ndid possibilities that
are evident in ideal family life. Moreover, the influence of sex in
human life has extended far beyond the family (that is, that group of
individuals who stand related to one another as husband, wife, parents,
and children), for it is a careless observer indeed who does not note
in our daily life many social and psychical relationships of men and
women who have no mutual interests relating to the biological processes
of race perpetuation. Of course, the psychologist recognizes that far
back of the platonic contact of the sexes on social and intellectual
lines is the suppressed and primal instinct that provides physical
unions for race perpetuation. However, this is of no practical
interest, for, as a matter of fact, the primal instincts are quite
subconscious in the usual social relations between the sexes.

[Sidenote: The larger view of sex.]

There is grandeur in this view of sex as originally a provision for
perpetuation of life by two cooperating individuals, later becoming the
basis of conjugal affection of the two individuals for each other and
of their parental affection for their offspring, and finally leading to
social and intellectual comradeship of men and women meeting on terms
which are practically free from the original and biological meaning of
sex.

Instead, then, of trying to keep sex, both word and fact, in the
background of the new educational movement, I believe it is best to
work definitely for a better understanding of the part which sex plays
in human life, as outlined in the preceding paragraph. Hence, in these
lectures I shall never go aside in order to avoid either the word or
the idea of sex; on the contrary, I shall attempt to direct the
discussion so as to emphasize the larger and very modern view of the
relationship of sex and human life.

[Sidenote: The many-sided bearings of sex.]

In this first lecture I want to make it clear that the role of sex in
human life is vastly greater than that directly involved in sexual
activity. I shall in several lectures touch the big problems from the
standpoint of the sexual instincts as these play an important part in
social, psychical, and aesthetic life even if they are rarely exercised,
physiologically, or if, as in millions of individuals, they never come
to mean more than possibilities of sexual activity for which
opportunities in marriage do not come. I am especially anxious to avoid
the narrow viewpoint of numerous w