Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/22

Rh we have plenty of hard, dry, pseudo-scientific flummery, else a long row of medical platitudes wholly useless, because totally indigestible by the average intellectual stomach. Who of them all has given us the rationale of the orgasm—the why and wherefore, or the cause of its being a thing of apparently no moment whatever at certain times, and under circumstances: yet at another will almost shock the human soul out of its earthly tenement, the body—by its keen, incisive, cutting, awful intensity? Which of them all has explained what every one ought to, but does not know to be a fact, i. e., that, as explained in the "New Mola," and elsewhere in this book, human conjugation is or may be triple; that is, it may be of soul, spirit or body, alone or either, and the binary minglings of the three, in various degrees, even to an infinity; for instance, one part soul, ten spirit, five hundred of mere body, and so on; but never true or normal except in exact equations; even tens or hundreds, according as the participants are high or low. The philosophers never even guessed at this truth.

Who of them has told, or can tell, why the nuptium fairly laps the very soul itself, of each participant, too, in the tenderest, softest, truly human, because strictly human, joy at one time; yet at another gives naught but cruel pain; else is but a nervous spasm, unsatisfactory to one party, and injurious to both; and yet the same people in both instances?

Why is it, O learned anthropologists, that the generative rite will at one time wholly unman one, yet at another—same ones too—will fill him with the most exquisite, manly, gallant sensibility; inspire him with the most lofty virtue and high resolve; charge him to the lips with true and royal courage; yet at another time transmute him into an errant coward and miserable poltroon? And, mirabile dictu—same parties still,—bring pain, keen mental agony, shame-facedness, and suicidal thought; yet at another, result in pride, joy, gratefulness, generosity, and mental summer, with physical springtime? Why will this mysterious duty—for such it is in God's sight, who by its means peoples the worlds, and stocks the starry spaces—plunge us into the deepest "blues," and fang our souls with remorse cruel as the grave, relentless as the Hadean gulf of Milton,