Part 11

We are now, I think, owing to our taking this broad biological view, in a better position to make up our minds as to some at least of the difficulties which beset us to-day in any attempt to deal squarely with the relation of sex to human life. It is true that some of these difficulties are permanent. The synthesis of a unitary and comprehensive mental organization can never be an easy task. The child is endowed with a number of instinctive tendencies which, as in animals, each tend whenever aroused to occupy the whole mental field to the exclusion of all others, producing divergence and lack of co-ordination instead of unity and organization. Then again, the experience of any one individual may be highly unusual. For the child to co-ordinate his various tendencies with each other and with his own experience and with the tradition and experience of the race must always be difficult, and there will always be some failures.

There is another permanent difficulty, a biological disharmony, in the fact that sexual maturity in man comes several years before general maturity, and that again, at least in any state of civilization which we can at present imagine as practicable, several years before the economic possibility of marriage. There will always be crises of adolescence; there will always be suffering and difficulty due to this disharmony in time between the origin of the full sexual instinct and the possibility of its proper satisfaction.

However, granted these permanent difficulties, there are others which may be reduced or made to disappear. Granted that we have to organize our minds into a whole, we can see the general plan on which we should aim at organizing it. We must aim first at having no barriers between different parts of the mind. Every attempt must be made in the education of children to prevent there being a stigma attached to one whole section of mental life, and so to avoid its partial or total dissociation from the rest. On the other hand, the absence of barriers does not imply the absence of any relation of subordination or dominance of one part to another. One of the most important biological generalizations is that progressive evolution is accompanied by the rise of one part to dominance and, whenever there are many parts to be considered, by the arrangement of the rest in some form of hierarchy, each part being subordinate to one above, dominant to one below. It is such a hierarchy which we must try to construct in our mental organization.

It is obviously impossible here to go into the whole question of values and ideals, but it is clear to any one who has given the briefest reflection to the subject that there are certain values, æsthetic, intellectual, and moral, which are ultimate for the mind of man, certain ideals--of truth and honesty, intellectual satisfaction, righteousness or at least freedom from the sense of sin or guilt, completeness and self-realization, unselfishness and serviceableness and so forth--which (though perhaps in varying proportions) are by common consent accepted as the highest: and further that the greater the attempt to deepen and broaden these, to increase their mental intensity and to widen their range and association, the more they tend to emerge into something increasingly unitary, in which it is seen that honesty is also beautiful and useful, that intellectual satisfaction is in the long run serviceable to the community, that unselfishness to be effective requires thought and will besides mere altruistic emotion, that one of the greatest aids to any genuine righteousness is an æsthetic love of beautiful things that prevents our doing ugly things, and so _ad infinitum_.

The proper way, then, to build the sex instinct into the mental system is not to have its stimulation cause a merely physiological and uninhibited desire for its gratification, nor to bring about a forcible repression and an attempt to break connection between it and the other parts of the mind.

The desirable method is to have free connection between it and the dominant ideas, so that its stimulation brings about a stimulation of them too. This leads, as a matter of experience, to the incorporation of the sexual emotion in the dominant ideas, or we had better say an interpenetration of one with the other, so that the sexual emotion is no longer simply sexual emotion, but is become part of something very much larger and very much better. Let the great writers say in their few words what I should say much worse in many.

Wordsworth’s “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” opens a window on to the general process of sublimation: and Blake’s description of the physical union of the sexes as “that ... on which the soul expands her wing” is an epitome of a particular aspect of our particular problem. Or again, when St. Paul says “Am I not free?” or “All things are lawful unto me,” he means that by subordinating all sides of himself to his highest ideals, he has reached that state in which what he does is right to him because he only wants to do what is right. (True that, as he himself confesses, he is not always able to keep in that state: but when he is in it, he attains that complete freedom which is the subordination of lower to higher desire.)

Physiologically speaking, the activation of the sex instinct, when the connection is made in this way, arouses the higher centres, and these react upon the centres connected with the sex instinct, modifying their mode of action. The nett result is thus that both act simultaneously to produce a single whole of a new type. Processes of this nature are common in the nervous system, as has been shown for instance by Hughlings Jackson, Head, and Rivers.[39]

Thus the higher, dominant parts of the mind are strengthened by their connection with such lower parts as the simple sex instinct, and the sex instinct is able to play a rôle in any operation of the mind, however exalted, in which emotion is in any way concerned. Rivers believes that the actual conflict between controlled and controlling parts of the mind is a potent generator of mental “energy”; and adds, “whatever be the source of the energy, however, we can be confident that by the process of sublimation the lives upon which it is expended take a special course, and in such case it is not easy to place any limit to its activity. We do not know how high the goal that it may reach.”[40]

The change is thus on the one side from the relative independence of the sex instinct towards its subordination to a position in a hierarchy of mental process, but on the other from a rigid limitation of its scope towards a greater universality by establishing connections with all other parts of the mind. Further, there is also a change towards greater dominance and “self-determination” of the mental as against the physical.

A great many of the difficulties which beset us, both as individuals and as communities, come from the fact that both these changes are only in process of being made, and are (even approximately) complete only in a very small number of persons.

Lack of restraint is failure to construct a properly-working hierarchy. That is a very simple example. Less easy to analyse but equally vicious, are the innumerable cases in which some sort of equilibrium is only attained not by a free interaction of dominant and subordinate parts, but by repression. Conflicts arise, which persist, either in an open form or in the subterranean regions of the unconscious. In either case they tend to be projected by the subject into his ideas of other people. This projection, or interpretation of external reality in terms of one’s self, is a curious and almost universal attribute of the human mind. The most familiar example is perhaps the anthropomorphism which in religion after religion has invested the powers of the universe with human form, human mental process, human personality--or at least with form, mind, and personality similar to those of man; while a very simple case is that in which certain neurotic types project their depression so as to colour everything that comes into their cognizance a gloomy black.

In the sphere of sex this process is, alas, most potently at work. The man in whom the sexual instinct still lives a more or less independent, uninhibited life of its own, tends--unless he has special evidence to the contrary, and often even then--to interpret the behaviour and the minds of others in the terms familiar to himself, and to suppose that they too must be stopped by the fear of punishment or of loss of caste if they are not to commit excesses.

On the other hand, those in whom there is a constant conflict with a sexual origin project it here, there, and everywhere into the breasts of those they know, and interpret others’ motives in terms of their own repressed wishes.

Furthermore, most of our existing laws and customs are based on a state of society in which the changes to which we have referred had not progressed as far as they have to-day, and man’s psychology was a little less removed from that of other mammals.

The result is that those who attempt the complete emancipation possible to a properly-organized mind are confronted first by the lag of our institutions and traditions, and secondly by the unconcealed suspicion of all those--and they are as yet the large majority--in which the conflicts arising out of sex are unresolved. It is from the sum of those conflicts that the spirit prevalent with regard to sex to-day derives its character--shocked and shamefaced as regards one’s own sexual life, vindictive and grudging as regards the difficulties of others. The bulk of men and women cannot treat sexual problems in a scientific spirit, because of the store of bottled-up emotion in the wrong place that they have laid up for themselves by their failure to come to proper terms with their sexual instincts. The soul should grow to deserve the words Crashaw wrote of St. Theresa--“O thou undaunted daughter of desires!” But this the soul of such disharmonic beings can never do.

This brings us to our other pressing question. Should the results of psycho-analytic methods, the knowledge that the sex instinct is fundamental and is interwoven into the roots of the highest spiritual activities--should the inculcation and demonstration of this be part of education? Some would say yes, and would argue that to know oneself is essential to a proper realization of one’s capacities. Personally I am extremely doubtful of the correctness of this answer. Knowledge of the processes of digestion is not necessary to digest well--so long as we go on digesting well: it is only necessary when we digest badly. In that case the processes involved are automatic: but even in processes which require a great deal of learning, we find a similar state of affairs. A man can become expert at, say, a game requiring the most delicate adjustments of hand and eye without analysing the processes he employs, but by practising them as finished articles, so to speak; and it is equally obvious that Shakespeare and Shelley and Blake and other great writers produced their works without the least analytical knowledge of the obscure and rather unpleasant processes which, if we are to believe the critics who psycho-analyse dead authors in the pages of Freudian journals, were “really” at work below the surface. Analysis constitutes a serious surgical operation for the mind, and, as one of the leading Austrian psycho-analysts has recently said, we do not want to perform this operation on healthy people any more than we want to open their abdomens merely for the sake of seeing that their viscera are normal.

If matters concerning sex are treated properly during a child’s development and education, the necessity for psycho-analysis and any extension of analytic knowledge of the foundations of one’s own mind that it may bring is done away with. If it can be ensured that there is no obvious avoidance of the subject leading to repression in the child’s mind, and on the other hand no undue prominence given to it so that a morbid curiosity is aroused, a large proportion of the conflicts that now arise could be avoided. The other necessity is that there should be provision for sublimation--in art or music, in social service or in one’s own work, in religion, or, in modified form, in sport or romance.

It is perfectly possible, in such case, for mental development to proceed naturally and comparatively smoothly towards a unified organization of the type of which we have spoken. Psycho-analysis would not help a boy or girl developing in such a way, any more than would a study of all the characters we have inherited from our simian forefathers help us to realize our specifically human possibilities. On the other hand, when the intellectual desire to know things for their own sake is aroused, as it is in most boys and girls between the ages of about fourteen and twenty, then just as it is good, in order to get a true picture of the universe, for them to know and be presented with the evidence for man’s evolution from lower forms, so it is good for the same reason to give them an account of their psychological organization, including evidence for the rôle which sex plays in the genesis of higher mental activities--without, however, any necessity for psychological experiments in burrowing into their own foundations. In this case such knowledge would have the additional value of putting them on their guard against allowing themselves to be prejudiced by their own incompletely-adjusted conflicts.

We are all of us too prone to think that a phenomenon is somehow “explained,” or interpreted better, by analysing it into its component parts or discovering its origin than by studying it in and for itself.

The new type of mental organization acquired by man permits of wholly new types of mental process, of a complexity as far exceeding those that we deduce in brutes as does the physical organism of a dog or an ant that of a polyp or a protozoan: and it is part of our business to realize those possibilities to the fullest extent.

To sum up, then, biological investigation in the first place shows us how certain abnormalities of sexual psychology may be more easily interpreted as caused by comparatively simple physical abnormalities than by the more complex distortions of psychological origin dealt with by psycho-analysis. In the second place, by giving us a broader _aperçu_ than can otherwise be gained over the evolution of sex and the direction visible in biological history, it clears up to a certain extent some of the difficulties which the discoveries of the psycho-analytic school have rendered acute.

If the changes in the relation of the sex instinct to the rest of the mind, which I have spoken of above as being in operation at present, should one day progress so far as to be more or less carried through in a majority, or in a dominant section of the population, the whole outlook of society towards the sex problem would be changed, and the laws and institutions and customs connected with it completely remodelled.

The most pressing task of those who are thinking over the problem of sex in human life will often be the relief of suffering and the removal of abuses: but the broader view should never be forgotten, and every attempt should be made to think constructively with a view to realizing the enormous possibilities that such a change would bring about.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blair Bell, ’16. “The Sex Complex.” London, 1916.

Carr-Saunders, ’22. “The Population Problem.” Oxford, 1922.

Crew, ’23. Proc. Roy. Soc. (B.). London, 1923.

Cunningham, J. T., ’00. “Sexual Dimorphism in the Animal Kingdom.” London, 1900.

Doncaster, L., ’14. “The Determination of Sex.” Cambridge, 1914.

East and Jones, ’19. “Inbreeding and Outbreeding.” Philadelphia, 1919.

Ellis, Havelock, ’10. “Studies in the Psychology of Sex.” Philadelphia, 1910.

Freud. “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”

Goldschmidt, R., ’23. “The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex-Determination.” London, 1923.

Harrow, B., ’23. “Glands in Health and Disease.” London, 1923.

Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.

Huxley, ’14. (Reversed Pairing, Grebe) Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1914.

Huxley, ’23. (Courtship and Display) Proc. Linnean Soc. London, 1923.

Jung, ’20. “Analytical Psychology.” London, 1920.

Lipschütz, ’19. “Die Pubertätsdrüse.” Bern, 1919.

Marshall, ’23. “The Physiology of Reproduction.” (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, 1923.

Meisenheimer, J., ’21. “Geschlecht und Geschlechter.” Jena, 1921.

Morgan, ’19. “The Physical Basis of Heredity.” Philadelphia, 1919.

Rivers, ’20. “Instinct and the Unconscious.” Cambridge, 1920.

Selous, E., ’20. (Moorhen) _Zoologist_ [4] 6. London, 1902.

Steinach J., ’20. Verjüngung, Leipzig, 1920.

Stopes, Marie. “Married Love.”

Tansley, ’20. “The New Psychology.” London, 1920.

Vincent, Swale, ’21. “Internal Secretion and the Ductless Gland.” (2nd Ed.). London, 1921.

Voronoff, S., ’23. “Greffes Testiculaires.” Paris, 1923.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Read before the British Society for Sex Psychology, October 1922.

[28] See East and Jones, ’19.

[29] See Huxley, ’23.

[30] See Howard, ’20; Carr-Saunders, ’22.

[31] See Goldschmidt, ’23; Morgan, ’19; Doncaster, ’14.

[32] See Steinach, ’20; summary in Lipschütz, ’19; Voronoff, ’23.

[33] See Carr-Saunders, ’22, ch. v, and M. Stopes.

[34] See Lipschütz, ’19; Goldschmidt, ’23.

[35] See Selous, ’02; Huxley, 14.

[36] See Blair Bell, ’16.

[37] See Vincent, ’21; Harrow, ’23.

[38] Crew, ’23.

[39] See Rivers, ’20, chs. iv, xviii.

[40] Rivers, ’20, p. 158.

V

PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:

A BIOLOGIC FANTASY

PHILOSOPHIC----ANTS?

Amœba has her picture in the book, Proud Protozoon!--Yet beware of pride. All she can do is fatten and divide; She cannot even read, or sew, or cook....

The Worm can crawl--but has no eyes to look: The Jelly-fish can swim--but lacks a bride: The Fly’s a very Ass personified: And speech is absent even from the Rook.

The Ant herself cannot philosophize-- While Man does that, and sees, and keeps a wife, And flies, and talks, and is extremely wise.... Will our Philosophy to later Life Seem but a crudeness of the planet’s youth, Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth?

PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:

A BIOLOGIC FANTASY[41]

“Incomprehensibility; that’s what I say.”--LEWIS CARROLL (_amended_).

According to a recent study by Mr. Shapley (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Philadelphia, vol. vi, p. 204), the normal rate of progression of ants--or at least of the species of ant which he studied--is a function of temperature. For each rise of ten degrees centigrade, the ants go about double as fast. So complete is the dependence that the ants may be employed as a thermometer, measurement of their rate of locomotion giving the temperature to within one degree centigrade.

* * * * * * *

The simple consequence--easy of apprehension by us, but infinite puzzlement to ants--is that on a warm day an ant will get through a task four or five times as heavy as she will on a cold one. She does more, thinks more, lives more: more Bergsonian duration is hers.

There was a time, we learn in the myrmecine annals, when ants were simple unsophisticated folk, barely emerged from entomological barbarism. Some stayed at home to look after the young brood and tend the houses, others went afield to forage. It was not long before they discovered that the days differed in length. At one season of the year they found the days insufferably long; they must rest five or six times if they were, by continuing work while light lasted, to satisfy their fabulous instinct for toil. At the opposite season, they needed no rest at all, for they only carried through a fifth of the work. This irregularity vexed them: and what is more, time varied from day to day, and this hindered them in the accurate execution of any plans.

But as the foragers talked with the household servants, and with those of their own number who through illness or accident were forced to stay indoors, they discovered that the home-stayers noticed a much slighter difference in time between the seasons.

It is easy for us to see this as due to the simple fact that the temperature of the nest varies less, summer and winter, than does that of the outer air: but it was a hard nut for them, and there was much head-scratching. It was of course made extremely difficult by the fact that they were not sensitive to gradual changes in temperature as such, the change being as it were taken up in the altered rate of living. But as their processes of thought kept pace in alteration with their movements, they found it simplest and most natural to believe in the fixity and uniformity of their own life and its processes, and to refer all changes to the already obvious mutability of external nature.

The Wise Ants were summoned: they were ordered by the Queen to investigate the matter; and so, after consultation, decided to apply the test of experiment. Several of their numbers, at stated intervals throughout the year, stayed in and went out on alternate days, performing identical tasks on the two occasions. The task was the repeated recitation of the most efficacious of the myrmecine sacred formulæ.

The rough-and-ready calculations of the workers were speedily corroborated. “Great is God, and we are the people of God” could be recited out-of-doors some twenty thousand times a day in summer, less than four thousand times in winter; while the corresponding indoor figures were about fifteen thousand and six thousand.

There was the fact; now for the explanation. After many conclaves, a most ingenious hypothesis was put forward, which found universal credence. Let me give it in an elegant and logical form.

(1) It was well-known--indeed self-evident--that the Ant race was the offspring and special care of the Power who made and ruled the universe.

(1.1) Therefore a great deal of the virtue and essence of that Power inhered in the race of Ants. Ants, indeed, were made in the image of God.

(1.2) It was, alas, common knowledge that this Power, although Omnipotent and Omniscient, was confronted by another power, the power of disorder, of irregularity, who prevented tasks, put temptations in the way of workers, and was in fact the genius of Evil.

(2) Further, it was a received tradition among them that there had been a fall from the grace of a Golden Age, when there were no neuters, but all enjoyed married bliss; and the ant-cows gave milk and honey from their teats.

(2.1) And that this was forfeited by a crime (unmentionable, I regret to say, in modern society) on the part of a certain Queen of Ants in the distant past. The Golden Age was gone; the poor neuters--obligate spinsters--were brought into being; work became the order of the day. Ant-lions with flaming jaws were set round that kingdom of Golden Age, from which all ants were thenceforth expelled.

(2.2.1) This being so, it was natural to conclude that the fall from grace involved a certain loss of divine qualities.

(2.2.2) The general conclusion to be drawn was that in the race of ants there still resided a certain quantity of these virtues that give regularity to things and events; although not sufficient wholly to counter-balance the machinations of the power of evil and disorder.

(2.2.3) That where a number of ants had their home and were congregated together, there the virtue resided in larger bulk and with greater effect, but that abroad, where ants were scattered and away from hearth, home, and altar, the demon of irregularity exerted greater sway.

This doctrine held the field for centuries.