SENSATION 



developed; as the source of sexual love they play a most 

 important part in the life of many of the histona. In 

 man and most of the higher animals these feelings of 

 love are associated with the highest features of psychic 

 life, and have led to the formation of some most remark- 

 able customs, instincts, and passions. Wilhelm Bolsche 

 has given us an admirable selection from this infinitely 

 rich and attractive realm in his famous Life of Love in 

 Nature ( 1 903 ) . It is well known that this sexual sense as 

 we have it in man has been developed from the nearest 

 related mammals, the apes. But while it offers a shame- 

 less and repulsive spectacle in many of the apes, it has 

 been greatly ennobled and refined in man in the develop- 

 ment of civilization. However, the sexual sense-organs 

 and their specific energy have remained the same. In 

 the vertebrates and the articulates and many other 

 metazoa the copulative organs are equipped with special 

 cell -forms (voluptuous particles), which are the seat of 

 intensely pleasurable feelings (see the Anthropogeny, 

 chapter xxix., plate 30). The pubic hairs which clothe 

 the mons Veneris are also delicate organs of the sex-sense, 

 and so are the tactile hairs about the mouth. In these 

 cases the correlation between the sensitive forms of 

 energy in the copulative organs and the psychic functions 

 of the central nervous system has been remarkably 

 developed. Moreover, a large part of the rest of the skin 

 may co-operate as a secondary organ of the sex-sense, as 

 is seen in the effect of caressing, stroking, embracing, 

 kissing, etc. Goethe, at once the greatest lyric poet and 

 the subtlest and profoundest monistic philosopher of 

 Germany, has given unrivalled expression to this sensual, 

 yet supersensual, basis of sexual love. Ontogeny teaches 

 unmistakably that its elementary organs, the epidermic 

 cells, develop entirely from the ectoderm. 



By "organic sensations" modem physiology under- 

 stands the perception of certain internal bodily states, 



307 



