The Two Distinct Functions Of Married Love

( Originally Published 1940 )

This one great sexual function with its love and its pain, with its supreme delight and its birth-pains, has now become differentiated into two distinct voluntarily separated functions: the charm of love if love alone is wanted, and the production of children if children are wanted.

This highest of all stages of evolution has only tardily been reached, but it has been reached at last. It is not really surprising that it took so long. It is only since the discovery of the microscope enabled the reproductive cells to be recognised, that the study of the whole process of fertilisation has been possible, as we mentioned at the end of Chapter 15. Up to that time we had only been able to form fanciful notions of the origin of individual life, somewhat like the uncertainty in which we stand about the origin of cell-life on the earth.

Indeed the question has long been discussed whether man originally suspected the causal nexus between the procreative act and the occurrence of pregnancy; so much time elapses before the latter is noticeable!

And how could he light on this conclusion at a time when every normally constituted female had regular sexual intercourse. Experience at that time, on the contrary, went to prove that very often sexual intercourse had no further consequences.

The counter-test, that when there was no intercourse there could be no pregnancy, was only made later, when animals were kept in captivity, or men and women in separate prisons.

Explorers such as Rothe, Strehlow and Spencer Gillens have recently established the fact that even at the present time there are tribes in Australia who have absolutely no idea of the connection between the two functions. But almost everywhere, among the primitive races, the people are convinced that sexual intercourse exerts a favourable influence on fecundity; and it is interesting to note that Professor Wilken has observed in Java that the native farmers, when their fruit trees produce too little fruit, imitate the movements of coitus against the trunks of the trees.

In this latter case we see expression given to the notion that the sexual at between the married couple may under some circumstances even exert an unfavourable influence on their fertility. It is perfectly clear to us that a crude empiricism may often have given rise to this idea, for we all know that nothing excites the sexual impulse so powerfully as enforced abstinence.

In a higher stage of civilisation it is thought that though it is indeed the man's physical movements that produce the physical effect, the soul first enters the new creature at the third month, as a divine gift.

So it is not surprising that the causal nexus remained so long unknown, and that even now so many people look upon it as a profanation of a sacred mystery, and fight against it as if it were mortal sin, when science reveals this causal nexus and wishes to make the knowledge available for the public.

It was only in 1850 (the year in which I was born) that DuBarry for the first time observed the penetration of a sperm-cell into the ovum of a rabbit, rendering the connection of cause and effect in this secret process as clear as it is in all other human processes for which we feel personally responsible.

After this observation we had only to notice how nature goes to work to make the procreative act at one time fruitful and at another sterile, and man can also do that now voluntarily.

It is indeed a fixed law in the whole of evolution that the higher we mount in the scale the fewer will be the offspring. For then it becomes ever more indispensable for all the conditions of life to be harmonious before a new living creature can be produced.

In this evolutionary tendency, the highest stage of development is reached by the human brain, which is the highest of all the products of nature. Nowhere else can it be so clearly seen, how Nature attains her object, and for this we must thank her.

To a certain extent she attains it through the introduction of all the sexual obstacles and difficulties which, as we have seen in Part II, bulk so largely in the higher species. And now we can thoroughly understand what many a reader must already have thought out for himself when all these obstacles were mentioned; he must have wondered how it is possible that Nature herself has not overcome them all long ago through natural selection in breeding. But no, these very obstacles were so many aids to the higher evolution of the species, because on the one hand they stimulate desire and on the other they limit prolificacy. But the higher reason of man, which seeks to bring both objects into harmony according to his conscious intentions forms the crown of this endeavour.

The great importance of this differentiation is, just as in all differentiations, that each of these functions can now perfect itself. At first, of course, all such innovations meet with a certain amount of opposition, as though they were an attack on customs which on account of their ancient traditions have become sacred to us. The same is true of every newly occurring point in evolution. We may be quite sure that the first pre-historic man who made weapons for himself-such as hammer, axe, spear or club, by fixing a flint to a stick-had to bear the reproaches of his companions, that he was a coward who could not conquer by his own strength alone! Meanwhile personally, he surely would feel very proud that he was so much more successful in hunting than his comrades.

Only now can sexual love in and for itself be honoured and guarded in its lofty significance, while formerly all these higher feelings were sacrificed to the question of fertilisation, because this is of such primordial interest. A book like this, in which the sexual impulse is at last honoured in it., primary significance, would formerly have been treated with disdain as a useless and insidious work. Now, however, the charm of love may be honoured on its own account; not only as a means to an end, but as an aim in itself.

Ethically also, this is a great advance. The sexual life now includes two different objects, two separate chapters: the ethics of the sexual feelings and the ethics of procreation. Each can now he considered separately and its principles better studied.