are of far greater extension than any act of
procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are
concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge
our outlook and deepen our insight.

There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or
what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human
beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing
offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher
mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual
impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual
relationship--or even in order to understand all that is involved in the
secondary object of marriage--we must go beyond conscious motives and
consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted
in the human organism.

The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from
without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work,
and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the
glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on
an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know,
liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and
developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full
life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their
balanced functions are essential to wholesome and complete existence. In
a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest
ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for
arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell,
the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is
significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in
ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in
conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole
organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world
by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become
immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on
a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is
becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
with its res