xual for these
two reasons: because the contingencies of the sexual function hare
helped to establish them in our race, and because they owe their
fascination in a great measure to the participation of our sexual life
in the reaction which they cause.

If any one were desirous to produce a being with a great
susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better
designed for that object than sex. Individuals that need not unite
for the birth and rearing of each generation, might retain a savage
independence. For them it would not be necessary that any vision
should fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the prying
cruelty of the eye. But sex endows the individual with a dumb and
powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually
towards another; makes it one of the dearest employments of his
life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the
keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an
eternal melancholy.

What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest
meaning and beauty? The attention is fixed upon a well-defined
object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily
regarded as powers or qualities of that object. But these effects are
here powerful and profound. The soul is stirred to its depths. Its
hidden treasures are brought to the surface of consciousness. The
imagination and the heart awake for the first time. All these new
values crystallize about the objects then offered to the mind. If the
fancy is occupied by the image of a single person, whose qualities
have had the power of precipitating this revolution, all the values
gather about that one image. The object becomes perfect, and we
are said to be in love.[2] If the stimulus does not appear as a
definite image, the values evoked are dispersed over the world, and
we are said to have become lovers of nature, and to have
discovered the beauty and meaning of things.

To a certain extent this kind of interest will centre in the proper
object of sexual passion, and in the special characteristics of the
opposite sex; and we find accordingly that woman is the most
lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty would confess it,
the most interesting to woman. But the effects of so fundamental
and primitive a reaction are much more general. Sex is not the only
object of sexual passion. When love lacks its specific object, when
it does not yet understand itself, or has