ABSTRACT
there is a tendency in contemporary science and philosophy, parallel with our decadent literature, to widen the scope of the sexual relation so as to make it not only the master but actually the source of what is called spiritual life. But why not reverse the process, even if our decadent literature and the pseudo-poetry that goes with it had to be greatly shaken in their self-confidence and perhaps to disappear—which I should think no great loss? What, in short, is the nature of this spiritual life, what is its activity and its satisfaction? It is the creative activity of thought, of poetry, of morality, of technique; I do not think we either need or can find any further definition. And what, on the other hand, is the physiological relation of the sexes if not the instinct to create or generate new life through the necessary cycle of distinction, opposition and conjunction? Does not that account for its central throne in the organism and its primacy—let us agree—over the nutritive instinct, and also for its repercussions and over-tones, even for its obsessions and perversions? That may be the reason also why there are so many preachers of erotic theory, and so few like Brillat-Savarin, who have hidden their thoughts under a mask of irony. And that may be what has stimulated so many poets or scribblers of love lyrics, who, as has been said, fill the pages of literature, and who now knock on the doors of science and philosophy, while the poetry of gluttony and deglutition is only represented by the parasites of Greco-Roman or Italian sixteenth century comedy and in popular farce. When the place of the sexual instinct in the cycle of life is thus sensibly and fairly explained, it is placed in the realm of the spirit as the most elementary form of practical organic 218life; it enters the sphere of the useful, pleasurable, profitable, or whatever branch of ‘economics’ may be assigned to it. Being thus in a degree spiritualised, it is far from sensualising or materialising the higher activities as is maintained in clumsy sexual theories of æsthetics and even of logic. There has actually been recently given to the world, or at least to the German world, a sexual analysis of the categories and dialectics of thought; a pretty extravagance, but certainly not without significance for the tendency I am discussing. If we take the opposite road which I have commended, and grasp the creative and spiritual function of physiological life, we may repeat, without fear of the morbidity that often affects mystics: ‘The law of the spirit is love’.
