vidual man and woman, just a side-show.
To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a
vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individual
experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends.

But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We
know that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man,
acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, so
say "electricity," by analogy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendous
magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of
the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense,
polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into
contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two
individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible,
clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an
electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the
densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes
through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation
which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and then
the tension passes.

The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were
before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The
air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the blood
of man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, like
prostitution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration.

But after coition, the actual chemical constitution of the blood is so
changed, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time for
chemical, biological readjustment through the whole system.

So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated,
like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living
blood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic
centers of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the
sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, new
being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood.
And so individual life goes on.

Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychic
individual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing together
of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarized
electric blood of the female, with the result of a