or vast intellectual
powers, than for the depth and intensity of their sexual emotions. And,
if possible, with the human female, the relation between intensity of
sexual emotion and high intellectual gifts has been yet closer. The life
of a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George Eliot, an Elizabeth Browning have not
been more marked by a rare development of the intellect than by deep
passionate sexual emotions. Nor throughout the history of the race has
high intelligence and intellectual power ever tended to make either male
or female unattractive to those of the opposite sex.

The merely brilliantly attired and unintelligent woman, probably never
awakened the same intensity of profound sex emotion even among the men
of her own type, which followed a George Sand; who attracted to herself
with deathless force some of the most noted men of her generation, even
when, nearing middle age, stout, and attired in rusty and inartistic
black, she was to be found rolling her cigarettes in a dingy office,
scorning all the external adornments with which less attractive females
seek to supply a hidden deficiency. Probably no more hopeless mistake
could be made by an ascetic seeking to extirpate sex emotion and the
attraction of the sexes for one another, than were he to imagine that
in increasing virility, intelligence, and knowledge this end could be
attained. He might thereby differentiate and greatly concentrate the
emotions, but they would be intensified; as a widely spread, shallow,
sluggish stream would not be annihilated but increased in force and
activity by being turned into a sharply defined, clear-cut course.

And if, further, we turn to those secondary manifestations of sexual
emotion, which express themselves in the relations of human progenitors
to their offspring, we shall find, if possible more markedly, that
increase of intelligence and virility does not diminish but increases
the strength of the affections. As the primitive, ignorant male, often
willingly selling his offspring or exposing his female infants to death,
often develops, with the increase of culture and intelligence, into
the extremely devoted and self-sacrificing male progenitor of civilised
societies; so, yet even more markedly, does the female relation with her
offspring, become intensified and permanent, as culture and intelligence
and virility increase. The Bushwoman, like the lowest female barbarians
in our own societies, will often readily dispose of her inf