Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/39

 has read Freud and ponders on the libido, there is no need, I take it, for me to explain that such delights have their seats chiefly in erogenous zones, and have more to do with the hormones than with the soul. Here the new child psychology confirms the observations of the Freudians, and reinforces their allegation that even the most tender and innocent infant may be worthy of suspicion. Dr. Watson says that the dreadful phenomenon of tumescence in the male can occur at birth—a satirical fact of the first calibre, if a fact. It concerns us here only because the incurable infantilism of the inferior man brings him to manhood with his emotions in this department substantially what they were when he yielded himself to auto-erotic exercises in the cradle.

But there is yet a difference, and it is important. In character his amorous fancies are the same; in intensity they are immensely exaggerated. His brain, in the first years of his second decade, ceases to develop, but simultaneously his glands begin to unfold gloriously, and presently they dominate his whole organism. In his middle teens, he is no more than a vast geyser of hormones. The sweet passion of love, in these