THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
OF LOVE
BY
REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated with a Postscript By
EZRA POUND
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
Publishers
New York
1922
CONTENTS
I. The Subject of an Idea
Love's general psychology.--Love according to natural laws.
--Sexual selection.--Man's place in Nature.--Identity of
human and animal psychology.--The animal nature of love.
II. The Aim of Life
The importance of the sexual act.--Its ineluctable character.
--Animals who live only to reproduce themselves.--The strife
for love, and for death.--Females fecundated at the very
instant of birth.--The maintenance of life.
III. Scale of Sexes
Asexual reproduction.--Formation of the animal colony.
--Limits of asexual reproduction.--Coupling.-- Birth
of the sexes.--Hermaphrodism and parthenogenesis.
--Chemical fecundation.--Universality of parthenogenesis.
IV. Sexual Dimorphism
1. Invertebrates: formation of the male.--Primitivity of
the female.--Minuscule males: the bonellie.--Regression
of the male into the male organ: the rirripedes.--Generality
of sexual dimorphism.--Superiority of the female in most
insect species.--Exceptions.--Numeric dimorphism.--Female
hymenoptera.--Multiplicity of her activities.--Male's purely
sexual rôle.--Dimorphism of ants and termites.--Grasshoppers
and crickets.--Spiders.--Coleoptera.--Glow-worm.--Cochineal's
strange dimorphism.
V. Sexual Dimorphism
2. Vertebrates:--Unnoticeable in fish, saurians, reptiles.
--The bird world.--Dimorphism favourable to males: the
oriole, pheasants, the ruff.--Peacocks and turkey-cocks.
--Birds of paradise.--Moderate dimorphism of mammifers.
--Effects of castration on dimorphism.
VI. Sexual Dimorphism
3. Vertebrates (Continued):--Man and woman.--Characteristics
and limits of human dimorphism.--Effects of civilization.
--Psychologic dimorphism.--The insect world and the human.
--Modern dimorphism, basis of the pair.--Solidarity of the
human pair.--Dimorphism and polygamy.--The pair favours the
female.--Sexual æsthetics.--Causes of the superiority of
feminine beauty.
VII. Sexual Dimorphism and Feminism
Inferiority and superiority of the female as shown in animal
species.--Influence of feeding on the production of sexes.
--The female would have sufficed.--Feminism absolute, and
moderate.--Pipe-dreams: elimination of the male and human
parthenogenesis.
VIII. Love-Organs
Sexual dimorphism and parallelism.--Sexual organs of man and
of woman.--Constancy of sexual parallelism in the animal
series.--External sexual organs of placentary mammifera.
--Form and position of the penis.--The penial bone.--The
clitoris.--The vagina.--The teats.--Forked prong of marsupials.
--Sexual organs of reptiles.--Fish and birds with a penial
organ.--Genital organs of arthropodes.--Attempt to classify
animals according to the disposition, presence, absence of
exterior organs for reproduction.
IX. The Mechanism of Love
1. Copulation: Vertebrates.--Its very numerous varieties and
its specific fixity.--The apparent immorality of Nature.
--Sexual ethnography.--Human mechanism.--Cavalage.--The form
and duration of coupling in divers mammifers.--Aberrations of
sexual surgery, the ampallang.--Pain as a bridle on sex.
--Maidenhead.--The mole.--Passivity of the female.--The ovule,
psychological figure of the female.--Mania of attributing
human virtues to animals.--The modesty of elephants.--Coupling
mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises.--In certain ophidians
and in certain fish.
X. The Mechanism of Love
2. Copulation (Continued)--Arthropodes.--Scorpions.--Large
aquatic crustaceans.--Small crustaceans.--The hydrachne.
--Scutilary.--Cockchafer.--Butterflies.--Flies, etc.--Variation
of animals' sexual habits.
XI. The Mechanism of Love p. 98
3. Of birds and fish.--Males without penis.--Coupling by simple
contact.--Salacity of birds.--Copulation of batrachians:
accoucheur toad, aquatic toad, earth toad, pipa toad.--Fœtal
parasitism.--Chastity of fish.--Sexes separated in love.
--Onanistic fecundation.--Cephalopodes, the spermatophore.
XII, The Mechanism of Love
4. Hermaphrodism.--Sexual life of oysters.--Gasteropodes.
--The idea of reproduction and the idea of pleasure.--Mechanism
of reciprocal reproduction: helices.--Spintrian habits.
--Reflection on hermaphrodism.
XIII. The Mechanism of Love
5. Artificial fecundation.--Disjunction of the secreting
apparatus from the copulating apparatus.--Spiders.--Discovery
of their copulative method.--Brutality of the female.--Habits
of the epeire.--The argyronete.--The tarantula.--Exceptions:
the reapers.--Dragonflies (libellule).--Dragonflies (demoiselle)
virgins and "jouvencelle."--Picture of their love affairs.
XIV. The Mechanism of Love
6. Cannibalism in sex.--Females who devour the male, those
who devour the spermatophore.--Probable use of these
practices.--Fecundation by the whole male.--Loves of the
white foreheaded dectic.--The green grasshopper.--The Alpine
analote.--The ephippigere.--Further reflections on the
cannibalism of sex.--Loves of the praying mantis.
XV. The Sexual Parade
Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes.--Their rôle
in fecundation.--Sexual games of birds.--How cantharides
caress.--Males' combats.--Pretended combats of birds.--Dance
of the tetras.--Gardener bird.--His country house.--His taste
for flowers.--Reflections on the origin of his art.--Combats
of crickets.--Parade of butterflies.--Sexual sense of
orientation.--The great-peacock moth.--Animals' submission to
orders of Nature.--Transmutation of physical values.--Rutting
calendar.
XVI. Polygamy
Rarity of monogamy.--Taste for change in animals.--Rôles
of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or instability
of specific types.--Strife of the couple against polygamy.
--Couples among insects.--Among fish, batrachians, saurians.
--Monogamy of pigeons, of nightingales.--Monogamy in carnivora,
in rodents.--Habits of the rabbit.--The ichneumon.--Unknown
causes of polygamy.--Rarity and superabundance of males.
--Polygamy in insects.--In fish.--In gallinaceæ, in web-footed
birds.--In herbivora.--The antelope's harem.--Human polygamy.
--How it tempera the couple among civilized races.
XVII. Love among Social Animals
Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera.--Bees.--Wedding
of the queen.--Mother bee, cause and consciousness of the hive.
--Sexual royalty.--Limits of intelligence among bees.--Natural
logic and human logic.--Wasps.--Bumble-bees.--Ants.--Notes on
their habits.--Very advanced state of their civilization.
--Slavery and parasitism among ants.--Termites.--The nine
principal active forms of termites.--Great age of their
civilization.--Beavers.--Tendency of industrious animals to
inactivity.
XVIII. The Question of Aberrations
Two sorts of sexual aberration.--Sexual aberrations of animals.
--Those of men.--Crossing of species.-- Chastity.--Modesty.
--Varieties and localizations of sexual bashfulness.--Artificial
creation of modesty.--Sort of modesty natural to all females.
--Cruelty.--Picture of carnage.--The cricket eaten alive.
--Habits of carabes.--Every living creature is a prey.
--Necessity to kill or to be killed.
XIX Instinct
Instinct.--Can one oppose it to intelligence?--Instinct in man.
--Primordiality of intelligence.--Instinct's conservative rôle.
--Modifying rôle of intelligence.--Intelligence and consciousness.
--Parity of animal and human instinct.--Mechanical character of
the instinctive act.--Instinct modified by intelligence.--Habit
of work creates useless work.--Objections to the identification
of instinct and intelligence taken from life of insects.
XX. Tyranny of the Nervous System
Accord and discord between organs and acts.--Tarses and sacred
scarab.--The hand of man.--Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for
copulation.--Origin of "luxuria."--The animal is a nervous system
served by organs.--The organ does not determine the aptitude.
--Man's hand inferior to his genius.--Substitution of one sense
for another.--Union and rôle of the senses in love.--Man and
animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.--Wear and tear
of humanity compensated by² acquisitions.--Man's inheritors.
Translator's Postscript
Bibliography: Practical Works Consulted
THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT OF AN IDEA
Love's general psychology.--Love according to natural
laws.--Sexual selection.--Man's place in Nature.--
Identity of human and animal psychology.--The animal
nature of love.
This book, which is only an essay, because its subject matter is so
immense, represents, nevertheless, an ambition: one wanted to enlarge
the general psychology of love, starting it in the very beginning of
male and female activity, and giving man's sexual life its place in the
one plan of universal sexuality.
Certain moralists have, undeniably, pretended to talk about "love in
relation to natural causes," but they were profoundly ignorant of
these natural causes: thus Sénancour, whose book, blotted though it be
with ideology, remains the boldest work on a subject so essential that
nothing can drag it to triviality. If Sénancour had been acquainted
with the science of his time, if he had only read Réaumur and Bonnet,
Buffon and Lamarck; if he had been able to merge the two ideas, man and
animal into one, he, being a man without insurmountable prejudices,
might have produced a still readable book. The moment would have
been favorable. People were beginning to have some exact knowledge
of animals' habits. Bonnet had proved the startling relationships
of animal and vegetable reproduction; the essential principle of
physiology had been found; the science of life was brief enough to be
clear; one might have ventured a theory as to the psychological unity
of the animal series.
Such a work would have prevented numerous follies in the century then
beginning. One would have become accustomed to consider human love as
one form of numberless forms, and not perhaps, the most remarkable of
the lot, a form which clothes the universal instinct of reproduction;
and its apparent anomalies would have found a normal explanation amid
Nature's extravagance. Darwin arrived, inaugurated a useful system, but
his views were too systematized, his aim too explanatory and his scale
of creatures with man at the summit, as the culmination of universal
effort, is of a too theologic simplicity. Man is not the culmination
of nature, he is in Nature, he is one of the unities of life, that
is all. He is the product of a partial, not of total evolution; the
branch whereon he blossoms, parts like a thousand other branches
from a common trunk. Moreover, Darwin, truckling to the religiose
pudibundery of his race, has almost wholly neglected the actual facte
of sex; this makes his theory of sexual selection, as the principle
of change, incomprehensible. But even if he had taken account of the
real mechanism of love, his conclusions, possibly more logical, would
still have been inexact, foi if sexual selection has any aim it can be
but conservation Fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated
elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to the unity.
It is not particularly interesting to consider human acts as the fruits
of evolution, for upon animal branches as clearly separate as those of
insect and mammifer one finds sexual acts and social customs sensibly
analogous, if not identical in many points.
If insects and mammifers have any common ancestor, save the primordial
jelly, there must indeed have been very different potentialities in its
amorphous contours to lead it here into being bee and there into being
giraffe. An evolution leading to such diverse results has interest only
as a metaphysical idea, psychology can get from it next to nothing of
value.
We must chuck the old ladder whose rungs the evolutionists ascended
with such difficulty. We will imagine, metaphorically, a centre
of life, with multiple lives diverging from it; having passed the
unicellular phase, we will take no count of hypothetic subordinations.
One does not wish to deny, one wishes rather not to deny, either
general or particular evolutions, but the genealogies are too uncertain
and the thread which unites them too often broken: what, for example,
is the origin of birds, organisms which seem at once a progress and
a retrogression from the mammifer? On reflection, one will consider
the different love-mechanisms of all the dioicians as parallel and
contemporary.
Man will then find himself in his proper and rather indistinct place
in the crowd, beside the monkeys, rodents and bats. Psychologically,
one must quite often compare him with insects, marvellous flowering of
the life force. And what clarity from the process, lights showering
in from all corners. Feminine coquetry, the flight before the male,
the return, the game of yes and no, the uncertain attitude seeming
at once cruel and amorous, and not peculiar to the female human?
Not at all. Célimène is of all species, and heteroclite above all;
she is both mole and spider, she is sparrow and cantharide, she is
cricket and adder. A celebrated author in a play called, I think, La
Fille Sauvage, represents feminine love as aggressive. An error! The
female attacked by the male thinks always of retreat, she never, never
attacks, save in certain species which appear to be very ancient and
which have persisted to our time only by prodigies of equilibrium. Even
there one must make reserves, for when one sees the female aggressive,
it is perhaps at the second or fourth phase of the game, not at the
beginning. The female sleeps until the male arouses her, then she gives
in, plays, or takes flight. The virgin's reserve before man is but a
very moderate bashfulness if compared with the pell-mell flight of a
young mole intacta.
This is but one fact of a thousand. There is not one way of instinctive
man with a maid which is not findable in one or other animal species;
this is perfectly comprehensible seeing that man is an animal,
submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality; there
being everywhere the same matter animate with the same desire: to live,
to perpetuate life. Man's superiority is in the immense diversity of
his aptitudes. Animals are confined to one series of gestures, always
the same ones, man varies his mimicry without limit; but the target is
the same, and the result is the same, copulation, fecundation and eggs.
Belief in liberty has been born from the diversity of human aptitude,
from man's power to reach the necessary termination of his activity by
different routes, or to dodge this termination and suicide in himself
the species whose future he bears. It, this liberty, is an illusion
difficult not to have, an idea which one must shed if one wants to
think in a manner not wholly irrational, but it is recompensingly
certain that the multiplicity of possible activities is almost an
equivalent of this liberty. Doubtless the strongest motive always wins,
but today's stronger is tomorrow's weaker, hence a variety of human
gaits feigning liberty, and practically resulting therein. Free will
is only the faculty of being guided successively by a great number
of different motives. When choice is possible, liberty begins, even
though the chosen act is rigorously determined and when there is no
possibility of avoiding it. Animals have a smaller liberty, restricted
in proportion as their aptitudes are more limited; but when life begins
liberty begins. The distinction, from this view-point, between man and
animal is quantitative, and not qualitative. One must not be gulled by
the scholastic distinction between instinct and intelligence; man is as
full of instincts as the insect most visibly instinctive; he obeys them
by methods more diverse, that is all there is to it.
If it is clear that man is an animal, it is also clear that he is a
very complex one. One finds in him most of the aptitudes which are
distributed one by one among beasts. There is hardly one of his habits,
of his virtues, of his vices (to use the conventional terms) which
can not be found either in an insect, a bird or a mammifer: monogamy,
adultery, the "consequences"; polygamy, polyandry, lasciviousness,
laziness, activity, cruelty, courage, devotion, any of these are common
to animals, but each as the quality of an whole species. In the state
of differentiation to which superior and cultivated human species have
attained, each individual forms surely a separate variety determined
by what is called, abstractly, "the character." This individual
differentiation, very marked in mankind, is less marked in other animal
species. Yet we note quite distinct characters in dogs, in horses and
even in birds of the same race. It is quite probable that all bees have
not the same character, since, for example, they are not all equally
prompt to use their stings in analogous circumstances. Even there the
difference between man and his brothers-in-life and in sensibility is
but a difference of degree.
"Solidarity" is but an empty ideology if one limit it to human species.
There is no abyss between man and animal; the two domains are separated
by a tiny rivulet which a baby could step over. We are animals, we live
on animals, and animals live on us. We both have and are parasites. We
are predatory, and we are the living prey of the predatory. And when
we follow the love act, it is truly, in the idiom of theologians, more
bestiarum. Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty.