Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/39



Before we enter further upon analyses of the Uranian and Uraniad Intersexes, some consideration in this chapter and its successor will be of importance to readers who for the first time find themselves analyzing attentively sexual feelings.

Love, as distinguished from other human emotions, particularly as distinguished from friendship, is the attraction exerted on one human being over another through the quality of our aesthetic sensitiveness; the quality of our sentiment, more or less refined, for beauty. The feeling includes distinctively our wish to possess the object that we love by physical connection with ourselves. We desire to unite ourselves to the being that we love, as closely as possible by a physical nearness. At the same time, we seek often to give ourselves up, in an inevitable personal surrender. The two impulses, the wish to possess, and the impulse to surrender, are inextricably blent in real love, and as a rule cannot be parted. The seeking for possession, the impulse to give ourselves as we achieve it, must be both physical and psychical, if one wishes to feel the fullest mystery of love as a passion. If the sentiment be only physical it is not perfect love, though it is a love. If it be only psychologic, if we do not demand so much the physical possession, nor feel the wish to surrender ourselves as a matter of course in