280 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



a broadening of interest in the entire great human 

 family. Underlying this enormous gain is the fusion 

 of the primitive sex impulse with the essentially self- 

 preservative impulse on the part of each sex, to 

 acquire knowledge of the other sex. Higher sexual 

 interests have thus become based on lower and 

 more primitive ones, and this growth has had an 

 immeasurable but powerful effect in checking some 

 of the savage impulses that come from the unbalanced 

 exercise of the most elementary somatic instincts. 

 Literature clearly enough reflects these tendencies, 

 which are associated with the same slow-going incli- 

 nation to self-examination that is notable in music, 

 and that began during the Renaissance and Reforma- 

 tion. The sonnets of Petrarch, the verses of Dante 

 to Beatrice, the erotic sonnets of Shakespeare, so 

 pregnant with biological understanding, all reflect the 

 awakening of the higher sexual feelings and emo- 

 tions often attended by the half-pleasurable pains 

 of introspective thought. 



And if further testimony were needed to show the 

 greater refinement of understanding and feeling that 

 pervades modern literature in its delineation of the 

 amorous passion, it is to be had in the poems of 

 Goethe, of Heine, and of Browning, in the plays of 

 Alfred de Musset, and in the revolutionary idealistic 

 writings of George Sand. Society is also indebted 

 to Mr. Bernard Shaw for a physiological interpreta- 

 tion of many sexual manifestations that arise from 

 the somatic instincts. For while Mr. Shaw's views 



