ANIMAL LIFE GENERATION. 345 



The man is not consulted whether he shall 

 be born or not ; life is super-imposed upon the 

 individual without his knowledge or consent, 

 so he aspires for a kind of organic freedom 

 in Generation. The individual alone can as- 

 similate but not generate; in order to reach 

 the creative function of his own individuality, 

 he requires another individual, symmetrical 

 in sex, that each may subsume or assimilate 

 the other, and thus both be present in the 

 third, the offspring. Thus the spacious prov- 

 ince of heredity unrolls before us, into which 

 stream ancestral contributions by the million. 



The basic character of the sexual Process 

 in animal Generation has been already out- 

 lined. The individual man, simply living for 

 himself through assimilation, is not the whole 

 process of himself, but the half, the one side 

 which must find its completing half in the op- 

 posite sex. Desire is the manifestation of this 

 halfness, which longs to be the whole. The 

 sexual individual, being inadequate to his own 

 immanent kind of species as self-created, is 

 impelled to his sexual counterpart, needing 

 it to assimilate him to his beginning and to 

 recreate his starting-point as the new indi- 

 vidual. He integrates his halfness and is 

 taken up into the total process in which two 

 sexual halves become one, the creative one 

 the genus above both as individuals. But 



