PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



sexual and paternal sensation, much less. The ingenuity 

 of each specie is small, but the universal ingenuity of 

 total fauna is immense, and there are few human imagin- 

 ings among those which we term perverse and even mon- 

 strous which are not the right and the norm in one or 

 another region of animal empire. Practices very analo- 

 gous to (although very different in aim from) divers 

 onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are 

 imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them 

 familial virtue and chastity. A physician, who has not 

 obtained much glory thereby, invented or proposed arti- 

 ficial fecundation: he was imitating spiders and dragon- 

 flies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood 

 and sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten 

 manual (Berquinade) if one contemplate, not without 

 bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious orthopter, the 

 praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la prego- 

 Diou as the Provengals call her, the prophetess as the 

 Greek said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who 

 wish 



"aux choses de 1'amour meler 1'honnetete" 

 Mix seemliness into affairs of Love 



have a value not only moral but scientific. In love every- 

 thing is just, everything is noble, as soon as, among the 

 maddest animals, it is a play moved by the desire of creat- 

 ing. It is more difficult doubtless to justify fantasies 

 which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble, 

 especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea 

 of specific finality; one may however affirm, and one will 

 say nothing more about the matter, that animals are not 

 ignorant either of sodomy or of onanism and that they 

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