rue that a woman desires sexual gratification from a
man. But while in her this desire not seldom only appears after
she has begun to love a man enough to give her life for him, a
man often desires to possess a woman physically before he loves
her enough to give even his little finger for her. The fact that
love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the senses and often
fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly goes from the
senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that goal--this
is of all the existing differences between men and women that
which causes most torture to both." It will, of course, be
apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these _Studies_ on
"Sexual Selection in Man" that the method of stating the
difference which has commended itself to Mary Wollstonecraft,
Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and the chastest
woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath, may find that
her heart is not the only path through which her senses may be
affected. The senses are the only channels to the external world
which we possess, and love must come through these channels or
not at all. The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if
we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe
in previous volumes of these _Studies_, there are in women (1)
preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as,
apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as
compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and delicately
poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, (3) eventually
a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.

It must be remembered, at the same time, that while this
distinction represents a real tendency in sexual differentiation,
with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it has about it
nothing whatever that is absolute. There are a vast number of
women whose sexual facility, again by natural tendency and not
merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of any man, if
not more so. In the sexual field, as we have seen in a previous
volume (_Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_), the range of
variability is greater in women than in men.

The fact that love is an art, a method of drawing music from an
instrument, and not the mere commission of an act by mutual consent, makes
any verbal agreeme