In a treatment of the relation between art and sexual life the facts must necessarily be classified under two different headings, namely, the influence of artistic activity upon sexual selection and the importance of erotic motives in works of art. These two points of view have indeed often been confounded with each other. But it will soon appear from the following how indispensable it is to maintain the distinction between them. In modern literature there has scarcely appeared any treatise of the same importance, not only for the theory of art, but also for æsthetic proper, as the chapters on sexual selection in _The Descent of Man_. As is well known, Darwin supposes a necessary connection between beauty and art. He takes it for granted that music, poetry, drama, and the rest chiefly aim at pleasing. When he sees that activities and forms, which at least technically correspond to the various kinds of art, are to be met with not only among the lower tribes of man, but even among some of the higher animals, he therefore explains these forms and activities as emanating from a conscious or unconscious endeavour to please through beauty. And for this endeavour he finds a reason in the necessity of gaining preference in the favour of the female. By endowing the female with æsthetic attention and æsthetic judgment[262] he has been able not only to explain the appearance of art amongst savages and animals, but also to account for the importance of beauty in life. In the foregoing arguments we have already with sufficient clearness pronounced our dissent from Darwin’s primary supposition. In the chapter upon the art-impulse we have tried to show that this tendency in its essence is something quite different from the tendency to “attract by pleasing.” But with all this theoretical argumentation it has of course not been proved that the endeavour of the males to win the favour of the females by singing, dancing, and other similar performances has exercised no influence on the _history_ of art. However little these activities may have to do with real art, they might, however, have afforded a raw material to be used by the art-impulse proper for its own purposes. In this connection it is necessary, therefore, to discuss the question, To what extent has æsthetic choice, exercised by either of the sexes in selecting a mate, favoured the development of artistic activities in the other sex?