e brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and
its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties
of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever
longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it
never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes
intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and
activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high
adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal
instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that
end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in
civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a
by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product
is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the
functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the
animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially
need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making
and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional
by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of
money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary
function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed
sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever
attaining the normal physical outlet. For the most part the by-product
accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet
peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary
animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.

By the term "spiritual" we are not to understand any mysterious and
supernatural qualities. It is simply a convenient name, in distinction
from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes
which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power. It is needless to
enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse,
for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different
order. They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful
erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is
more than a mere animal gratification. Our ancient ascetic traditions
often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure. We see only its