e
system stimulating and inhibiting hormones, which not only confer on the
man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but
at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of
masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before
Brown-Sequard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to
search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the
medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same
dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute
London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of
sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton,
whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had
definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly
proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the
personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[5] It
was the wish to group together all the far-flung manifestations of the
inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own
conception of _auto-erotism_, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which
arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to
be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex
activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature
and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria,
and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a
more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual
activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed
him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous
thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in
personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human
activity.

[5] "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made
it revolve round Self," wrote Hinton half a century ago in his
unpublished MSS., "betrayed the human race." "The rule of Self," he
wrote again, "has two forms: Self-indulgence and Self-virtue; and Nature
has two weapons against it: pain and pleasure.... A restraint must
always be put away when another's need can be served by putting it away;
for so is restored to us the force by which Life is made.... How curious
it seems! the true evil thing