individual form, the limbs develop out of
the soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself into
distinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. The
child before puberty is quite another thing from the child after
puberty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea of
childhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear.

And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now new
relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence.
Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and
mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period
of _Schwaermerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships.
A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends and
enemies.

A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds
relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now
relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never
dies.

It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul.

And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of
genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of
forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing
into his own isolation of individuality.

All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new
world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be
responsible for it.

Now sex comes into active being. Until puberty, sex is submerged,
nascent, incipient only. After puberty, it is a tremendous factor.

What is sex, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so
much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and
a circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoanalyst is right so
far. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals
which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force
or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two
people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sexual in nature?

This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, in
its obvious manifestation. The _sexual_ relation between man and woman
consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We
know its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all our
experience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreative
purpose of sex is, to the indi