highest. Hence then full appreciation 

 for the high leadership of human evolution by youth as poet, and 

 by maid as his inspirer: for on this vital spring of emotion depends 

 not only the continuance of the race, but its higher developments 

 as weU: and these alike of intellectual and practical achievement, 

 as manifestly of all the arts, from those of ennobled human expression 

 to those creative of its needed environment of beauty. Hence the 

 Olympian and Parnassian mythopoesy of Hellas at its highest; as 

 again in later ages the idealisms of poetry and of chivalry at their 

 best. Yet Hellas had also its epics and dramas of deepest sex- 

 tragedies, and later ages the like as well. Hence the continual rise 

 of moral restraints and examples, from philosophy, morals and 

 religion, and even to vows of celibacy and asceticisms. So now once 

 more, our opening evolutionary spiral has to be comprehensively 

 elaborated in thought and applied in life, both socially and individu- 

 ally. At briefest, here is that "sublimation" which is one of the best 

 terms introduced by the psycho-analysts; though the ideal and its 

 practice are of course from antiquity and middle ages alike — 

 whence the saying, ever current among students — "il faut faire 

 passer son sexe par son cerveau". Yet with neglect of this largely its 

 frequent failures, so often of arrest, at elemental level, and thence 

 too readily to perversions of higher steps to corresponding falls. 

 Hence the significance of biological examples; yet need of personal 

 education, and of self-education above all. 



