It is to be noted, however, that these suggestions introduce an assumption of male superiority, or male inferiority—according to our scheme of values—which unnecessarily prejudices and confuses the issue. We have to consider the question of the origin of art apart from any supposed predominance of its manifestations in one sex or the other. In my own conception—put forward a quarter of a century ago—of what I called auto-erotic activities, it was on such a basis that I sought to place it, since I regarded those auto-erotic phenomena as arising from the impeded spontaneous sexual energy of the organism and extending from simple physical processes to the highest psychic manifestations; “it is impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilisation generally, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse,” though I was careful to add that the transmutation of sexual energy into other forms of force must not be regarded as itself completely accounting for all the finest human aptitudes of sympathy and art and religion.[42] It is along this path, it may perhaps be claimed,—as dimly glimpsed by Nietzsche, Hinton, and other earlier thinkers,—that the main explanation of the dynamic process by which the arts, in the widest sense, have come into being, is now chiefly being explored. One thinks of Freud and especially of Dr. Otto Rank, perhaps the most brilliant and clairvoyant of the younger investigators who still stand by the master’s side. In 1905 Rank wrote a little essay on the artist[43] in which this mechanism is set forth and the artist placed, in what the psycho-analytic author considers his due place, between the ordinary dreamer at one end and the neurotic subject at the other, the lower forms of art, such as myth-making, standing near to dreams, and the higher forms, such as the drama, philosophy, and the founding of religions, near to psycho-neurosis, but all possessing a sublimated life-force which has its root in some modification of sexual energy.