15
result is probably much the same; in the intensity of the new reinforcement of two lives united, all the outside world, once so interesting, becomes for a time a negligeable fringe; but the advance in the new intellectual outlook is marked. Personality we now recognise is not a thing that you can tie up in separate parcels, labelling each parcel with the name of the person to whom it is addressed. Any new strong emotion dyes and alters the whole personality, so that it never is and never can be the same to anyone again. Analogy is usually misleading, but the closest and most instructive analogy to what happens is that of focus. You cannot have a strong emotional focus on two things at the same time. Of this natural and inevitable sex-egotism society is, of course, wisely tolerant. This man and woman will ultimately do society a supreme service, and for a time she accepts as inevitable that they should be, in common parlance, "no good." Society en masse has a good deal of common-sense, but in the more intimate clash of individual relations sentiment is apt to obscure clear vision, and the necessarily egotistic and exclusive character of a sex-emotion[1] is sometimes overlooked.
Sex, then, like other strong instincts, is anti-social and individualistic. In its primal form it induces, perhaps more than any other instinct, pugnacity; in its later and more diffused form, as the emotion of love, it is exclusive through its intensity of focus.
- ↑ I apologise to all psychologists, and especially to Mr. McDougall, for a somewhat loose use (unavoidable in a popular discussion) of the terms instinct, emotion, sentiment.
