Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of
loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never
ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be
worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain."
And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed
her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can
no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most
insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say,
is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most
brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final
insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous
persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The Imitation of Christ_ or
_The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_. And how many others!
FOOTNOTES:
[45] _Meditationes Piissimæ de Cognitione Humanæ Conditionis_, Migne's
_Patrologia_, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De Dignitate Animæ et
Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the
vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os
et nares cæterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum
numquam vidisti.... Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab
ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam. Profecto fuit
quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno
involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica
tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est homo quam sperma fetidum,
saccus stercorum, cibus vermium.... Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus
conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori angustia?"
[46] See (in Mignes' edition) _S. Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis
Collationes_, lib. ii, cap. IX.
[47] Dühren (_Neue Forshungen über die Marquis de Sade_, pp. 432 et seq.)
shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted, for instance, in
Schopenhauer and De Sade.
[48] In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these
_Studies_, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the
study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the sexual and
excretory centres were fully dealt with.
[49] "La Morale Sexuelle," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.,
1907.
[50] The above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an
unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in _The New Spirit_, first
issued in 1889.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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