Little Essays of Love and Virtue. Havelock Ellis

sexual phenomena of some kind or other fail to manifest themselves being simply cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He met, indeed, a few people who seemed exceptions to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he found that he was mistaken, and that so far from being absent in these people the sexual instinct was present even in its crudest shapes. The activity of sex is an activity that on the physical side is generated by the complex mechanism of the ductless glands and displayed in the whole organism, physical and psychic, of the individual, who cannot abolish that activity, although to some extent able to regulate the forms in which it is manifested, so that purity cannot be the abolition or even the indefinite suspension of sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and beautiful control of them.

      It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

II

       Table of Contents

      We have seen that various popular beliefs and conventional assumptions concerning the sexual impulse can no longer be maintained. The sexual activities of the organism are not mere responses to stimulation, absent if we choose to apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run away from them, harmless if we enclose them within a high wall. Nor do they constitute a mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can control by a crude system of hygiene and dietetics. We better understand the psycho-sexual constitution if we regard the motive power behind it as a dynamic energy, produced and maintained by a complex mechanism at certain inner foci of the body, and realise that whatever periodic explosive manifestations may take place at the surface, the primary motive source lies in the intimate recesses of the organism, while the outcome is the whole physical and spiritual energy of our being under those aspects which are most forcible and most aspiring and even most ethereal.

      This conception, we find, is now receiving an admirable and beautifully adequate physical basis in the researches of distinguished physiologists in various lands concerning the parts played by the ductless glands of the body, in sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring out into the system stimulating and inhibiting hormones, which not only confer on the man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before Brown-Séquard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton, whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[5] It was the wish to group together all the far-flung manifestations of the inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own conception of auto-erotism, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria, and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human activity.