lationship--it attains the wholesome organic effects which may be
indirectly achieved by artistic activities. It is in this sense that we
are here concerned with what we may perhaps best call the play-function
of sex.[19]

[19] The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice Parmelee,
_Personality and Conduct_, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But it is understood
by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more extended sense than I have used
it.

As thus understood, the play-function of sex is at once in an inseparable
way both physical and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity all the
complex and inter-related systems of the organism. At the same time it
satisfies the most profound emotional impulses, controlling in harmonious
poise the various mental instincts. Along these lines it necessarily tends
in the end to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and introduce into
the sphere of sex the other two more objective fields of play, that of
play as education, and that of play as artistic creation. It may not be
true, as was said of old time, "most of our arts and sciences were
invented for love's sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion as
we truly and wisely exercise the play-function of sex, we are at the same
time training our personality on the erotic side and acquiring a mastery
of the art of love.

The longer I live the more I realise the immense importance for the
individual of the development through the play-function of erotic
personality, and for human society of the acquirement of the art of love.
At the same time I am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
personality and the ignorance of the art of love even among those men and
women, experienced in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might most
confidently expect to find such development and such art. At times one
feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate
field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally
possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving,
the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement
of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.

In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge
but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from
superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing
knowledge. We have to cease to regard as admirable the man who regards
the