Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/42

 In speaking of human love, we must differentiate in it certain strong affections often called love—maternal love, filial love, fraternal love, and so on. Such sentiments however spontaneous, deep and pure, are not love, as that sentiment really is, and as it should be distinguished from all non-sexual phases of our regard. Parental, filial, fraternal affections are called "love" only by a thousand-year-old looseness of ideas and terms. Such sentiments ought to be classed more popularly as "natural affections" just as by that term they are classed legally. However beautiful, they are far less certain, less genuine less obscure and less mysterious than love. They refer rather to friendship. They lack the essential sexual note, the desire for possessing beauty. Indeed we may grade the various kindly human sentiments that we feel for our fellow-beings as thus: love, friendship, natural affection, friendly human interest.

The instant that the physical desire, with or without a concurrent spiritual desire, springs up in us, stirred to life by a quickening sense of physical beauty in the object of our interest, then there cannot be logical question of our sentiment being more than mere strong friendship, or more than a minor "natural affection." We are in the presence of passional sexual love; of such love in its lighter or more vehement character perhaps, but of erotic love. It is love, no matter what are the real or supposed sexes of the persons concerned. The instant that even vaguely we want to possess, and even vaguely feel that we would be willing to surrender ourselves along with the possession, then no matter how "impossible" how terrifying, how bewildering such an impulse be to us we love, we love sexually. From friendship, we are already far afield.

But with this logical and inevitable conLegitimate in elusion, we come lace to lace with a convention long-sustained in generally