Volume 5 — EROTIC SYMBOLISM. (continued 4)
Reading edition
A man cannot, however, deviate at once so widely and so spontaneously in his impulses from the rest of the world in which he himself lives without possessing an aboriginally abnormal temperament. At the very least he exhibits a neuropathic sensitiveness to abnormal impressions. Not infrequently there is more than this, the distinct stigmata of degeneration, sometimes a certain degree of congenital feeble-mindedness or a tendency to insanity.
Yet, regarded as a whole, and notwithstanding the frequency with which they witness to congenital morbidity, the phenomena of erotic symbolism can scarcely fail to be profoundly impressive to the patient and impartial student of the human soul. They often seem absurd, sometimes disgusting, occasionally criminal; they are always, when carried to an extreme degree, abnormal. But of all the manifestations of sexual psychology, normal and abnormal, they are the most specifically human. More than any others they involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring before us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in opposition, himself creating his own paradise. They constitute the supreme triumph of human idealism.
[64]
Binet, Etudes de Psychologie Expérimentale, esp., p. 84; Krafft-Ebing, Op. cit., p. 18.
[65]
G. Tarde, "L'Amour Morbide," Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1890, p. 585.
[66]
Lucretius, Lib. IV, vv. 1150-1163.
[67]
Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Section II, Mem. III, Subs. I.
[68]
Judith Cladel, Auguste Rodin Pris sur la Vie, 1903, pp. 103-104. Some slight modifications have been made in the translation of this passage on account of the conversational form of the original.
[69]
W. Cyples, The Process of Human Experience, p. 462. Even if (as we have already seen, ante, p. 58) the saint cannot always feel actual physical pleasure in the intimate contact of humanity, the ardor of devoted service which his vision of humanity arouses remains unaffected.
[70]
"To love," as Stendhal defined it (De l'Amour, Chapter II), "is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, and feeling by all the senses, and as near as possible, a beloved object by whom one is oneself loved."
[71]
Pillon's study of "La Mémoire Affective" (Revue Philosophique, February, 1901) helps to explain the psychic mechanism of the process.