Modern Art Of Love

( Originally Published 1940 )

I feel sure that many of my readers, every time we have to talk about glands and tumours, blood-vessels and organochemical substances, have felt inclined to say impatiently: "But what has all this to do with the refined and tender feeling that we call love?" The time has now come for me to answer this question.

It is quite a simple matter. The materialistic processes which we have dealt with anatomically in Part I, and functionally in Part II, force us to seek a partner, and it is the stimulation of the affections, the emotions, that are thus called forth, it is this nameless longing that we call love. In this section we will take these emotions as the subject of our study. Just as one must first know all there is to learn about the mouth and tongue before one can understand the sense of taste, so it was necessary to study the genital organs before it was possible to understand, to evaluate and to control love.

Even the most rigid of materialists will not wish to restrict his knowledge to the raw material, he will only begin at the beginning so that he may better gradually reach the heights of knowledge. And thus it was necessary for us to discuss the crude details of the lower spheres of our bodies, although possibly it may have annoyed some of our readers. It is something like the shudder that goes through us when we see a skeleton for the first time in our lives, for we forget that such a skeleton is living inside us, forming the frameworks of our physical and mental structure; and yet, it is useful to know it, for otherwise we can never understand the processes of our daily lives.

There is something painful to our feelings in this: the facts themselves so simple and so cold, and the rapture so transcendent. Quite right! And everything that we read here about the love life will surely be hopelessly far behind what we shall really feel, as soon as we actually experience it for ourselves. That will be smoothed down when we begin to speak about it, and even more when it is read; paper is so cold, and so is printers' ink. But the author should not be expected to set all his lady and gentleman readers in a sexual ecstasy; that would indeed be asking too much! This realisation remains for each one as his own life-drama. And everything that I mention here, my dear readers, as feeling myself, can only possess a meaning for you in so far as it finds an echo in your own feelings.

But it will have a scientific value for you only if you read it in connection with all that we have already written in this book. Only then will you see cause and effect clearly, and also be able to control this life-impulse for the future.

This incongruency between the physical foundation and the spiritual feelings is not only met with in the sexual sphere; it lies fundamentally in the mysterious combination of the material with the psychic. What likeness is there, for instance, between the water-white fluid which we chemically term alcohol, and the intoxication of an evening spent not too wisely, but too well? Or if we wish a physiological example instead of a pathologic one: what is warmth? Warmth is a quickened movement of the atoms composing our bodies; but we feel our bodily warmth as an agreeable sensation, that affords us much pleasure. And what is a bed? A collection of materials which are poor conductors of heat in which a tired half-nude person hides himself; yet we feel it to be a warm nest in which we can lie in comfort.

So also sexual occurrences stimulate our circulation, respiration and psychic life, so greatly that we feel ourselves imbued with redoubled energy. And in this sphere it is one of the finest duties of science to study the connection of cause and effect.

This has unfortunately been too long postponed. Embryology, obstetrics and venereal diseases have been studied, but the relation of the inner love-life with the material processes has only too often been omitted from the course of study. In the sexual sphere we have up to the present clung far too much to dualism, and that has done us a fearful amount of harm and caused untold misery. Parents do not understand their children, once they are grown up.

Then the maiden revels in dreams of yearning and longing:

"Oh! ask the stars whether I love you."