e extent it has slowly superseded all the other senses. Its range is
practically infinite; it brings before us remote worlds, it enables us to
understand the minute details of our own structure. While apt for the most
abstract or the most intimate uses, its intermediate range is of universal
service. It furnishes the basis on which a number of arts make their
appeal to us, and, while thus the most aesthetic of the senses, it is the
sense on which we chiefly rely in exercising the animal function of
nutrition. It is not surprising, therefore, that from the point of view of
sexual selection vision should be the supreme sense, and that the
love-thoughts of men have always been a perpetual meditation of beauty.

It would be out of place here to discuss comparatively the origins of our
ideas of beauty. That is a question which belongs to aesthetics, not to
sexual psychology, and it is a question on which aestheticians are not
altogether in agreement. We need not even be concerned to make any
definite assertion on the question whether our ideas of sexual beauty have
developed under the influence of more general and fundamental laws, or
whether sexual ideals themselves underlie our more general conceptions of
beauty. Practically, so far as man and his immediate ancestors are
concerned, the sexual and the extra-sexual factors of beauty have been
interwoven from the first. The sexually beautiful object must have
appealed to fundamental physiological aptitudes of reaction; the
generally beautiful object must have shared in the thrill which the
specifically sexual object imparted. There has been an inevitable action
and reaction throughout. Just as we found that the sexual and the
non-sexual influences of agreeable odors throughout nature are
inextricably mingled, so it is with the motives that make an object
beautiful to our eyes.[131]

The sexual element in the constitution of beauty is well
recognized even by those writers who concern themselves
exclusively with the aesthetic conception of beauty or with its
relation to culture. It is enough to quote two or three
testimonies on this point. "The whole sentimental side of our
aesthetic sensibility," remarks Santayana, "--without which it
would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic,--is
due to our sexual organization remotely stirred.... If anyone
were desirous to produce a being with a great susceptibility to
beauty, he coul