II. THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

Primitive Man.—The modern world accepts the fact of man’s evolution from the animal world, without understanding things that necessarily flow from this. Among animals, sexual relations take place at proper times and places, in such unions as have proven most valuable to the particular species; we attach no blame to these. Among animals, moreover, there is no conception of any relationship between coitus or mating, and parturition or the birth of the child. The fact of paternity is unknown.

One of the secondary sexual characteristics developed by female selection was increased brain mass, evincing greater shrewdness. Thus female choice developed in the higher mammals, and especially in man, a reasoning power; and this in the end dethroned her. Among primitive races, paternity is unknown; there are races existing today which do not understand it. An African chief was asked by a puzzled Christian missionary, “But have you no children?” In good-natured tolerance he corrected his inquisitor; “Among us, men do not have children.” When the idea slowly dawned on man’s mind that he was related to his child, we may be sure that the promiscuity, widespread among races, of early sexual matings had been broadened to include at least some mating pairs. For, in a state of promiscuity, fatherhood could not be established; any one of a number of males might be the father of the child. With a mating couple, the thing was different; and the idea came, and came again.

Savage reasoning is a slow and tortuous thing. When the man protested, “But I am kin to the child!” the wise ones of the tribe would answer, “But you were not sick!” In their minds childbirth (and hence relationship to the child) was always accompanied by sickness. Accordingly, the awkward savage mind invented a queer custom known as the couvade, still found among certain backward tribes. By means of this, when the wife became ill in childbirth, the husband took to his bed, and was nursed just as assiduously by the medicine men as the wife was. He could now answer, triumphant, “I have been sick! This proves that I am kin to my child.”

This idea, once gaining ground, completely overturned the former status of women and men, which had been largely a matriarchate, or mother-rule. Up to this time, woman had had the sole choice of mates, and the leading place in the tribe; for the young were hers, and fatherhood was unknown. Now, with paternity acknowledged, the man, part kin to the child, thereby had the right to part control over it. His wishes conflicted with the mother’s; this led, for the first time in the history of life, to a conflict between the male and the female. No male animal ever fights or abuses his female; it is left for man, made, he confesses, in the image of his creator, to oppress his mate. The male was stronger; and he soon reduced to subjection not only the child, but his wife as well. The patriarchal period, or age of father-rule, commenced; the subjection of women started, the blackest period in human history.

Natural Love.—Love, the innate interest in male and female to secure fertilization and cross-reproduction, appears first as natural love, or sheer animal passion. Religion itself has one of its roots deep in the erotic nature of man; the widespread primitive worship of the love force and of sexual symbols is evidence of this. The phallic origin of such symbols as the cross and the trinity, the yonic derivation of the sacred seven-branched candlestick, are instances known to every anthropologist.

It must not be forgotten that, in its natural state, natural love is worthy to be called pure and noble. It embraced both monogamy and polygamy, depending upon the wishes of the parties concerned. It must never be overlooked that monogamy has developed as a female ideal, not a male one. For the compulsion on the male is: Fertilize! That on the female: Select! The male’s biological imperative is to fertilize as many females as he can; that of the female, is to select only the best and finest male as her mate. Monogamy spread as a property right, to insure that the sons of a man should be legitimate, in order that they might inherit his property. But this meant monogamy for the wife only; the husband was still at liberty to have concubines and harlots.

There are those who state that the coming of Christianity elevated woman, especially in the worship of the Virgin Mary. After all, she is distinctly inferior in power to the great mother goddesses, Demeter (dea-mater, goddess-mother), Cybele, Astarte, Ashtoreth, who sprang up during the matriarchate. In fact, early Christianity definitely lowered pagan conceptions of womanhood. Christ himself said, “there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” This lifted the mutilated man above the man who was mate of a woman. Paul praised celibacy above mating. Early Christian authorities were even more outspoken. Tertullian exclaims, “Woman, you are the gate to hell!” Again, “Celibacy must be chosen, even though the human race should perish.” Hieronymus says, “Matrimony is always a vice.” Origines declares, “Matrimony is impure and unholy; a means of sensual passion.” Christianity; then, had swung the pendulum too far toward giving all worth to things of the next world, and holding things of this world as vile. The growth of common intelligence has altered this, and the purity and nobility of natural love is now generally recognized.

Romantic Love.—The savage had no conception of romantic love, and neither did the classical world. It grew amid the unnatural conditions of the age of roving knighthood, with its long separation of mated couples, and the danger to isolated highborn women from attacks. Romantic love was a sublimation, or emotional substitute, for the intense sexual need grown during such absences; it grew in proportion to the greater equality and independence of women during the period. It differs from natural love in one thing: natural love requires the possession of the person of the beloved; romantic love is satisfied with the presence of the beloved.

There was often the touch of outlawed love in romantic matings. At the Court of Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne it was stated and approved that:

“Nature and custom have erected an insuperable barrier between conjugal affection and the love which unites two lovers. It would be absurd to draw comparisons between two things which have neither resemblance nor connection.”

Here it is assumed that the love between two lovers must be an outlawed thing, apart from the love of wife and husband, or conjugal love. The romances of great geniuses, Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Tasso and Eleanora, and a hundred others, go to indicate, with the romantic literature of the whole world, that love is a higher law, that will and should prevail over the laws of men and the conventions of society. In this it is in harmony with the teachings of biology and a sound sociology.

Conjugal Love.—Also a late growth is the love of husband and wife, or conjugal love. This requires monogamy, and a certain strong self-control. It is, as has been indicated, often at war with romantic love. In certain lands, as generally in France today, the two are separated, and wife and mistress are rarely united in the same person. Anglo-Saxon custom is the reverse of this, and there is a strong tendency here to unite the love for a lover with the love for a wedded mate. There is no doubt but that this is the higher, although the more difficult, solution of the conflict. More will be said on this subject later.

Freud’s Analysis of Love Development.—Freud, who with his disciple Jung has delved deeply into the hidden origins of the love force, has divided the normal development of love in the human being into three stages:

Auto-eroticism, or self love.

Homosexuality, or love of the same sex.

Heterosexuality, or love of the opposite sex.

The infant at first secures its erotic pleasure through the practice of sucking to obtain its food. The instincts have not yet been separated; the same act that satisfies hunger also satisfies love and other primitive instincts. Soon the child begins to recognize the pleasure in suckling apart from obtaining food, and, even after he has had enough to eat, he will continue the motions of suckling, because of the satisfaction that this gives to the erotic instinct. Then the child discovers his own body, and passes into the stage of auto-eroticism, narcissism, or self-love. He obtains a pleasure from handling his genitals and other parts of his body—a pleasure for which he is soon punished, by his elders, as something naughty. Normally he will grow out of this stage into the next; but he may become fixed erotically at this stage, and continue for life an auto-erotic. Such rare cases find their sole sexual pleasure in onanism; and some vestiges of the stage persist throughout life.

The second stage is when the child realizes that there are other people in the world, children especially, and that he can obtain erotic pleasure from contact with genitals similar to his own. Of course, he does not yet know that the opposite sex has differing organs; and he attributes to every child organs the same as his own. This gives rise to the period of homosexuality. In its lowest manifestation, this is put into physical practice. It should normally be sublimated; that is, the child should develop as an emotional substitute a strong affection for members of his own sex. Strong friendships between boys and boys, boys and men, and men and men, as well as between females of various ages, are the ways in which this force is drained off constructively. For, despite the opinion of Edward Carpenter and others among moderns, and Sappho, Socrates and others among ancients, that this is a high form of love, whose disciples are called Urnings or heaven-creatures, it is clear that those who never pass beyond homosexuality are instances of development arrested at the second stage. In the normal development of the child today, this is entirely sublimated into friendships.

At the same time, it should be emphasized here that childish practices of onanism or homosexuality, even when carried over into adolescence, are not what they are painted by medical quacks and superficial thinkers. They are not vicious sins, or even sins at all; they are merely preliminary and sterile steps in love. The reason that they are not high forms of love is that they are contrary to the tendency of life itself, which has developed the reproductive organs, not for sterile stimulation, but for reproduction. Both onanism and homosexual love are barren. The normal human love life must go beyond them.

The third stage is heterosexuality, or love for members of the opposite sex. Here the bodily organism comes into harmony with the tendency of life itself; this is the highest stage of bodily usage in contact with other human beings. The rest of this study will be devoted to an elaboration of its proper development.

Bousfield, in his “The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis,” has indicated statistically the evolution of the sexual components of the normal child in the following table:

Infant

Autosexuality 100%

Child of 12

Autosexuality 40%

Homosexuality 50%

Heterosexuality 10%

Normal Individual at Puberty

Autosexuality 20%

Homosexuality 30%

Heterosexuality 50%

From this it will be seen that vestiges of the lower stages persist in the higher. These do no harm, if the individual flowers well in his environment. Any serious obstacle in life, which cannot be overcome or passed, may dam up the flow of the life source, and cause a regression to one of the earlier stages. And, of course, in abnormal cases, there may be fixations at either of the earlier stages. But these are sterile stages, and the normal boy will soon step out of them into the third stage, which means manhood.