te; and the force and constancy of the instinct must
make up for its lack of precision. A great deal of vital energy is
thus absorbed by this ill-adjusted function. The most economical
arrangement which can be conceived, would be one by which only
the one female best fitted to bear offspring to a male should arouse
his desire, and only so many times as it was well she should grow
pregnant, thus leaving his energy and attention free at all other
times to exercise the other faculties of his nature.

If this ideal had been reached, the instinct, like all those perfectly
adjusted, would tend to become unconscious; and we should miss
those secondary effects with which we are exclusively concerned
in aesthetics. For it is precisely from the waste, from the radiation
of the sexual passion, that I beauty borrows warmth. As a harp,
made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to every wind, so
the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes
simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of
tenderness toward every object. The capacity to love gives our
contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to
manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic
sensibility -- without which it would be perceptive and
mathematical rather than aesthetic -- is due to our sexual
organization remotely stirred.

The attraction of sex could not become efficient unless the senses
were first attracted. The eye must be fascinated and the ear
charmed by the object which nature intends should be pursued.
Both sexes for this reason develope secondary sexual characteristics;
and the sexual emotions are simultaneously extended to various
secondary objects. The colour, the grace, the form, which
become the stimuli of sexual passion, and the guides of
sexual selection, acquire, before they can fulfil that office, a
certain intrinsic charm. This charm is not only present for reasons
which, in an admissible sense, we may call teleological, on account,
that is, of its past utility in reproduction, but its intensity and power
are due to the simultaneous stirring of profound sexual impulses.
Not, of course, that any specifically sexual ideas are connected
with these feelings: such ideas are absent in a modest and
inexperienced mind even in the obviously sexual passions of love
and jealousy.

These secondary objects of interest, which are some of the most
conspicuous elements of beauty, are to be called se