PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



old ones. That is to say you have all sorts of aptitudes 

 developed without external change, which in an earlier 

 biological state would possibly have found carnal ex- 

 pression. You have every exploited "hyper-aesthesia," 

 i.e., every new form of genius, from the faculty of hearing 

 four parts in a fugue perfectly, to the ear for money (vide 

 Henry James in "The Ivory Tower" the passages on Mr. 

 Gaw). Here I only amplify what Gourmont has indi- 

 cated in Chapter XX. You have the visualizing sense, 

 the "stretch" of imagination, the mystics, for what there 

 is to them Santa Theresa who "saw" the microcosmos, 

 hell, heaven, purgatory complete, "the size of a walnut;" 

 and you have Mr. W., a wool-broker in London, who 

 suddenly at 3 a. m. visualizes the whole of his letter- 

 file, three hundred folios; he sees and reads particularly 

 the letter at folder 171, but he sees simultaneously the 

 entire contents of the file, the whole thing about the 

 size of two lumps of domino sugar laid flat side to flat 

 side. 



Remains precisely the question: man feeling this pro- 

 tean capacity to grow a new organ: what organ? Or 

 new faculty; what faculty? 



His first renunciation, flight, he has regained, almost 

 as if the renunciation, so recent in terms of biology, had 

 been committed in foresight. I Instinct conserves only the 

 "useful" gestures. Air provides little nourishment, and 

 anyhow the first great pleasure surrendered, the simple 

 ambition to mount the air has been regained and regrati- 

 fied. Water was never surrendered, man with sub- 

 aqueous yearnings is still, given a knife, the shark's van- 

 quisher. 



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