Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/37

 In its proper place, we shall consider the successive stages of the love-life, which are important milestones in the development of the individual from infancy to adulthood.

Let us dwell for the moment upon the social, ethical, and esthetic significance of sex and love. On this point, Maudsley, the English psychiatrist, has expressed himself in the following words: "If man were robbed of sexual desire and everything mentally connected with and emanating from the same, almost every vestige of poetry and perhaps all moral sentiment would be torn from his life."

Numerous thinkers, philosophers and observers from time immemorial have reminded us of the measureless influence of our sexual life in non-sexual channels.

Notwithstanding all the authentic testimony of the far-reaching importance of this great biological impulse—which, upon reflection, is self-evident—it has been the accepted policy not to talk about it openly, frankly and honestly. Nevertheless, it has been a never-failing theme of subterranean talk, the inevitable topic in the whispered gossip of the backstairs, and the subject of vulgar witticism and pruriency.

It is true that love in an abstract sense has been exalted literally, sentimentally and romantically as the transcendent, elevating force of humanity.

But what is love, even in its most sublime form, but the supreme refinement of the sexual impulse? And how are we to understand love, and to develop and enrich the background from which it springs, unless we comprehend the vital force behind it?

In asserting that love is the supreme refinement of the sexual impulse, I do not mean that it has been, or should be, refined out of all its vital and inherently human qualities. That process is as spurious as the refinement of a denatured