Produced by Michael Roe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF THE EMOTION OF LOVE BETWEEN THE SEXES.[1] By SANFORD BELL, Fellow in Clark University. The emotion of love between the sexes has as yet received no thorough scientific treatment. No writer so far as I can find has treated it from a genetic standpoint. The literature upon the subject is therefore meager. In his recent treatise upon “The Psychology of the Emotions,” Ribot[2] remarks: “The sex-instinct, the last in chronological order with man and the higher animals, gives rise to the emotion of love with its numerous individual varieties. Most psychologists have been very sparing of details where it is concerned, and one might mention certain voluminous treatises which contain no mention of it. Is this through exaggerated delicacy? Or is it because the authors think that their place has been usurped by the novelists who have so obstinately confined themselves to the study of this passion? But the novelist's mode of analysis is different from the psychological mode, and does not exclude it.” This author then devotes one chapter of eleven pages to the treatment of the sexual instinct, which includes what he has to say upon sex-love. Brief as this treatment is, it is valuable, both for the facts it presents and for the problems it suggests. Havelock Ellis, who has perhaps done more than any other investigator in the field of the normal Psychology of Sex says in his most recent work:[3] “It is a very remarkable fact that although for many years past serious attempts have been made to elucidate the psychology of sexual perversions, little or no endeavor has been made to study the psychologic development of the normal sexual emotions. Nearly every writer seems either to take for granted that he and his readers are so familiar with all the facts of normal sex psychology that any detailed statement is altogether uncalled for, or else he is content to write a few introductory phrases, mostly made up from anatomic, philosophic and historical work. “Yet it is unreasonable to take normal phenomena for granted here as in any other region of medicine. A knowledge of such phenomena is as necessary here as physiology is to pathology or anatomy to surgery. So far from the facts of normal sex development, sex emotions and sex needs being uniform and constant, as is assumed by those who consider their discussion unnecessary, the range of variation within fairly normal limits is immense, and it is impossible to meet with two individuals whose records are nearly identical.