Thus all ethics and, perhaps, a good part of æsthetics and religion depend upon the existence of sexual feeling.
Though the sexual life leads to the highest virtues, even to the sacrifice of the ego, yet in its sensual force lies also the danger that it may degenerate into powerful passions and develop the grossest vices.
Love as an unbridled passion is like a fire that burns and consumes everything; like an abyss that swallows all,—honor, fortune, well-being.
It seems of high psychological interest to trace the developmental phases through which, in the course of the evolution of human culture to the morality and civilization of to-day, the sexual life has passed.[1] On primitive ground the satisfaction of the sexual appetite of man seems like that of the animal. Openness in the sexual act is not shunned; man and woman are not ashamed to go naked. To-day we see savages in this condition (comp. Ploss, “Das Weib,” p. 196, 1884); as, for example, the Australians, the Polynesians, and the Malays of the Phillipines. The female is the common property of the males, the temporary booty of the strongest, who strive for the possession of the most beautiful of the opposite sex, thus carrying out instinctively a kind of sexual selection.
Woman is a movable thing, a ware, an object of bargain and sale and gift; a thing to satisfy lust and to work.
The appearance of a feeling of shame before others in the manifestation and satisfaction of the natural instinct, and modesty in the intercourse of the sexes, form the beginning of morality in the sexual life. From this arose the effort to conceal the genitals (“And they knew that they were naked”) and the secret performance of the sexual act.
The development of this degree of culture is favored by the rigors of climate and the necessity for complete protection of the body thus entailed. Thus in part the fact is explained that among northern races modesty may be proved anthropologically earlier than among southern races.
A further stage in the development of culture in sexual
- ↑ Comp. Lombroso, “The Criminal.”
