the sex instinct towards its subordination to a position in a hierarchy
of mental process, but on the other from a rigid limitation of its
scope towards a greater universality by establishing connections with
all other parts of the mind. Further, there is also a change towards
greater dominance and “self-determination” of the mental as against the
physical.
A great many of the difficulties which beset us, both as individuals
and as communities, come from the fact that both these changes are only
in process of being made, and are (even approximately) complete only in
a very small number of persons.
Lack of restraint is failure to construct a properly-working hierarchy.
That is a very simple example. Less easy to analyse but equally
vicious, are the innumerable cases in which some sort of equilibrium
is only attained not by a free interaction of dominant and subordinate
parts, but by repression. Conflicts arise, which persist, either in an
open form or in the subterranean regions of the unconscious. In either
case they tend to be projected by the subject into his ideas of other
people. This projection, or interpretation of external reality in terms
of one’s self, is a curious and almost universal attribute of the
human mind. The most familiar example is perhaps the anthropomorphism
which in religion after religion has invested the powers of the
universe with human form, human mental process, human personality--or
at least with form, mind, and personality similar to those of man;
while a very simple case is that in which certain neurotic types
project their depression so as to colour everything that comes into
their cognizance a gloomy black.
In the sphere of sex this process is, alas, most potently at work. The
man in whom the sexual instinct still lives a more or less independent,
uninhibited life of its own, tends--unless he has special evidence to
the contrary, and often even then--to interpret the behaviour and the
minds of others in the terms familiar to himself, and to suppose that
they too must be stopped by the fear of punishment or of loss of caste
if they are not to commit excesses.
On the other hand, those in whom there is a constant conflict with a
sexual origin project it here, there, and everywhere into the breasts
of those they know, and interpret others’ motives in terms of their own
repressed wishes.
Furthermore, most of our existing laws and customs are based on a
state of society in which the changes to which we have referred had
not progressed as far as they have to-day, and man’s psychology was a
little less removed from that of other mammals.
The result is that those who attempt the complete emancipation
possible to a properly-organized mind are confronted first by the lag
of our institutions and traditions, and secondly by the unconcealed
suspicion of all those--and they are as yet the large majority--in
which the conflicts arising out of sex are unresolved. It is from the
sum of those conflicts that the spirit prevalent with regard to sex
to-day derives its character--shocked and shamefaced as regards one’s
own sexual life, vindictive and grudging as regards the difficulties
of others. The bulk of men and women cannot treat sexual problems in a
scientific spirit, because of the store of bottled-up emotion in the
wrong place that they have laid up for themselves by their failure to
come to proper terms with their sexual instincts. The soul should grow
to deserve the words Crashaw wrote of St. Theresa--“O thou undaunted
daughter of desires!” But this the soul of such disharmonic beings can
never do.
This brings us to our other pressing question. Should the results
of psycho-analytic methods, the knowledge that the sex instinct is
fundamental and is interwoven into the roots of the highest spiritual
activities--should the inculcation and demonstration of this be part
of education? Some would say yes, and would argue that to know oneself
is essential to a proper realization of one’s capacities. Personally I
am extremely doubtful of the correctness of this answer. Knowledge of
the processes of digestion is not necessary to digest well--so long as
we go on digesting well: it is only necessary when we digest badly. In
that case the processes involved are automatic: but even in processes
which require a great deal of learning, we find a similar state of
affairs. A man can become expert at, say, a game requiring the most
delicate adjustments of hand and eye without analysing the processes
he employs, but by practising them as finished articles, so to speak;
and it is equally obvious that Shakespeare and Shelley and Blake and
other great writers produced their works without the least analytical
knowledge of the obscure and rather unpleasant processes which, if we
are to believe the critics who psycho-analyse dead authors in the pages
of Freudian journals, were “really” at work below the surface. Analysis
constitutes a serious surgical operation for the mind, and, as one of
the leading Austrian psycho-analysts has recently said, we do not want
to perform this operation on healthy people any more than we want to
open their abdomens merely for the sake of seeing that their viscera
are normal.
If matters concerning sex are treated properly during a child’s
development and education, the necessity for psycho-analysis and any
extension of analytic knowledge of the foundations of one’s own mind
that it may bring is done away with. If it can be ensured that there
is no obvious avoidance of the subject leading to repression in the
child’s mind, and on the other hand no undue prominence given to it so
that a morbid curiosity is aroused, a large proportion of the conflicts
that now arise could be avoided. The other necessity is that there
should be provision for sublimation--in art or music, in social service
or in one’s own work, in religion, or, in modified form, in sport or
romance.
It is perfectly possible, in such case, for mental development to
proceed naturally and comparatively smoothly towards a unified
organization of the type of which we have spoken. Psycho-analysis
would not help a boy or girl developing in such a way, any more than
would a study of all the characters we have inherited from our simian
forefathers help us to realize our specifically human possibilities. On
the other hand, when the intellectual desire to know things for their
own sake is aroused, as it is in most boys and girls between the ages
of about fourteen and twenty, then just as it is good, in order to
get a true picture of the universe, for them to know and be presented
with the evidence for man’s evolution from lower forms, so it is good
for the same reason to give them an account of their psychological
organization, including evidence for the rôle which sex plays in the
genesis of higher mental activities--without, however, any necessity
for psychological experiments in burrowing into their own foundations.
In this case such knowledge would have the additional value of putting
them on their guard against allowing themselves to be prejudiced by
their own incompletely-adjusted conflicts.
We are all of us too prone to think that a phenomenon is somehow
“explained,” or interpreted better, by analysing it into its component
parts or discovering its origin than by studying it in and for itself.
The new type of mental organization acquired by man permits of wholly
new types of mental process, of a complexity as far exceeding those
that we deduce in brutes as does the physical organism of a dog or an
ant that of a polyp or a protozoan: and it is part of our business to
realize those possibilities to the fullest extent.
To sum up, then, biological investigation in the first place shows
us how certain abnormalities of sexual psychology may be more easily
interpreted as caused by comparatively simple physical abnormalities
than by the more complex distortions of psychological origin dealt
with by psycho-analysis. In the second place, by giving us a broader
_aperçu_ than can otherwise be gained over the evolution of sex
and the direction visible in biological history, it clears up to a
certain extent some of the difficulties which the discoveries of the
psycho-analytic school have rendered acute.
If the changes in the relation of the sex instinct to the rest of the
mind, which I have spoken of above as being in operation at present,
should one day progress so far as to be more or less carried through
in a majority, or in a dominant section of the population, the whole
outlook of society towards the sex problem would be changed, and
the laws and institutions and customs connected with it completely
remodelled.
The most pressing task of those who are thinking over the problem of
sex in human life will often be the relief of suffering and the removal
of abuses: but the broader view should never be forgotten, and every
attempt should be made to think constructively with a view to realizing
the enormous possibilities that such a change would bring about.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blair Bell, ’16. “The Sex Complex.” London, 1916.
Carr-Saunders, ’22. “The Population Problem.” Oxford, 1922.
Crew, ’23. Proc. Roy. Soc. (B.). London, 1923.
Cunningham, J. T., ’00. “Sexual Dimorphism in the Animal Kingdom.”
London, 1900.
Doncaster, L., ’14. “The Determination of Sex.” Cambridge, 1914.
East and Jones, ’19. “Inbreeding and Outbreeding.” Philadelphia,
1919.
Ellis, Havelock, ’10. “Studies in the Psychology of Sex.”
Philadelphia, 1910.
Freud. “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”
Goldschmidt, R., ’23. “The Mechanism and Physiology of
Sex-Determination.” London, 1923.
Harrow, B., ’23. “Glands in Health and Disease.” London, 1923.
Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.
Huxley, ’14. (Reversed Pairing, Grebe) Proc. Zool. Soc. London,
1914.
Huxley, ’23. (Courtship and Display) Proc. Linnean Soc. London,
1923.
Jung, ’20. “Analytical Psychology.” London, 1920.
Lipschütz, ’19. “Die Pubertätsdrüse.” Bern, 1919.
Marshall, ’23. “The Physiology of Reproduction.” (2nd Ed.).
Cambridge, 1923.
Meisenheimer, J., ’21. “Geschlecht und Geschlechter.” Jena, 1921.
Morgan, ’19. “The Physical Basis of Heredity.” Philadelphia, 1919.
Rivers, ’20. “Instinct and the Unconscious.” Cambridge, 1920.
Selous, E., ’20. (Moorhen) _Zoologist_ [4] 6. London, 1902.
Steinach J., ’20. Verjüngung, Leipzig, 1920.
Stopes, Marie. “Married Love.”
Tansley, ’20. “The New Psychology.” London, 1920.
Vincent, Swale, ’21. “Internal Secretion and the Ductless Gland.”
(2nd Ed.). London, 1921.
Voronoff, S., ’23. “Greffes Testiculaires.” Paris, 1923.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Read before the British Society for Sex Psychology, October 1922.
[28] See East and Jones, ’19.
[29] See Huxley, ’23.
[30] See Howard, ’20; Carr-Saunders, ’22.
[31] See Goldschmidt, ’23; Morgan, ’19; Doncaster, ’14.
[32] See Steinach, ’20; summary in Lipschütz, ’19; Voronoff, ’23.
[33] See Carr-Saunders, ’22, ch. v, and M. Stopes.
[34] See Lipschütz, ’19; Goldschmidt, ’23.
[35] See Selous, ’02; Huxley, 14.
[36] See Blair Bell, ’16.
[37] See Vincent, ’21; Harrow, ’23.
[38] Crew, ’23.
[39] See Rivers, ’20, chs. iv, xviii.
[40] Rivers, ’20, p. 158.
V
PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:
A BIOLOGIC FANTASY
PHILOSOPHIC----ANTS?
Amœba has her picture in the book,
Proud Protozoon!--Yet beware of pride.
All she can do is fatten and divide;
She cannot even read, or sew, or cook....
The Worm can crawl--but has no eyes to look:
The Jelly-fish can swim--but lacks a bride:
The Fly’s a very Ass personified:
And speech is absent even from the Rook.
The Ant herself cannot philosophize--
While Man does that, and sees, and keeps a wife,
And flies, and talks, and is extremely wise....
Will our Philosophy to later Life
Seem but a crudeness of the planet’s youth,
Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth?
PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:
A BIOLOGIC FANTASY[41]
“Incomprehensibility; that’s what I say.”--LEWIS CARROLL
(_amended_).
According to a recent study by Mr. Shapley (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.,
Philadelphia, vol. vi, p. 204), the normal rate of progression of
ants--or at least of the species of ant which he studied--is a function
of temperature. For each rise of ten degrees centigrade, the ants go
about double as fast. So complete is the dependence that the ants may
be employed as a thermometer, measurement of their rate of locomotion
giving the temperature to within one degree centigrade.
* * * * * * *
The simple consequence--easy of apprehension by us, but infinite
puzzlement to ants--is that on a warm day an ant will get through a
task four or five times as heavy as she will on a cold one. She does
more, thinks more, lives more: more Bergsonian duration is hers.
There was a time, we learn in the myrmecine annals, when ants were
simple unsophisticated folk, barely emerged from entomological
barbarism. Some stayed at home to look after the young brood and tend
the houses, others went afield to forage. It was not long before they
discovered that the days differed in length. At one season of the year
they found the days insufferably long; they must rest five or six times
if they were, by continuing work while light lasted, to satisfy their
fabulous instinct for toil. At the opposite season, they needed no
rest at all, for they only carried through a fifth of the work. This
irregularity vexed them: and what is more, time varied from day to day,
and this hindered them in the accurate execution of any plans.
But as the foragers talked with the household servants, and with those
of their own number who through illness or accident were forced to stay
indoors, they discovered that the home-stayers noticed a much slighter
difference in time between the seasons.
It is easy for us to see this as due to the simple fact that the
temperature of the nest varies less, summer and winter, than does that
of the outer air: but it was a hard nut for them, and there was much
head-scratching. It was of course made extremely difficult by the fact
that they were not sensitive to gradual changes in temperature as such,
the change being as it were taken up in the altered rate of living.
But as their processes of thought kept pace in alteration with their
movements, they found it simplest and most natural to believe in the
fixity and uniformity of their own life and its processes, and to refer
all changes to the already obvious mutability of external nature.
The Wise Ants were summoned: they were ordered by the Queen to
investigate the matter; and so, after consultation, decided to apply
the test of experiment. Several of their numbers, at stated intervals
throughout the year, stayed in and went out on alternate days,
performing identical tasks on the two occasions. The task was the
repeated recitation of the most efficacious of the myrmecine sacred
formulæ.
The rough-and-ready calculations of the workers were speedily
corroborated. “Great is God, and we are the people of God” could be
recited out-of-doors some twenty thousand times a day in summer, less
than four thousand times in winter; while the corresponding indoor
figures were about fifteen thousand and six thousand.
There was the fact; now for the explanation. After many conclaves,
a most ingenious hypothesis was put forward, which found universal
credence. Let me give it in an elegant and logical form.
(1) It was well-known--indeed self-evident--that the Ant race was
the offspring and special care of the Power who made and ruled the
universe.
(1.1) Therefore a great deal of the virtue and essence of that
Power inhered in the race of Ants. Ants, indeed, were made in the
image of God.
(1.2) It was, alas, common knowledge that this Power, although
Omnipotent and Omniscient, was confronted by another power, the
power of disorder, of irregularity, who prevented tasks, put
temptations in the way of workers, and was in fact the genius of
Evil.
(2) Further, it was a received tradition among them that there had
been a fall from the grace of a Golden Age, when there were no
neuters, but all enjoyed married bliss; and the ant-cows gave milk
and honey from their teats.
(2.1) And that this was forfeited by a crime (unmentionable, I
regret to say, in modern society) on the part of a certain Queen
of Ants in the distant past. The Golden Age was gone; the poor
neuters--obligate spinsters--were brought into being; work became
the order of the day. Ant-lions with flaming jaws were set round
that kingdom of Golden Age, from which all ants were thenceforth
expelled.
(2.2.1) This being so, it was natural to conclude that the fall
from grace involved a certain loss of divine qualities.
(2.2.2) The general conclusion to be drawn was that in the race
of ants there still resided a certain quantity of these virtues
that give regularity to things and events; although not sufficient
wholly to counter-balance the machinations of the power of evil
and disorder.
(2.2.3) That where a number of ants had their home and were
congregated together, there the virtue resided in larger bulk and
with greater effect, but that abroad, where ants were scattered
and away from hearth, home, and altar, the demon of irregularity
exerted greater sway.
This doctrine held the field for centuries.
* * * * * * *
But at last a philosopher arose. He was not satisfied with the current
explanation, although this had been held for so long that it had
acquired the odour and force of a religious dogma. He decided to put
the matter to the test. He took a pupa (_anglice_ “ant’s egg”) and on a
windless day suspended it from a twig outside the nest. There he had it
swung back and forth, counting its swings. He then (having previously
obtained permission from the Royal Sacerdotal College) suspended the
pupa by the same length of thread from the roof of the largest chamber
of the nest--a dome devoted to spiritual exercise--and repeated the
swinging and the counting. The living pendulum-bob achieved the same
daily number of oscillations inside the nest as outside, although it
was full summer, and the foragers found the day quite twice as long
as did the home-stayers. The trial was repeated with another pupa and
other lengths of thread; the result was always the same.
It was then that he laid the foundations of ant science by his bold
pronouncement that neither the combat of spiritual powers nor the
expansion or contraction of the store of divine grace had anything to
do with the strange alteration of diurnal length; but that the cause of
it lay in the Ants themselves, who varied with the varying of something
for which he invented the word _Temperature_, not in a contraction or
expansion of Time.
This he announced in public, thinking that a tested truth must be
well-received, and would of necessity some day prove useful to society.
But the consequence was a storm of protest, horror, and execration.
Did this impious creature think to overthrow the holy traditions with
impunity? Did he not realize that to impugn one sentence, one word,
one letter of the Sacred Books was to subvert the whole? Did he think
that a coarse, simple, verifiable experiment was to weigh against the
eternal verity of subtle and mysterious Revelation? No! and again a
thousand times No!!
He was brought before the Wise Ants, and cross-questioned by them. It
was finally decided that he was to abjure his heretical opinion and to
recant in public, reciting aloud to the four winds of heaven: “the Ant
is the norm of all”--
Μὑρμηξ παντὁς νὁμος.
He said it. But Truth stirred within him, and under his breath he
muttered “Eppur si muove....” This was overheard, and he was condemned
(loneliness being much hated and dreaded by ants) to a solitary
banishment.
Later philosophers, however, by using this same pendulum method, were
enabled to find that the movements of sap in plants differed in rate
according to the length of day, and later discovered that the expansion
of water in hollow stems also followed these changes. By devising
machines for registering these movements, they were enabled to prophesy
with considerable success the amount of work to be got through on a
given day, and so to render great aid to the smooth working of the body
politic. Thus, gradually, the old ideas fell into desuetude among the
educated classes--which, however, did not prevent the common people
from remaining less than half-convinced and from regarding the men of
science with suspicion and disapproval.
* * * * * * *
We happen to be warm-blooded--to have had the particular problem
faced by our philosophic ants solved for us during the passage of
evolutionary time, not by any taking of thought on our part or on
the part of our ancestors, but by the casual processes of variation
and natural selection. But a succession of similar problems presses
upon us. Relativity is in the air; it is so much in the air that it
becomes almost stifling at times; but even so, its sphere so far has
been the inorganic sciences, and biological relativity, though equally
important, has been little mentioned.
We have all heard the definition of life as “one damn thing after
another”; it would perhaps be more accurate to substitute some term
such as _relatedness_ for _thing_.
When I was a small boy, my mother wrote down in a little book a number
of my infant doings and childish sayings, the perusal of which I find
an admirable corrective to any excessive moral or intellectual conceit.
What, for instance, is to be thought of a scientist of whom the
following incident is recorded, even if the record refers to the age of
four years?
I (for convenience one must assign the same identity to oneself at
different ages, although again it is but a relative sameness that
persists)--I had made some particularly outrageous statement which was
easily proved false: to which proof, apparently without compunction, I
answered, “Oh, well, I always ex_agg_-erate when it’s a fine day....”
The converse of this I came across recently in a solemn treatise of
psychology: a small girl of five or six, in the course of an “essay” in
school, affirmed that the sun was shining and the day was fine; while
as a matter of fact it had been continuously overcast and gloomy: on
being pressed for a reason, she explained that she felt so happy that
particular morning that she had been sure it was a fine day.
If the weather can affect one’s statements of fact, and one’s emotions
can affect the apparent course of meteorological events, where is
the line to be drawn? What is real? The only things of which we have
immediate cognizance are, of course, happenings in our minds: and the
precise nature and quality of each of these happenings depends on two
things--on the constitution and state of our mind and its train on the
one hand; on the other hand upon events or relations between events
outside that system. That sounds very grand; but all it means after all
is that you need a cause to produce an effect, a machine to register as
well as a something to be registered.
As further consequence, since this particular machine (if I may be
permitted to use the odious word in a purely metaphorical sense),
this mind of ours, is never the same for two succeeding instants, but
continually varies both in the quantity of its activity and the quality
of its state, it follows that variations in mental happenings depend
very largely on variations in the machine that registers, not by any
means solely upon variations in what is to be registered.
Few (at least among Englishmen) would dispute the thesis that food,
properly cooked and served, and of course adapted to the hour, is
attractive four times in the day. But to a large proportion among
us, even sausages and marmalade at nine, or roast beef and potatoes
on a Sabbath noon, would prove not only not attractive but positively
repellent if offered us on a small steamer on a rough day. I will not
labour the point.