PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



vertebrates and arthropodes; it extends to identity among 

 hermaphrodite mollusks if one then compare not two 

 sexes but two individuals. It extends, for each sex con- 

 sidered separately, along the whole zoological chain. 

 Parting from link animals which separate into two parts, 

 one sees the sexual organs design themselves in the form 

 wherein they arrive in higher animals of great complex- 

 ity, such that, in acquiring differences of form and 

 position they retain a remarkable stability of structure; 

 one would say almost of identity in marsupials, reptiles, 

 fish, birds. For clarity one must proceed from the 

 known to the unknown; man is the figure to whom one 

 may compare necessarily the observations on other 

 animals. 



There is no lack of point in knowing the normal love- 

 mechanism, since moralists pretend to regulate its move- 

 ments. Ignorance is tyrannic; the inventors of natural 

 ethics knew very little of nature: this permitted them to 

 be severe; for no definite piece of knowledge interfered 

 with the certitude of their gestures. One becomes more 

 discreet when one contemplates the prodigious picture of 

 the erotic habits of the animal world, and even entirely 

 incompetent to decide flatly, yes or no, whether a fact 

 is natural or unnatural. 



Man is a placentary mammifer: by this title his 

 genital organs and their mode of employ are common to 

 him and to all hairy animals having teats and an um- 

 bilicus. He is not normally covered all over with hair, 

 but there is hardly a spot on his body where hairs may 

 not sprout, and both sexes are hairy often with extreme 

 abundance in pubis and arm-pits. The male and active 

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