THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
THE
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
OF LOVE
BY
REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated with a Postscript By
EZRA POUND
BON I AND LIVE RIGHT
Publishers New York
THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
COPYRIGHT, 1922, By
BONI AND LlVERIGHT, INC.
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PACK
I. THE SUBJECT OF AN IDEA n
Love's general psychology. — Love according to natural
laws. — Sexual selection. — Man's place in Nature. —
Identity of human and animal psychology. — The
animal nature of love.
II. THE AIM OF LIFE 17
The importance of the sexual act. — Its ineluctable
character. — Animals who live only to reproduce them-
selves.— The strife for love, and for death. — Females
fecundated at the very instant of birth. — The main-
tenance of life.
III. SCALE OF SEXES 22
Asexual reproduction. — Formation of the animal col-
ony.— Limits of asexual reproduction. — Coupling. —
Birth of the sexes. — Hermaphrodism and partheno-
genesis.— Chemical fecundation. — Universality of par-
thenogenesis.
IV. SEXUAL DIMORPHISM 31
1. Invertebrates: formation of the male. — Primitiv-
ity of the female. — Minuscule males: the bonellie. —
Regression of the male into the male organ: the
cirripedes. — Generality of sexual dimorphism. — Su-
periority of the female in most insect species. — Excep-
tions.— Numeric dimorphism. — Female hymenoptera. —
Multiplicity of her activities.— Male's purely sexual
role.— Dimorphism of ants and termites. — Grasshoppers
and crickets. — Spiders. — Coleoptera. — Glow-worm. —
Cochineal's strange dimorphism.
V. SEXUAL DIMORPHISM 43
2. Vertebrates: — Unnoticeable in fish, saurians, reptiles.
— The bird world. — Dimorphism favourable to males:
v
1163473
CHAPTER PACK
the oriole, pheasants, the ruff. — Peacocks and turkey-
cocks. — Birds of paradise. — Moderate dimorphism of
mammifers. — Effects of castration on dimorphism.
VI. SEXUAL DIMORPHISM: 49
3. Vertebrates (Continued) : — Man and woman. —
Characteristics and limits of human dimorphism. — Ef-
fects of civilization. — Psychologic dimorphism. — The
insect world and the human. — Modern dimorphism,
basis of the pair. — Solidarity of the human pair. — Di-
morphism and polygamy. — The pair favours the fe-
male.— Sexual aesthetics.— Causes of the superiority of
feminine beauty.
VII. SEXUAL DIMORPHISM AND FEMINISM 59
Inferiority and superiority of the female as shown
hi animal species. — Influence of feeding on the produc-
tion of sexes. — The female would have sufficed. —
Feminism absolute, and moderate. — Pipe-dreams: elimi-
nation of the male and human parthenogenesis.
VIII. LOVE-ORGANS 64
Sexual dimorphism and parallelism. — Sexual organs of
man and of woman. — Constancy of sexual paral-
lelism in the animal series. — External sexual organs of
placentary mammifera. — Form and position of the
penis.— The penial bone. — The clitoris. — The vagina. —
The teats. — Forked prong of marsupials. — Sexual organs
of reptiles. — Fish and birds with a penial organ. —
Genital organs of arthropodes. — Attempt to classify
animals according to the disposition, presence, ab-
sence of exterior organs for reproduction.
IX. THE MECHANISM OF LOVE 76
i. Copulation: Vertebrates. — Its very numerous va-
rieties and its specific fixity. — The apparent immoral-
ity of Nature. — Sexual ethnography. — Human mechan-
ism.— Cavalage. — The form and duration of coupling
in divers mammifers.— Aberrations of sexual surgery,
the ampallang. — Pain as a bridle on sex. — Maidenhead.
— The mole. — Passivity of the female. — The ovule,
psychological figure of the female. — Mania of attribut-
ing human virtues to animals. — The modesty of ele-
phants.— Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tor-
toises.— In certain ophidians and in certain fish.
vi
CHAPTER PACT
X. THE MECHANISM OF LOVE 91
2. Copulation (Continued) — Arthropodes. — Scorpions.
—Large aquatic crustaceans. — Small crustaceans. — The
hydrachne. — Scutilary. — Cockchafer. — Butterflies. —
Flies, etc. — Variation of animals' sexual habits.
XI. THE MECHANISM OF LOVE 98
3. Of birds and fish. — Males without penis. — Coupling
by simple contact. — Salacity of birds. — Copulation of
batrachians: accoucheur toad, aquatic toad, earth toad,
pipa toad. — Foetal parasitism. — Chastity of fish. —
Sexes separated in love. — Onanistic fecundation. —
Cephalopodes, the spermatophore.
XII. THE MECHANISM OF LOVE 107
4. Hermaphrodism. — Sexual life of oysters. — Gastero-
podes. — The idea of reproduction and the idea of
pleasure. — Mechanism of reciprocal reproduction:
helices. — Spintrian habits. — Reflection on hermaphrod-
ism.
XIII. THE MECHANISM OF LOVE xia
5. Artificial fecundation. — Disjunction of the secret-
ing apparatus from the copulating apparatus. — Spiders.
— Discovery of their copulative method. — Brutality of
the female. — Habits of the epeire. — The argyronete. —
The tarantula. — Exceptions: the reapers. — Dragonflies
(libellule) .— Dragonflies (demoiselle) virgins and "jou-
vencelle." — Picture of their love affairs.
XIV. THE MECHANISM OF LOVE 120
6. Cannibalism in sex. — Females who devour the male,
those who devour the spermatophore. — Probable use of
these practices. — Fecundation by the whole male. —
Loves of the white foreheaded dectic. — The green
grasshopper. — The Alpine analote. — The ephippigere. —
Further reflections on the cannibalism of sex. — Loves of
the praying mantis.
XV. THE SEXUAL PARADE 137
Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes. — Their
role in fecundation. — Sexual games of birds. — How
cantharides caress. — Males' combats. — Pretended com-
bats of birds. — Dance of the tetras. — Gardener bird. —
His country house. — His taste for flowers. — Reflections
vii
V
on the origin of his art. — Combats of crickets. — Parade
of butterflies. — Sexual sense of orientation.— The great-
peacock moth. — Animals' submission to orders of Na-
ture.— Transmutation of physical values. — Rutting
calendar.
XVI. POLYGAMY 141
Rarity of monogamy. — Taste for change in animals. —
Roles of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or
instability of specific types. — Strife of the couple
against polygamy. — Couples among insects. — Among
fish, batrachians, saurians. — Monogamy of pigeons, of
nightingales. — Monogamy in carnivora, in rodents. —
Habits of the rabbit.— The ichneumon. — Unknown
causes of polygamy. — Rarity and superabundance of
males. — Polygamy in insects. — In fish. — In gallinaceae,
in web-footed birds.— In herbivora. — The antelope's
harem. — Human polygamy. — How it tempers the
couple among civilized races.
XVH. LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS 157
Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera. —
Bees.— Wedding of the queen. — Mother bee, cause and
consciousness of the hive. — Sexual royalty. — Limits of
intelligence among bees. — Natural logic and human logic.
— Wasps. — Bumble-bees. — Ants.— Notes on their habits.
— Very advanced state of their civilization. — Slavery
and parasitism among ants. — Termites. — The nine
principal active forms of termites. — Great age of their
civilization. — Beavers. — Tendency of industrious ani-
mals to inactivity.
XVHI. THE QUESTION or ABERRATIONS 172
Two sorts of sexual aberration.— Sexual aberrations
of animals. — Those of men. — Crossing of species. —
Chastity. — Modesty. — Varieties and localizations of
sexual bashfulness. — Artificial creation of modesty. —
Sort of modesty natural to all females. — Cruelty. —
Picture of carnage. — The cricket eaten alive. — Habits
of carabes. — Every living creature is a prey. — Necessity
to kill or to be killed.
XIX. INSTINCT 184
Instinct. — Can one oppose it to intelligence? — Instinct
in man. — Primordiality of intelligence. — Instinct's con-
viii
CHAPTER PAG1
servative role. — Modifying role of intelligence. — Intelli-
gence and consciousness. — Parity of animal and hu-
man instinct. — Mechanical character of the instinctive
act. — Instinct modified by intelligence. — Habit of work
creates useless work. — Objections to the identification of
instinct and intelligence taken from life of insects.
XX. TYRANNY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 194
Accord and discord between organs and acts. — Tarses
and sacred scarab. — The hand of man. — Mediocre fit-
ness of sexual organs for copulation. — Origin of "lux-
uria." — The animal is a nervous system served by
organs. — The organ does not determine the aptitude. —
Man's hand inferior to his genius. — Substitution of one
sense for another. — Union and role of the senses in
love. — Man and animal under the tyranny of the
nervous system. — Wear and tear of humanity com-
pensated by acquisitions. — Man's inheritors.
TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT ......... 206
BIBLIOGRAPHY: PRACTICAL WORKS CONSULTED . . 220
THE NATURAL
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT OF AN IDEA
Love's general psychology. — Love according to natural
laws. — Sexual selection. — Man's place in Nature. —
Identity of human and animal psychology. — The
animal nature oj love.
THIS book, which is only an essay, because its subject
matter is so immense, represents, nevertheless, an ambi-
tion: one wanted to enlarge the general psychology of
love, starting it in the very beginning of male and female
activity, and giving man's sexual life its place in the
one plan of universal sexuality.
Certain moralists have, undeniably, pretended to talk
about "love in relation to natural causes," but they were
profoundly ignorant of these natural causes: thus Senan-
cour, whose book, blotted though it be with ideology,
remains the boldest work on a subject so essential that
nothing can drag it to triviality. If Senancour had been
acquainted with the science of his time, if he had only
read Reaumur and Bonnet, Buff on and Lamarck; if he
ii
THE NATURAL
had been able to merge the two ideas, man and animal
into one, he, being a man without insurmountable preju-
dices, might have produced a still readable book. The
moment would have been favorable. People were be-
ginning to have some exact knowledge of animals'
habits. Bonnet had proved the startling relationships of
animal and vegetable reproduction; the essential principle
of physiology had been found; the science of life was
brief enough to be clear; one might have ventured a
theory as to the psychological unity of the animal series.
Such a work would have prevented numerous follies
in the century then beginning. One would have become
accustomed to consider human love as one form of num-
berless forms, and not perhaps, the most remarkable
of the lot, a form which clothes the universal instinct
of reproduction; and its apparent anomalies would have
found a normal explanation amid Nature's extravagance.
Darwin arrived, inaugurated a useful system, but his
views were too systematized, his aim too explanatory
and his scale of creatures with man at the summit, as
the culmination of universal effort, is of a too theologic
simplicity. Man is not the culmination of nature, he is
in Nature, he is one of the unities of life, that is all.
He is the product of a partial, not of total evolution;
the branch whereon he blossoms, parts like a thousand
other branches from a common trunk. Moreover, Dar-
win, truckling to the religiose pudibundery of his race,
has almost wholly neglected the actual facts of sex;
this makes his theory of sexual selection, as the principle
of change, incomprehensible. But even if he had taken
account of the real mechanism of love, his conclusions,
12
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
possibly more logical, would still have been inexact, for
if sexual selection has any aim it can be but conservation.
Fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated ele-
ments into a unique element, a perpetual return to
the unity.
It is not particularly interesting to consider human
acts as the fruits of evolution, for upon animal branches
as clearly separate as those of insect and mammifer one
finds sexual acts and social customs sensibly analogous,
if not identical in many points.
If insects and mammifers have any common ancestor,
save the primordial jelly, there must indeed have been
very different potentialities in its amorphous contours
to lead it here into being bee and there into being
giraffe. An evolution leading to such diverse results has
interest only as a metaphysical idea, psychology can
get from it next to nothing of value.
We must chuck the old ladder whose rungs the evo-
lutionists ascended with such difficulty. We will imagine,
metaphorically, a centre of life, with multiple lives di-
verging from it; having passed the unicellular phase, we
will take no count of hypothetic subordinations. One
does not wish to deny, one wishes rather not to deny,
either general or particular evolutions, but the genealo-
gies are too uncertain and the thread which unites them ^^ *
too often broken :<£what, for example, is the origin of
birds, organisms which seem at once a progress and a
retrogression from the mammifer?; On reflection, one
will consider the different love-mechanisms of all the
dioicians as parallel and contemporary.
Man will then find himself in his proper and rather
13
<jy
THE NATURAL
indistinct place in the crowd, beside the monkeys,
rodents and bats. Psychologically, one must quite often
compare him with insects, marvellous flowering of the
life force. And what clarity from the process, lights
showering in from all corners. Feminine coquetry, the
flight before the male, the return, the game of yes and
no, the uncertain attitude seeming at once cruel and
amorous, and not peculiar to the female human? Not
at all. Celimene is of all species, and heteroclite above
all; she is both mole and spider, she is sparrow and
cantharide, she is cricket and adder. A celebrated author
in a play called, I think, La Fille Sauvage, represents
feminine love as aggressive. An error. The female
attacked by the male thinks always of retreat, she
never, never attacks, save in certain species which
appear to be very ancient and which have persisted
to our time only by prodigies of equilibrium. Even
there one must make reserves, for when one sees the
female aggressive, it is perhaps at the second or fourth
phase of the game, not at the beginning. The female
sleeps until the male arouses her, then she gives in, plays,
or takes flight. The virgin's reserve before man is but
a very moderate bashfulness if compared with the pell-
mell flight of a young mole intacta.
This is but one fact of a thousand. There is not
one way of instinctive man with a maid which is not
findable in one or other animal species; this is perfectly
comprehensible seeing that man is an animal, submitted
to the essential instincts which govern all animality;
there being everywhere the same matter animate with
the same desire: to live, to perpetuate life. Man's supe-
14
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
riority is in the immense diversity of his aptitudes.
Animals are confined to one series of gestures, always
the same ones, man varies his mimicry without limit;
but the target is the same, and the result is the same,
copulation, fecundation and eggs.
Belief in liberty has been born from the diversity of
human aptitude, from man's power to reach the neces-
sary termination of his activity by different routes, or to
dodge this termination and suicide in himself the species
whose future he bears. It, this liberty, is an illusion
difficult not to have, an idea which one must shed if
one wants to think in a manner not wholly irrational,
but it is recompensingly certain that the multiplicity of
possible activities is almost an equivalent of this liberty.
Doubtless the strongest motive always wins, but today's
stronger is tomorrow's weaker, hence a variety of human
gaits feigning liberty, and practically resulting therein.
Free will is only the faculty of being guided successively
by a great number of different motives. When choice is
possible, liberty begins, even though the chosen act is
rigorously determined and when there is no possibility
of avoiding it. Animals have a smaller liberty, restricted
in proportion as their aptitudes are more limited; but
when life begins liberty begins. The distinction, from
this view-point, between man and animal is quantitative,
and not qualitative. One must not be gulled by the
scholastic distinction between instinct and intelligence;
man is as full of instincts as the insect most visibly
instinctive; he obeys them by methods more diverse,
that is all there is to it.
If it is clear that man is an animal, it is also clear
THE NATURAL
that he is a very complex one. One finds in him most
of the aptitudes which are distributed one by one among
beasts. There is hardly one of his habits, of his virtues,
of his vices (to use the conventional terms) which can
not be found either in an insect, a bird or a mammifer:
monogamy, adultery, the "consequences"; polygamy,
polyandry, lasciviousness, laziness, activity, cruelty,
courage, devotion, any of these are common to
animals, but each as the quality of an whole species.
In the state of differentiation to which superior and
cultivated human species have attained, each individual
forms surely a separate variety determined by what is
called, abstractly, "the character." This individual
differentiation, very marked in mankind, is less marked
in other animal species. Yet we note quite distinct
characters in dogs, in horses and even in birds of the
same race. It is quite probable that all bees have not
the same character, since, for example, they are not all
equally prompt to use their stings in analogous circum-
stances. Even there the difference between man and
his brothers-in-life and in sensibility is but a difference
of degree.
"Solidarity" is but an empty ideology if one limit it
to human species. There is no abyss between man and
animal; the two domains are separated by a tiny rivulet
which a baby could step over. We are animals, we live
on animals, and animals live on us. We both have and
are parasites. We are predatory, and we are the living
prey of the predatory. And when we follow the love act,
it is truly, in the idiom of theologians, more bestiarum.
Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty.
16
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER II
THE AIM OF LIFE
The importance of the sexual act. — Its ineluctable
character. — Animals who live only to reproduce them-
selves.— The strife for love, and for death. — Females
fecundated at the very instant of birth. — The main-
tenance of life.
WHAT is life's aim? Its maintenance.
But the very idea of an aim is a human illusion. There
is neither beginning, nor middle, nor end in the series of
causes. What is has been caused by what was, and what
will be has for cause the existent. One can neither con-
ceive a point of rest nor a point of beginning. Born of
life, life will beget life eternally She should, and wants
to. Life is characterized on earth by the existence of
individuals grouped into species, that is to say having
the power, a male being united with a female, to repro-
duce a similar being. Whether it be the internal con-
joining of protozoaires, or hermaphrodite fecundation,
or the coupling of insects or mammifers, the act is the
same: it is common to all that lives, and this not only
to animals but to plants, and possibly even to such min-
erals as are limited by a non-varying form. Of all
possible acts, in the possibility that we can imagine, the
17
THE NATURAL
sexual act is, therefore, the most important of all acts.
Without it life comes to an end, and it is absurd to
suppose its absence, for in that case thought itself
disappears.
Revolt is useless against so evident a necessity. Our
finikin scruples protest in vain; man and the most dis-
gusting of his parasites are the products of an identical
sexual mechanism. The flowers we have strewn upon
love may disguise it as one disguises a trap for wild
beasts; all our activities manoeuvre along the edge of
this precipice and fall over it one after another; the
aim of human life is the continuation of human life.
Only in appearance does man escape this obligation
of Nature. He escapes as an individual, and he submits
as a species. The abuse of thought, religious prejudices,
vices sterilize a part of humanity; but this fraction is
of merely sociological interest; be he chaste or volup-
tuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole
condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do
not reproduce their species, neither do all animals; the
feeble and the late-comers among insects die in their
robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously filled by
courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by
the inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come
boasting that he has freed his blood from the pressure
of desire; the very importance which he ascribes to his
victory but affirms the same power of the life-will.
A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will,
if she is healthy, confess naively that she "wants to
marry to have children." This so simple formula is the
legend of Nature. What an animal seeks is not its own
18
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem,
during a relatively long existence, to have but brief
sexual periods, but one must make allowance for the
period of gestation. In principle the sole occupation
of any creature is to renew, by the sex act, the form
wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats, to this
end builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and
definite that it constitutes the entire life of a very great
number of animals, which are, notwithstanding, ex-
tremely complex.
The ephemera is bora in the evening, and copulates,
the female lays eggs during the night, both are dead in
the morning, without even having looked at the sun.
These little animals are so little destined for anything
else save love that they have not even mouths. They
eat not, neither do they drink. One sees them hover-
ing in clouds above the water, among the reeds. The
males, although more numerous than the females, per-
form a multiple duty, and fall exhausted. The purity
of such a life is to be admired in many butterflies: the
silk -moths, heavy and clumsy, shake their wings for an
instant at birth, couple and die. The Great Peacock
or Oak Bombyx, much larger than they, eats no more
than they do: yet we see him traverse leagues of country
in his quest of the female. He has only a rudimentary
proboscis and a fake digestive apparatus. Thus his two
or three days' existence passes without one egoistic act.
The struggle for life, much vaunted, is here the struggle
to give life, the struggle for death, for if they can live
three days in search of the female they die as soon as
the fecundation is accomplished.
THE NATURAL
Among all solitary bees, scolies, masons, bembex, and
anthopores, the males born soonest, range about the nests
awaiting the birth of the females. As soon as these
appear they are seized and fecundated, knowing, thus,
life and love in the same shiver. The female osmies
and other bees are keenly watched by the males who
nab and mount them as they emerge from the natal tube,
the hollow stalk of a reed, flying at once with them into
the air where the love-feast is finished. Then while
the male, drunk with his work, continues his death-
flight, the female feverishly hollows the house of her
offspring, partitions it, stores the honey for the larvae,
lays, whirls for an instant and dies. The year following:
the same gestures above the same reeds split by the reed-
gatherers; and thus in years following, the insect per-
mitted never the least design save the conservation of
one fragile form; brief apparition over flowers.
The sitaris is a coleopterous parasite in the nests of
the anthopore. Copulation takes place on hatching.
Fabre noticed a female still in her wrappings, whom a
male already free was helping to get loose, waiting only
the appearance of the extremity of the abdomen, to hurl
himself thereupon. The sitaris' love lasts one minute,
long season in a short life: the male drags on for two
days before dying, the female lays on the very spot
where she has been fecundated, dies, having known
nothing but the maternal function in the strictest limit
of her birthplace.
No one has ever seen the female palingenia. This
butterfly is fecundated before even getting rid of her
nymph's corset, she dies with her eyes still shut, mother,
20
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
at once, and infant in swaddling clothes. Moralists love
bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms.
They recommend us work, order, economy, foresight,
obedience and divers virtues other. Abandon yourself
boldly to labour: Nature wills it. Nature wills every-
thing. She is complacent to all the activities; to our
imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not
one. She desires the social constructions of bees; she
desires also the Life All Love of the "Great Peacock,"
of the osmie, of the sitaris. She desires that the forms
she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this
end all means are, to her, good. ' ..t if she presents us
the laborious example of the bee, she does not hide from
us the polyandrous example, nor the cruel amours of
the mantis. There is not in the will to live the faintest
trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes
an unique sole morality, that is to say an universal com-
mandment, which all species may listen to, which they
can follow in spirit and in letter, if one wishes in short
to know the "aim of life" and the duty of the living,
it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will
totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them
into a sole affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat
it, without fear, and without allowing any objection: the
aim of life is life's continuation.
21
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER III
SCALE OF SEXES
Asexual reproduction. — Formation of the animal colony.
— Limits of asexual reproduction. — Coupling. —
Birth of the sexes. — Hermaphrodism and partheno-
genesis.— Chemical fecundation. — Universality of par-
thenogenesis.
THE primitive mode of reproduction is asexual, or what
one will so consider provisorily, in comparison with more
complex mechanism. In the first living forms there are
neither sexual organs nor differentiated sexual elements.
The animal reproduces itself by scissiparity or by bud-
ding; the individual divides itself in two parts, or a
protuberance develops, forms a new being and then
separates.
Scissiparity is an inexact term, for the division is
transversal, and the two parts far from equal; it occurs
in protozoaires, and further in worms, star-fish and polyps.
Budding is common to protozoaires, infusoria, ccelen-
terata, to fresh-water polyps and to nearly all vegetables.
A third primitive mode, sporulation, consists in the pro-
duction inside the organism of particular cells, spores,
which separate and become individuals; this occurs in
protozoaires, as well as in ferns, algae and mushrooms.
The first two modes, division and budding, serve also
22
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
for the formation of animal colonies, when the new
individual retains a point of contact with the generating
individual. It is by this notion of colony that one
explains complex beings, and even superior animals, in
considering them as reunions of simple primitive beings
which have differentiated themselves and still retained
a solidarity, sharing the physiological work between them.
Colonies of protozoaires are formed of individuals having
identical functions, living in perfect equality, despite the
hierarchy of position; colonies of metazoaires are com-
posed of specialised members whose separation may be a
cause of death for the total individual. There is then,
in the latter case, a new being composed of distinct ele-
ments which, retaining a certain essential autonomy,
have become the organs of a new entity.
The first living organisms formed their hierarchies
thus: individual unicellular, or plastide; group of plas-
tides or meride. The merides, as the protozoaires, can
reproduce themselves asexually, or by division or budding.
They may separate completely or remain attached to
their generator. If they remain attached one has
mounted a step and attained the zoide. Thence, by
colonies of zoides one gets individuals still more complex,
called denies. None of these terms is much more than
a convenience for memory. The nomenclature stops, as
does the progression, at a certain moment, for the evo-
lution has its limit, its finality, as does even the milieu
in which life continues to evolve. One might say that
heaving up from the obscure vital centre, the new animal-
shoots branch upward until they knock their heads upon
an ideal or imaginary roof which prevents any further
23
THE NATURAL
climbing. This is the death of the- species, and Nature
contemptuously abandoning her work, begins to make
yet another mould of the initial ooze, to derive from it
a new form. The dream of an unlimited transformation
of actual species is pure chimaera; they will disappear
one by one, according to their order of primogeniture,
according to their faculty for adapting themselves to
the changing milieu, and one might foresee, if the earth
lasts, in a distant time an unimaginable fauna replacing
the present fauna, and even replacing man.
Man is a metazoaire, that is to say an animal with dif-
ferentiated pluricellules, like the sponge, the wheel ani-
mals, and the annelids. He belongs to the artizoaire
series: a head, belly, back, bilateral symmetry; to the
vertebrate branch: internal skeleton, cartilaginous and
osseous; to the class of mammifers, to the sub-class of
placentaires; to the group of primates not far from the
chiroptera (bats) and the rodents.
In regard to the life-transmitting mechanism the ani-
mals are divided somewhat differently. On one side bud-
ding and division, or scissiparity, is prolonged rather
far into the metazoaire series concurrent with sexual
reproduction; on the other hand there are, among pro-
tozoaires, phenomena of coupling, unions of cellules
which resemble veritable fecundation and perform its
role; without the nuclear regeneration which is the aim
and consequence, neither segmentation nor budding can
take place, at least not indefinitely. In sum, the repro-
duction of beings is always sexual; only in the one case,
the protozoaires, it is produced by non-differentiated
elements; and in the other, the metazoaires, by differen-
24
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
tiated elements, a male and a female. If one clips off
bits of a sponge, a hydra, one obtains as many new
individuals, which when they have grown one may again
divide, and so on repeatedly, but not indefinitely. At
a variable instant, after a certain number of generations
by fragmentation, senescence appears among the so pro-
duced individuals; the clipped morsels remain inert.
Thus this sort of artificial virgin birth has a limit, as has
normal parthenogenesis, and in order that the individuals
may regain their parthenogenetic force one must give
them time to regenerate their cellules by the coupling
which fecundates them.
Fecundation is in all cases, doubtless, merely a re-
juvenation, thus considered it is uniform not only
throughout the animal series, but throughout the vege-
table. One ought to experiment in slip-cutting, and
discover at what point the slip cut from a slip begins to
diminish in vitality. Coupling and fecundation have the
same result: it is necessary that cellules A unite with
cellules B (macro-nucleus and micro-nucleus among
protozoaires; ovule and spermatozoid among meta-
zoaires), in order that the organism may usefully
exteriorize a part of its substance. When the too com-
plex organism has lost the primitive faculty of segmenta-
tion, it makes use, directly, to reproduce itself, of certain
cellules differentiated for that purpose: it is these cellules
united into a whole, which reintegrate and give birth
to a double of the generating individual or individuals.
From the top to the bottom of the sexual scale the new
being springs invariably from a duality. The multi-
25
THE NATURAL
plication takes place only in space. In time the product
is a contraction, two giving one.
Scissiparity is compatible with the existence of separate
sexes, as in the starfish. This fantastic animal with no
instrument save its suckers opens oysters, envelops them
with its stomach which it unbellies (vomits), devours
them. It is not less curious in reason of its variety of
reproductive mode, serving itself of sexual apparatus, or
budding, or casting an arm which becomes a new creature.
Thus it is difficult to class animals according to their
manner of reproduction; hermaphrodism is another
block. This mode is doubtless primitive, since it is of
the type of protozoaire coupling, but it is greatly com-
plicated when it persists, for example up to the moment
where it disappears in the mollusk series, whereof some
possess so luxurious a love-organism. The simple and
very naive form, that in which the sperm and the eggs
are produced simultaneously inside the same individual,
is found only in inferior organisms. Normal partheno-
genesis belong equally to summary and to complicated
animals, to wheel-animals and to bees. Among arthro-
pod es, that is to say among insects in general, the sexes
are always separate, save in certain tardigrade arachnids,
but these are the ones which offer the finest cases of
parthenogenesis, generation without aid of the male.
The term need not be taken literally. For as there is no
indefinite scissiparity without coupling, there is no un-
limited parthenogenesis without fecundation: the female
is fecundated for several generations which transmit this
power, but there comes a day when the female who has
not encountered a male gives birth to males and females.
26
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
They couple and produce females parthenogenetically en-
dowed. This has been for long time a mystery, — it is
still a mystery, for side by side with normal partheno-
genesis there is irregular parthenogenesis, there are cases
where non-fecundated eggs behave exactly as fecundated
eggs, without anyone's knowing why.
The virgin-begotten cycle of plant-lice is famous, that
of wheel-animals not less entertaining. The males,
smaller than the females, live but two or three days,
couple and die. The fecundated females lay eggs whence
come nothing but females, unless the eggs are subjected
to a temperature above 18 degrees (centigrade); above
that the eggs hatch out males. Between the periods of
coupling there are long stretches of virgin-birth, nothing
but females producing females, until the temperature per-
mits a male hatch. In two years the plant louse runs
through ten or twelve parthenogeneses ; in July of the
second year, there appear winged individuals, these are
still female, but double size, and they lay two sets of eggs,
whereof the smaller hatch male (the male is three or four
times smaller than the female), the larger eggs hatch
female; there is coupling and the cycle begins again.
For long people believed the plant louse truly andro-
gynous. Reaumur and Bonnet, having seen isolated
plant-lice reproduce themselves were convinced of this,
when Trembley, a man of genius, celebrated also for his
observations of hydra, threw out the idea: Who knows
whether a coupling of these lice does not fecundate them
for several generations? He had discovered the basis of
parthenogenesis. Facts upheld him. Bonnet described
27
THE NATURAL
the male and female, and noted even the genital ardour
of this sticking leaf-louse, this milch-cow of the ants.
Parthenogenesis is a sign-post. Nothing more clearly
demonstrates the importance of the male or the precision
of his function. The female appears to be the whole
show, without the male she is nothing. She is the ma-
chine and has to be wound up to go. The male is merely
the key. People have tried to obtain fecundation by
false keys. Eggs of sea-anemones, and star-fish have
been hatched by contact with exciting chemicals, acids,
alkalines, sugar, salt, alcohol, ether, chloroform, strych-
nine gas, carbonic acid. But one has never been able
to bring these scientific larvae to maturity, and every-
thing leads one to believe that if one succeeded, and that
if these artificial beings were capable of reproduction, it
would be but for a limited period. This provoked
parthenogenesis is neither more nor less interesting than
the normal. It is doubtless abnormal, but abnormal
parthenogenesis is not infrequent in nature; eggs of the
bombyx, of star-fish, and of frogs, hatch sometimes with-
out fecundation, and very probably because they have
accidentally come up against the very stimulant which
the excellent experimenters have lavished on them.
Whether sperm acts as an "excitant" or as fecundator,
the action is no easier to understand by one label than
by another. The queen bee lays both fecundated and
non-fecundated eggs; the first hatch female, the second
invariably male, here the male element would seem to
be the product of parthenogenesis and the female to re-
quire previous fecundation. In contrast, among plant-
lice, the generations of female continue for nearly two
28
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
years. There is an order in these things, as in all
things, but it is not yet apparent; one notes only, that
however long and varied be the parthenogenetic period,
it is limited somewhere by the necessity of the female
principle being united with the male principle. After
all, hereditary fecundation is no more extraordinary than
particular fecundation, it is a mode of perpetuating life
which the exercise of one's reason should make one
consider as perfectly normal.
One ought, at the end of this summary chapter, to be
courageous enough to say that fecundation, as vulgarly
understood, is merely an illusion. Taking man and
woman (or no matter what dioic metazoaire) the man
does not fecundate the woman; what happens is at once
more mysterious and more simple. From the male A,
the great Male, and from the great Female B are born
without any fecundation whatever, spontaneously, little
males a and little females b. These little males are
called spermatozoides, and the little females, ovules;
it is between these new creatures, between these spores,
that the fecundating union occurs. One then observes
that a and b resolve themselves into a third animal x,
which by natural growth becomes either A or B. Then
the cycle begins again. The union between A and B is
merely a preparation; A and B are nothing but channels
carrying a and b, carrying them often far beyond them-
selves. Like the plant-lice or drones, the mammifers
called man are subject to alternate generation, one
parthenogenesis always separating the veritable con-
junction of the differentiated elements. Coupling is
not fecundation; it is merely the mechanism; its utility
29
THE NATURAL
is merely in that it puts two parthenogenetic products
into relation. This relation occurs inside the female, or
outside the female (as in case of fishes) ; the milieu has
an importance of fact, not of principle.
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER IV
SEXUAL DIMORPHISM
I. Invertebrates: formation of the male. — Primitivity
of the female. — Minuscule males: the bonellie. — Re-
gression of the male into the male organ: the cirri-
pedes. — Generality of sexual dimorphism. — Superior-
ity of the female in most insect species. — Exceptions. —
Numeric dimorphism. — Female hymenoptera. — Multi-
plicity of her activities. — Male's purely sexual role. —
Dimorphism of ants and termites. — Grasshoppers and
crickets. — Spiders. — Coleoptera. — Glow-worm. — Cochi-
neal's strange dimorphism.
i. INVERTEBRATES. — At a moment fairly undecided in
the general evolution the male organ specializes into the
male individual. Religious symbolisms may or might
have been intended to mean this. The female is primi-
tive. At the third month, the human embryo has ex-
ternal uro-genital organs clearly resembling the female
organs. To arrive at complete female estate they need
undergo but a very slight modification; to become male
they have to undergo a considerable and very complex
transformation. The external genital organs of the
female are not, as has been often said, the product of
an arrested development; quite the contrary, the male
organs undergo a supplementary development, which is
THE NATURAL
moreover useless, for the penis is a luxury and a danger:
the bird who does without it is no less wanton thereby.
One finds general proof of the female's primitivity in
the extreme smallness of certain male invertebrates, so
tiny indeed that one can only consider them as auton-
omous masculine organs, or even as spermatozoides.
The male of the syngames (an internal parasite of birds)
is less a creature than an appendix; he remains in con-
stant contact with the organs of the female, stuck
obliquely into her side, and justifying the name "two-
headed worm" which has been given to this wretched and
duplex animalculus. The female bonellie is a sea worm
shaped like a sort of cornucopia sack fifteen centimetres
in length: the male is represented by a minuscule filament
of about one or two millimetres, that is to say about one-
thousandth her size. Each female supports about twenty.
These males live, first in the oesophagus, then descend into
the oviduct where they impregnate the eggs. Only their
very definite function clears them from the charge of
being parasites; in fact they were long supposed to be
parasites, while men sought vainly for the male of the
prodigious bonellie.
Side by side with males who are merely individualized
sexual organs, one sees males who have lost nearly all
organs save the male organ itself. Certain hermaphro-
dite cirripedes (mollusks attached by a peduncle [stalk] )
cling as parasites to the coat of other cirripedes: whence
a diminution of volume, a regression of ovaries, abolition
of nutritive functions; the stalk takes root in the living,
nourishing milieu. But one organ, the male one, per-
sists in these diminished cirripedes, and takes on enor-
32
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
mous proportions, absorbing the whole of the animal.
With only a slight further change one would see the
transformation of male into male organ completely ac-
complished, as one does, moreover, in the hydraria.
Become again an integral part of an organism from
which it had formerly separated to become an individual,
the male merely returns to its origins and clearly certifies
what they were.
The bonellie, which is one of the most definite ex-
amples of dimorphism, is also an example of the singular
feminism which one normally finds in nature. For
feminism reigns there, especially among inferior species
and in insects. It is almost only among mammifers and
in certain groups of birds that the male is equal or
superior to the female. One would say that he has slowly
attained a first place not intended by nature for him.
It is probable that, relieved of all care, after the fecunda-
tion, he has had more leisure than the female wherein
to develop his powers. It is also possible, and more
probable, that these extremely diverse cases of resem-
blance and dissemblance are due to causes too numerous
and too varied for us to seize their logical sequence. The
facts are obvious: the male and the female differ nearly
always, and differ often profoundly. Many insects
vulgarly supposed to be different species are but males
and females of one race seeking each other for mating.
It needs some knowledge to recognize a pair of black-
birds, the male black all over, and the female brown-
backed with grey throat and russet belly.
While hermaphrodism demands a perfect resemblance
of individuals — save in cases like the cirripedes, where
33
THE NATURAL
there is a male supplementary parasite — the separation
of the sexes leads, in principle, to dimorphism, the role
of the male, his modes of activity differ from those of the
female; a difference found also among dioic plants.
Hemp is a well known case, although the taller shoots
which the peasants call male are in exact contrary, the
females. The small garden-loving nettle has two sexes
on the same stalk; the greater nettle, found in unculti-
vated land, is dioic: the male stalk has very long flop-
ping leaves and flowers hanging along the stem; the
leaves and flowers of the female stalk are short and stand
almost upright. Here the dimorphism is not in favour
of the female, but impartial.
Of insects the female is nearly always the superior
individual. It is not this marvellous small creature,
nature's divergent and minuscule king who offers us the
spectacle of the bilhargie, spearwort, whereof the female,
mediocre blade, lives, like a sword sheathed in the hollow
stomach of the male. This timid life and its perpetual
amours would horrify the bold female scarabcea, adroit
chalicodomes, cold wise lycoses, and proud, terrible,
amazonian mantes. In the insect world the male is the
frail elegant sex, gentle and sober, with no employment
save to please and to love. To the female the heavy
work of digging, of masonry, and the danger of hunt
and of war.
There are exceptions, but found chiefly among para-
sites, among the degraded, like the xenos which lives
without distinction upon wasps, coleoptera, and nevrop-
tera. The male is provided with two large wings; the
female has neither wings, feet, eyes, nor antennae; is a
34
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
small worm. After metamorphosis the male emerges,
flies a little, then returns to the female who has remained
inside the nymphal envelope, and fecundates her in her
wrappings.
Other exceptions, this time normal, are furnished by
butterflies, that is to say by a sort of insect which is
very placid, and which, at least in the winged form, is
addicted neither to hunting nor to any trade or business
function. One gives the name "psyche" to a very small
butterfly which flutters out rather clumsily in the morn-
ing; it is the male. The female is a huge worm, fifteen
times as long, ten times as fat. The lovers are in the
proportion of a cock to a cow. Here the feminism is
wholly ludicrous. There is the same disproportion in
the mulberry bombyx, of which the female is much
heavier than the male; she flies with difficulty, a passive
beast who submits to a fecundation lasting several hours;
likewise in the autumn butterfly, cheimatobia, the male
sports two pairs of fine wings on a spindle body, the
female is a gross fat keg with rudimentary wings, inca-
pable of flight; she climbs difficultly into trees on whose
buds her caterpillar feeds itself; in the case of another
butterfly which one calls, absurdly, the orgye, the male
has all the characteristics of lepidoptera, the female is
almost wingless with a heavy and swollen body and a
carriage about as pleasing as that of a monstrous wood-
louse; there is the same disproportion in the graceful,
agile and delicate liparis, known as the zig-zag because
of his wing-markings; he would hardly discover his mate
without aid from instinct, she being a whitish beast with
heavy abdomen ruminating motionless in the tree-bark.
55
THE NATURAL
Neighbouring species, the monk, the brown-rump, the
gold-rump show hardly any sexual differences.
Numeric dimorphism follows dimorphism of mass; the
family of one sort of butterfly of the Marquesas Islands
is composed of one male and of five females all different,
so different that one long supposed them distinct species.
Here the advantage is obviously on the side of the male
lord of this splendid harem. Nature, profoundly ignorant
of our sniveling ideas of justice and equality, vastly
pampers certain animal species, while showing herself
harsh and indifferent to others; now the male is favoured,
now the female, upon whom the greatest mass of superior-
ities is heaped, and upon whom likewise all the cruelties
and disdains. The hymenoptera include bees, bumble-
bees, wasps, scolies, ants, masons, sphex, bembex, osmies,
etc. The place of these among insects is analogous to
that of the primates or even of man among mammifers.
But while woman, not animally inferior to her male,
remains below him in nearly all intellectual activities,
among the hymenoptera the female is both brain and the
tool, the engineer, the working-staff, the mistress, mother,
and nurse unless, as in the case of bees, she casts upon
a third sex all duties not purely sexual. The males make
love. The male of the tachyte, a sort of wasp rather
like the sphex, is about eight times smaller than the
female, but he is a very ardent small lover, marvellously
equipped for the amorous quest; his citron-coloured
diadem is made of eyes, is a girdle of enormous eyes, a
lighthouse whence he explores his horizon, ready to fall
like an arrow upon the loitering female. When fecun-
dated, the she-tachyte constructs a cellular nest which she
36
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
packs with the terrible mantis, of whom she is the always
victorious enemy; for knowing by incomprehensible in-
stinct whether she is about to lay a male or a female
egg, she augments or diminishes, according to its sex,
the larder for the larva: the tiny male is allotted a dwarf
provision.
The male hornet is notably smaller than the female,
and the neuter hornet still smaller. The male pine
lophyr is black, the female yellow. The male of the
chalicodome or mason-bee is russet, the far more beauti-
ful female is a fine velvety black with deep violet wings.
While the male loafs and bumbles she artfully and pa-
tiently rears the big-domed clay nest where her offspring
pass their larvae days. This bee lives in colonies but the
labour is individual, each doing her work without bother-
ing about that of her neighbour, unless it be to rob her
or spoil her construction, as in a civilization not un-
known to us. The female mason is armed, but by no
means aggressive.
In many hymenoptera only the female carries the
sword, as in the case of the gilded wasp, gold-striped over
blue or red, who can project a long needle from her
abdomen ; the female philanthe, who is carnivorous, while
the puerile unarmed male lives upon flower-pollen. Not
disdaining this natural dessert, the female philanthe will
attack the nectar-loaded bee with her great dart, stab
him and pump out his crop. One may see the ferocious
small animal knead the dead bee for half an hour, squeeze
him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. Charm-
ing and candid habits of these winged topazes whirring
among the flowers! Fabre has excused this sadique
37
THE NATURAL
gourmandizing: the philanthe kills bees in order to feed
her larvae, who have, however, so great a repugnance
for honey that they die upon contact with it; it is there-
fore out of sheer maternal devotion that she intoxicates
herself with this poison! All things are, in nature, pos-
sible. But it might not be unreasonable to say that if
the larvae of the philanthe hate honey, it is because their
greatly honey-loving mother has never allowed them a
drop of it.
One of the rare cases of hymenoptera where the
female appears inferior to the male is the mutille or
ant-spider. The male is larger, has wings and lives on
flowers. The female is apteral, but provided with a
noisy apparatus for attracting the male's attention. The
male of the cynips of the oak-apple, the terminal cynips,
has a blond body with large diaphanous wings, the brown
and black female is wingless. The male yellow cimbex
slender, and brown with a spot of yellow, is so different
from the round female with yellow belly and black head,
that they were long thought of different species.
Ants like all social hymenoptera are, as one knows,
divided into three sexes, winged males and females and
wingless neuters. Fecundation takes place in the air;
the lovers fly up, join, fall enlocked, a golden cloud which
the death of the males disperses, while the females, losing
their wings, re-enter the house for egg-laying. The workers
or neuters are generally smaller, as noticeably in the great
red wood-ants, who dig their shelters in stumps. White
ants or termites1 show very accentuated dimorphism;
1 These are nevroptera or pseudo-nevroptera, but their habits
bring them noticeably near to social hymenoptera.
38
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
the female or queen having a head almost as large as that
of a bee, a belly the thickness of one's finger, long in
proportion, and growing to be fifteen times as large as
the rest of her body. This sexual tub lays continuously
without any let-up at the speed of an egg per second.
The male, as in Baudelaire's vision of the giantess, lives
in the shadow of this formidable mountain of female
power and luxury. Among the termites there is not a
fourth sex but a fourth way of being sexless. There are
soldiers as well as workers, the soldiers having powerful
mandibles mounted on enormous heads. All the termite
customs are extraordinary, and their conic nests reach a
height having a relation to them that a house five or
six hundred metres high would have to us.
Of mosquitoes and maringouin mosquitoes and all in-
sects of that sort, the females alone prick and suck the
blood of mammifers. The males live on flowers and
tree-trunks. One sees them in forest alleys and clear-
ings, moving regularly as in army manoeuvres, they are
scouting, watching for females; as soon as a male has
caught one he seizes her, and disappears up into the air
where the union is accomplished. Only the male cricket
has a noise-machine, only the female a hearing mechan-
ism, situated in her front legs. Likewise it is the male
grasshopper who sounds. A love-call? People say so,
but there is no proof. Grasshoppers live, male and
female in complete promiscuity lined up on the tree-
bark; such a quantity of music is unnecessary, and
moreover if the female grasshopper isn't deaf, she has
an almost insensible hearing. It is probable that the song
of insects and birds, if it is sometimes a love-call, is
39
THE NATURAL
more often only a physiological exercise, at once neces-
sary and disinterested. Fabre, who lived all his life
among the implacable noises of the Provencal country-
side, sees in "the violin of the locust, in the bag-pipe of
the tree-toad, in the cymbals of the cacan only a means
suitable to expressing the joy of living, the universal joy
which each animal species celebrates in its own fashion. *
Why then is the female mute? It is certainly absurd
and profoundly useless to summon, in almost uninter-
rupted song, from mom till eve, a companion whom one
sees seated beside one pumping the juice out of a plane-
tree; but it has perhaps not always been so. The two
sexes may have had, in the past, habits more divergent.
The plane-tree which unites them in the same feeding-
ground has not always grown in Provence. The un-
ending song may have been useful at a time when the
sexes lived separate, and may have remained as evidence
of ancient customs. It is moreover a commonly observed
fact that activities long survive the period of their
utility. Man and all animals are full of maniac gestures
whose movement is only explicable on the hypothesis that
it had once a different intention.
The female spider is nearly always superior to the
male in size, industry, activity, and means of defence and
attack. We will note their sexual habits later, but must
observe here their particular cases of dimorphism. The
Madagascar she-epeire is enormous, very handsome,
black, red, silver and gold. She rigs up a formidable
web in her tree, near which one sees always a modest and
puerile skein, the work of a minuscule male keeping an
Souvenirs entomologiques, tome V. p. 256.
40
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
anxious eye on the chance of sidling up to his terrible
mistress, and risking his wedding-death. The argyronete
or water-spider, returns the balance to the male, who is
fatter, larger, and provided with longer limbs.
The male triumphs again, and more frequently, among
coleoptera. The nasicorn scarab, so called most aptly
because he carries on his head a long back-bending arched
horn, has all his chest solidly armoured; the female has
neither horn nor cuirass. Everyone knows the flying-
stag or lucane (stag-beetle, bull-fly), enormous coleop-
tera which flies through the summer evening buzzing
like a top. He is feared for the bold appearance of his
long mandibles which branch like stag's horns and which
the uninstructed take for dangerous pincers. He is the
male, his war-gear pure ornament, as he lives inoffen-
sively by sucking tree-sap. The much smaller females
are devoid of warlike apparatus, they are very few in
number, and it is in the excitement of searching for them
that the male, whose life is short and who knows it,
whirls like a maniac, and bangs himself into our trem-
bling ears. Here again one divines animals who have
changed their habits more quickly than their organs.
The old pirate has kept his daggers and axes, but aban-
doned, no one knows why, to vegetarian diet, he has lost
all power to use them, he is merely a stage-super. But
maybe this gear impresses the female? She cedes more
willingly to this hector who gives her the illusion of
strength, that is of the male's beauty.
The glow-worm is a real worm, but a larva rather
than a definitive animal. The male of this female is a
perfect insect, provided with wings which he uses to
THE NATURAL
seek in the darkness the female who shines more brightly
as she more desires to be looked at and mounted. There
is a kind of lampyre of which both sexes are equally
phosphorescent, one in the air, the male, the other
on the ground where she awaits him. After coupling
they fade as lamps when extinguished. This lumi-
nosity is, evidently, of an interest purely sexual.
When the female sees the small flying star descend to-
ward her, she gathers her wits, and prepares for hypocrite
defence common to all her sex, she plays the belle and
the bashful, exults in fear, trembles in joy. The fading
light is symbolic of the destiny of nearly all insects, and
of many animals also; coupling accomplished, their rea-
son for being disappears and life vanishes from them.
The male cochineal has a long body with very delicate
wings, transparent and which at a distance look like
those of a bee; he is provided with a sort of tail formed
of two silky strands. One sees him flying over the nopals,
then suddenly alighting on a female, who resembles a fat
wood-louse round and puffy, twice as stout as the male,
wingless. Glued by her feet to a branch, with her pro-
boscis stuck into it, continually pumping sap, she looks
like a fruit, like an oak-apple or oak-gall on a peduncle
for which reason Reaumur called her picturesquely the
gall-insect. In certain species of cocides the male is so
small that his proportion is that of an ant strolling over
a peach. His goings and comings are like those of an ant
hunting for a soft spot to bite, but he is seeking the
genital cleft, and having found it, often after long and
anxious explorations, he fulfills his functions, falls off
and dies.
42
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER V
SEXUAL DIMORPHISM
II. Vertebrates: — Unnoticeable in fish, saurians, rep-
tiles.— The Bird World. — Dimorphism favourable to
males: the oriole, pheasants, the ruff. — Peacocks and
turkey-cocks. — Birds of paradise. — Moderate dimor-
phism of mammifers. — Effects of castration on dimor-
phism.
II. VERTEBRATES. — Sexual differences are generally
unnoticeable in fish, reptiles and saurians. They are
accentuated when we come to superior vertebrates, to
birds and mammals, but without ever attaining the ex-
treme difference which characterizes a great number of
arthropodes. In birds the disparity may be of colouring,
size, or length, form and curliness of the feathers; among
mammals, of shape, hair, beard or horns. Sometimes
the female bird is finer and stronger; thus stronger and
of more powerful wing-spread in the case of the secre-
tary, the buzzard, the falcon, the ash-coloured vulture
and many birds of prey; more beautiful as in the Indian
turnices.1 One of them, the gray phalarope, solves
woman's dream in favour of the female, leaving her the
brilliant colours; the male contents himself with more
1 Bird, rather like quail.
43
THE NATURAL
sober clothing and, not being able to lay, assumes at
least the further maternal cares: sitting on the eggs.
In general, nature is, in the bird world, favourable to
the male. He is a prince whose wife appears morgan-
atic. Often smaller, as the female canepetiere (a sort of
bustard), while the female garden warbler is nearly al-
ways clothed as Cinderella. The birds which women
have massacred in millions in order to deck themselves
as parrots and jays, are male birds for the most part;
their sisters bear more modest clothing, and one would
say that this humility, become favourable to their species,
had been developed by nature in provision of human
stupidity and badheartedness. The gold-yellow oriole
with black wings and tail, has for mate a brown sparrow
with grey and greenish touches. The silver pheasant (a
false pheasant) has a black tuft standing up from his
silver-white nape, his neck and back are of the same
metal; his dark belly has a blue shimmer, his beak
is blue, his cheeks red, and his feet, red. The smaller
female covers her belly sadly in a whitish chemise, her
back is russet. In the true pheasant the dimorphism is
still more marked. The large, proud male (we are deal-
ing with the common pheasant) who has no objection
to being admired, is deep green on nape and neck, cop-
per-red with violet shimmer on back, flanks, belly and
breast; his tail russet with black bands, a reddish brown
tuft spreads from his head, and the eye-circle is vivid
red. The much smaller female has an earthy plumage
speckled with black. The fair Golden Pheasant is really
all golden over green. His yellow tail and wings and
his saffron red belly complete this marvellous masculine
44
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
splendour. The female must content herself with burnt
sienna back-covering which comes down onto her ochre-
coloured belly.
A little head projecting from an enormous neck-circle
of white out-puffing feathers, middle sized body, and
long legs. It is the combatant (ruff -bird). One must
add a tapering beak, ornamented at the base by a sort
of red grape. One can't say what colour the male is, he
is of all colours. One leaves him white, and finds him
red; he was black, and is violet; later he will be speckled
or banded in most varied hues. His ruff is an ornament
and a defence; he loses both it and his red grape with the
passing of his fighting and loving season. This instabil-
ity of feathering accords curiously with the instability of
his character; no animal is more irritable or cantanker-
ous. One can not keep him captive save solitary and in
obscurity. The female, somewhat less turbulent never
changes her vestment, an invariable gray, with a small
amount of brown on the back.
Peacocks and turkey-cocks alone can spread wheel-
wise their fan-tails, as also the cock bustard; they alone
are provided with great wattles. The menure hen lifts,
as the cock, a lyre of feathers, but it is a tarnished and
mediocre imitation of her master's, which glistens in
all shades rising and curving with such paradoxical grace.
The dimorphism of birds of paradise is even more
marked than in the preceding cases. Nape citron-yellow,
throat green, forehead black, back in burnt chestnut,
the cock's tail has two long plumes, his flanks two fine
tapering feathers of yellow-orange marked in red, which
he can spread branching or draw in at will; the dim
45
THE NATURAL
female is without ornament. The sifilet, a bird related
to the birds of paradise has, fixed between eye and ear a
pair of fine plumes twice the length of his body, which
float as he walks like white blue-shimmering streamers.
It is a lover's paraphernalia, which the female in conse-
quence does without, while the male loses his after mat-
ing.
The dissemblance of barnyard cock and hen are well
enough known to give everyone a clear idea of dimor-
phism in birds and to show difference of characters
parallel with difference of form.
The dimorphism of mammals is even less often favour-
able to the female than is that of birds. One can cite
but the sole example of the American tapir where the
male is smaller than the female.1 The contrary is nearly
always the case. Sometimes the two sexes have an
identical appearance: cougars, cats, panthers, servals. If
there is a rule, it is difficult to formulate, for side by
side with these felines without sexual dimorphism, the
sex of lions and tigers clearly determines their forms.
Among mammifers there are bizarre resemblances and
baroque differences. The he and she mole, at first
sight, appear the same even to their exterior sexual or-
gans, the female's clitoris is, like the male's penis, per-
forated to let the ureter pass through it. But here, as
we shall see later, the morphologic resemblance by no
means indicates similarity of characters; the female mole
is excessively female. There is baroque difference of
sexes in the capped seal of Greenland and Terra Nova.
The male can puff out his head-skin into an enormous
1 Translator's note. O sinistre continent.
46
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
helmet. To what purpose? Possibly to scare naive
enemies. True to her role of protege the female can not
throw this bluff, which is used by Chinese warriors, by
certain insects like the mantis and by the cobra among
serpents.
She-brown bears and she-kangaroos are smaller than
males. In all the deer tribes save reindeer the male
alone is horned, and this is the by no means ridiculous
origin of a very old joke, for the does are lascivious and
are pleased to receive the attentions of a number of males.
The difference of bull and cow is distinct enough, that
of stallion and mare less so, diminishing still further be-
tween dog and bitch, and being almost null among cats.
In all cases where the dimorphism is slight, and is the
direct consequence of the possession of sexual organs,
castration inclines the male toward the female type.1
This is as apparent in cattle as in eunuchs or gelded
horses. One may see in this yet another proof of the
primitivity of the female, since the abstraction of testicles
suffices to give the male that softness of form and char-
acter which typifies females. Masculinity is an aug-
mentation, an aggravation of the normal type represented
by femininity; it is a progress, and in this sense it is a
development. But this reasoning, good for mammals,
would be detestable among insects, where the accentua-
tion of type is nearly always furnished by the female.
There are no general laws in nature, unless they be
those which regulate all matter. With the birth of life,
1 Castration of females seems, at least, among humans, to bring
them nearer the male type. Effects of castration vary, neces-
sarily, according to the age of the subject.
47
THE NATURAL
the unique tendency diverges at once upon multiple
lines. Perhaps we must throw this point of divergence
still further back, for a metal like radium seems to differ
from other metals as much as an hymenopter from a
gasteropod.
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER VI
SEXUAL DIMORPHISM
III. Vertebrates (continued). — Man and woman. —
Characteristics and limits of human dimorphism. —
Effects of civilization. — Psychologic dimorphism. — The
insect world and the human. — Modern dimorphism,
basis of the pair. — Solidarity of the human pair. —
Dimorphism and polygamy. — The pair favours the
female. — Sexual (Esthetics. — Causes of the superiority
of feminine beauty.
III. VERTEBRATES (continued) — Man and woman. —
Among primates sexual dimorphism is but little accent-
uated, especially when the male and female live the same
life in the open air and share the same labours. The male
gorilla, very strong and very pig-headed, flees from no
enemy; the female on the contrary is almost timid: when
surprised in company with the male, she cries out, gives
the alarm and escapes. But attacked when alone with
her offspring, she resists. One can easily distinguish
the male and female orang-outang, the male is larger
with longer more bristling hair, he alone has a Horace
Greeley beard; in the female the patches of bald skin are
much less callous. But the great difference between the
49
THE NATURAL
sexes in gorilla and orang-outang is in the males having
vocal sacks descending over the chest to the arm-pits.
Thanks to these air-reservoirs, these bag-pipe bags,
inflatable at will, the male can howl for a very long
time and with great violence; the females' sacks are very
small. Other monkeys, notably howling apes, are pro-
vided with these air-chambers, as are also certain other
mammifers well known for the extravagance of their
cries: polecats and pigs. Birds and batrachians have
analogous organs.
Dimorphism of men and women varies according to
race or rather according to species. Very feeble in most
blacks and reds it is accentuated among Semites, Aryans,
and Finns. But in man as in all animals of separate
sexes one must differentiate between the primary dimor-
phism, which is necessary and produced by the specializa-
tion of sexual organs, and the secondary dimorphism with
which the relation of sex is less evident or wholly un-
certain. Limited to the non-sexual elements, human
dimorphism is very feeble. Almost null in infancy, it
develops with approaching puberty, is maintained dur-
ing the genital period, and diminishes, sometimes almost
to vanishing point, in old age. It varies individually,
even during the years of greatest reproductivity, in males
feebly sexed and in women heavily sexed: that is to say
there are men and women whose type closely approaches
the type-ideal formed by the fusion of sexes; neither one
nor the other escapes the radical dimorphism imposed
by the difference of sexual organs.
Leaving aside exceptions, one observes a mediocre
and constant dimorphism between men and women,
SO
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
which may be expressed as follows, taking the male for
type: the female is smaller and has less muscular force,
she has longer head hair, but in contrast the hair-
system is very little developed over the rest of her body,
excepting in the armpits and pubis; aside from the
teats, belly and hips, whose form is sexual, she is normally
fatter than the male, and in direct consequence of this,
her skin is finer; her skull-capacity is inferior by about
15% (man=ioo; woman=8s) and her intelligence,
less spontaneous, inclines in general to activities entirely
practical. There is hardly any difference in the male and
female skulls of every inferior human species, the con-
trary is true of civilized races. Civilization has certainly
accentuated the initial dimorphism of man and woman —
at least unless one of the very conditions of civilizations
be not precisely a notable difference, morphologic and
psychologic, between the two sexes. In that case civiliza-
tion has but accentuated a native dimorphism. This
is more probable, for one does not see how civilization
could have caused the dimorphism, not at least unless it
had already existed as a very strong tendency. Identical
work, the same utilization of instinctive activities have
managed greatly to reduce dimorphism of forms, for
example, in dogs and horses, but this has had no in-
fluence on the psychologic dimorphism. Cultivation of
instinct has never been able to efface, in the most spe-
cialized breeds of dogs, the peculiar tonality which instinct
receives from sex. It is improbable that intellectual
culture could fashion women in such a way as to rid
them of the characteristic colour which sex imparts to
their intelligence.
Si
THE NATURAL
One uses the words instinct and intelligence to flatter
prejudiced people. Instinct is merely a mode of intel-
ligence.
Dimorphism is a constant fact in the animal series.
Favourable to the male, favourable to the female, indiffer-
ent, it starts always from sexual necessity. There is a
job to be done: nature divides it equally, or not, be-
tween male and female. She knows neither justice nor
equality, and lays heavy burdens upon some, even to
mutilation and premature death, while she gives to
others liberty, leisures, and long hours of pleasant life.
It is necessary that the couple reproduce a certain number
of beings, equals of the unities of which itself is formed:
all means are good which attain this end, and which
attain it most speedily and most surely. Nature who
is pitiless, is also in a hurry. Her imagination, always
active, invents, ceaselessly, new forms which she casts
into life, in measure as the earlier born finish their cycle.
In superior mammals, and particularly in human species,
division of labour is the means used by nature to insure
the perpetuity of types. The female insect (leaving
aside for the moment social hymenoptera) is provided
at once with the organs of her sex and with tools of her
trade, with arms for guarding the race; the female human
has ceded to man the tools and weapons, here merged in
the one instrument, muscle. Or rather, keeping her
rights to the instrument, she gives up the use of it.
She is neither warrior, huntress, nor mason, nor butcher;
she is the female, and the male is the rest. The division
of labour supposes community. In order that the female
may cede the cares for subsistence and defence to the
52
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
male, the couple must be established and permanent.
The male osmie (sort of solitary bee) sees the light be-
fore his female; he could prepare the nest, or at least
choose its situation, guide the female to it, work or
watch; but he belongs to a series of animals in which
the males are merely male organs, and all his role is con-
tained in the gestures of mating. The couple is not
yet formed. When it is formed, as in other kinds of
insects, scarabs, copris, sisyphs, geotrupes, the work is
equally shared between the two sexes. Here the parallel
ends, for the social evolution of the insect has led to
functional differentiations extremely complicated, and
if not unknown, at least abnormal, to humanity. Bee
society has the female for base, human society has the
couple. They are organisms so different that no com-
parison of them is possible, or even useful. Only in
ignorance of them, can one envy bees; a community
without sexual relations is really without attraction for
a member of the human community. The hive is not
a society but a hatchery.
The couple is only possible with a dimorphism, real
but moderate. There must be a difference, especially of
strength, in order for there to be a true union, that is
to say subordination. A couple formed of equal ele-
ments, like a society of equal elements, would be in a
state of permanent anarchy; two creatures suffice for
anarchy, as for war. A couple formed of elements too
unequal, would, by the crushing of the weaker, find itself
reduced to tyrannized unity. Man and woman, as is the
case with other primates and the carnivora (for most
herbivora are polygamous) represent two sexes made to
S3
THE NATURAL
live united and to share jointly in the cares for their
offspring. The state of couple, demanding a certain
dimorphism, assures by it, its perpetuity. When the
couple is dissolved, be it by polygamy or by promiscuity,
as has happened among Mohammedans, and among Chris-
tians (a religion, long powerful, functions both as race
and as milieu) the dimorphism is accentuated, each of
the elements escapes, in some measure, the strict influence
of the other sex. Likewise if, in consequence of identical
education, the psychologic dimorphism is attenuated,
even slightly — it never is attenuated more than slightly — •
or if physical games reduce a little the physical differ-
ences, the couple is less easily formed and grows less
stable: hence adultery, divorces, excess of prostitution.
In all monogamous society, prostitution is the strict
consequence: it diminishes more or less in polygamous
societies where the free women are rarer, it would only
disappear completely in promiscuity, that is to say in
universal prostitution.
Polygamy, apart from its indirect influence, has, by
the internment of women, a direct one on the dimorph-
ism. Set apart from the active life of the outer
world, and even from the air and light, the female of
the male polygamous human becomes whiter, whatever
may have been her initial colour, fatter, heavier, and also
more stupid and more addicted to all sorts of onanism.
Among Indian Mussulmen the man and woman appear
to belong to different species, the man being so tanned,
and the woman so colourless. Shut-in prostitutes of the
Occident also lose colour, and one would with difficulty
recognize two sisters in the soft, bleached whore and the
54
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
sun-reddened, hardy cow-girl. Woman's liberty also
accentuates the dimorphism but by another process.
Freed from the bridle of necessity, from the need of
pleasing, woman escaped from the couple, exaggerates
her feminism, she becomes again the female in excess,
since it is in being more and more female that she
has most chances of seducing the male, who is insensible
to all other merit. And, inversely, a woman having man's
education is, given equal beauty, less than any other a
seductress.
Thus, while the disintegration of the couple augments
the feminine dimorphism, the diminution of the natural
dimorphism renders the transformation of the couple
more uneasy and more precarious. The human couple
is an harmony difficult to realize, very easy to destroy,
but in measure as one destroys it one frees the elements
which will, necessarily, re-create it. (We will return later
to polygamy, human and animal ; but must here examine
its relation to dimorphism. All the questions treated in
this book are, moreover, so interlocked, that it will be
difficult to prevent one or other of them from cropping
up apropos no matter what other. If the method is less
clear it is perhaps more loyal. Far from wishing to
impart human logic to nature, one attempts here to
introduce a little natural logic into the old classic logic.)
The sole aim of the couple is to free the female from
all care that is not purely sexual, to permit her the most
perfect accomplishment of her most important function.
The couple favours the female, but it favours also the
race. It is fully beneficial when the woman has acquired
the right of maternal laziness. There is another reason
55
THE NATURAL
for believing in the legitimacy of such a sharing of
useful work between the two members of the couple,
it is that masculine work diminishes its femininity, while
feminine work feminizes the males. In order that the
necessary and moderate dimorphism persist it would be
necessary if the woman is to take up male exercises that
the male should assume all the accessory labours of
maternity. This would not be contrary to supple nat-
ural logic; there are examples of it among batrachians
and among birds. But one does not see clearly either
the utility or the possibility of such a reversal of roles
in the human species. The duty of a being is to perse-
vere in its being and even to augment the character-
istics which specialize it. The duty of woman is to
keep and to accentuate her aesthetic and her psychologic
dimorphism. The aesthetic viewpoint obliges one for the
thousandth time to put, but, happily, not to resolve the
agreeable question of woman's beauty. One may judge
when it is a matter of shape, of muscular energy, of
respiratory amplitude: these can be measured and set
down in figures. When it comes to beauty, it is a
matter of feeling, that is to say of what is at once deep-
est and most personal in each one of us, and which is
most variable between one man and another. However,
the sexual element which enters into the idea of bfeauty,
being here at its very root, since it is the question of
woman, the opinion of men is nearly unanimous: in the
human couple, it is woman who represents beauty.
All contrary opinion will be for ever considered as a
paradox or as the most boring of sexual aberrations. A
feeling does not adduce its reasons, it has none. It
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
has to have them lent to it. yThe superiority of feminine
beauty is real, it has a sole" cause, the unity of line.
What makes woman the more beautiful is the invisibility
of her genital organs. The male organ, which is some-
times an advantage, is always a load, and always a
blemish; it is made for the race, not for the individual.
In the male human, and precisely because of its erect
attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par excellence,
and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand
to hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for
the eye, be it as a roughness of surface, be it as a break
in the middle of the line. The harmony of the female
body is then geometrically, much more perfect, espe-
cially if one consider the male and the female at the
very hour of desire, at the moment, that is, when they
present the most intense and most natural expression
of life. In the woman, all movements are interior, or
visible only in the undulation of her curves, conserving
thus her full aesthetic value, while the man, seeming
at once to recede toward the primitive states of animality,
appears reduced, putting off all beauty, to the bare
and simple condition of genital organ. Man, it is true,
has his aesthetic compensation during pregnancy and
its deformations.
One must admit also that the human form has grave
defects of proportion, and that they are more accentuated
in the female than in the male. In general the trunk
is too long, and the legs, consequently, too short. One
says that there are two aesthetic types in Aryan races:
one with long limbs and one with short limbs. Both
types are indeed, easy enough to distinguish, but they
57
THE NATURAL
rarely present their characteristics with sufficient dis-
tinction, moreover the first is rather rare: it is the one
which sculptors have vulgarized by amelioration. Com-
pare a series of photographs of art with a series of
photos from the nude, and you have proof enough that
the beauty of the human body is an ideologic creation.
Take away the egoistic sentiment of the race, and the
sexual delirium, and man would appear very inferior
in harmonic plentitude to most of the mammifers; the
monkey, his brother, is, frankly, maesthetic.
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER VII
SEXUAL DIMORPHISM AND FEMINISM
Inferiority and superiority of the female as shown in
animal species. — Influence of feeding on the production
of sexes. — The female would have sufficed. — Feminism
absolute, and moderate. — Pipe-dreams: elimination of
the male and human parthenogenesis.
ONLY after serious study of sexual dimorphism in
the animal series may one venture a few reflections on
feminism. One has noticed, in certain species, the female
more beautiful, stronger, more active, more intelligent;
and one has noticed the opposite. One has seen the
male larger, or smaller; one has seen and will see him
parasite, or provider, permanent master of the couple
or the group, fugitive lover, a slave sacrificed by the
female after the completion of her pleasure. All attitudes,
and the same ones, are attributed by nature to either
of the sexes; there is not, apart from the specific func-
tions, a male or a female role. Both or either accord-
ing to the decalogue of their specie put on the same
costume, don the same mask, wield the same boar-spear,
tool or sabre without one's being able to discover, at
least not without going back to the beginning of things
and digesting the archives of life, which of them is dis-
guised and which acts "according to nature."
59
THE NATURAL
The abundance of food, especially nitrogenized
(? azotized) will produce a greater number of females.
With certain animals at transformation one may act
directly on individuals: tadpoles gorged on mixed food,
vegetables, larvae, chopped meat, have given an excess of
females approaching totality (95 females to 5 males).
On the other hand over-feeding tends to abolish stamens
in plants, the stamens turn into petals, suralimentation
even moults the petals into leaves and the buds into
shoots. Richness of means, well-being, intensive feeding
abolish sex, but the last to be affected is the female,
which in sum, perseveres obscurely in the unsexed plant,
forced back to its primitive means of reproduction, or
to reproduction by slip cutting. If excessive alimenta-
tion tends to suppress the male, it would then appear
that the separation into two sexes is a means of diminish-
ing the costs of the total being. The mono.ic type is
a step toward this simplification of labour; the female
at a given moment eliminates her male organ, refuses
to feed it, frees herself from the burden which has only
a momentary utility. And, following this, provided in
herself with an overabundance of all that maintains life,
she divests herself of the specialized sexual apparatus,
unsexes herself, that is to say, the identity of contraries
being here evident, she is sexed throughout all her parts:
tola femina sexus.
The male is an accident: the female would have
sufficed. Brilliant as are, in certain animal species, the
destinies of the male, the female is primordial. In civil-
ized humanity she is born in proportion greater as the
civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this
60
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
very plenitude diminishes, proportionately, the general
fecundity: whether we treat of man or of apple-trees, the
male element in- or de-creases according to famine or
abundance of nourishment. But the human race is not
sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever
very great between the two sexes; and no warm-blooded
animal is sufficiently plastic for this cause, so active
among vegetables, ever to lead to the dissolution of the
male. There are no natural laws, there are tendencies,
there are limits: the fields of oscillation are determined
by the pasts of species, trenches curving into cloisters
which close, in nearly all directions, the alleys of the
future.
It is a fact, from henceforth hereditary, that the
male of the human species has centralized in himself
most of the activities independent of the sexual motor.
He alone is capable of disinterested works, that is to say
of aims unconnected with the physical conservation of the
race, but without which civilization would be impossible,
or at least very different from what it is and from the
idea which we have of its future. Doubtless in humanity,
as in the rest of nature, the female represents the im-
portant sex. In utter need, as with the mason bee, she
could serve for the absolutely necessary work, to build
the shelter, to gather the food, and the male might,
without essential damage be reduced to the role of mere
fecundating apparatus. The number of males could,
and even should in such case, diminish with due rapid-
ity, but then human society would in- or de-dine toward
the type represented by that of social bees: continual
labour being incompatible with the periods of maternity,
61
THE NATURAL
the feminine sex would atrophy, a single female would
be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the rest
of the population would work stupidly for an ideal ex-
terior to its own sensibility. Even more radical trans-
formations would not be anti-natural. Virgin-birth
might establish itself: certain males could be bora in
each century, as happens in the intellectual order, and
they could fecundate the generation of loins, as genius
fecundates the generation of minds. But humanity, by
the richness of its intelligence, is less than other animal
species submitted to causal necessity; by constant
squirming in its nets, it has managed to displace a cord
here and there, and makes now and again the un-
expected movement. The coming of males once hi a
century would be unnecessary if some mechanical device
were found for exciting the life of woman's eggs, as
one excites those of the sea-anemone. If a few males
were born from time to time, by an atavistic quirk of
nature, they could be exhibited as curiosities, as we now
exhibit hermaphrodites.
The feminist ideal leads us to these pipe-dreams. But
if it comes to destroying the couple and not to re-forming
it, if it comes to establishing a vast social promiscuity,
if feminism resolves itself into the formula: free- woman
in free-love, it is even more chimerical than all the
chimaera which have at least their analogy in the divers-
ity of animal habits. Human parthenogenesis is less ab-
surd: it offers an order, and promiscuity is a disorder.
But social promiscuity is impossible by the further reason
that woman, the more feeble, would be crushed by it.
She struggles against man only, thanks to the privileges
62
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
which man concedes her, when troubled by sexual in-
ebriety, intoxicated and drowsy with the fumes of desire.
The factitious equality which she claims would re-estab-
lish her ancient slavery, on the day when most or all
women wish to enjoy it: that is still another possible
solution of the feminist crisis. However one looks at
it, one sees the human couple re-establish itself ineluct-
ably.
It is very difficult, from the standpoint of natural
logic, to sympathize with moderate feminism, one could
more easily accept feminism in excess. For if there are
in nature numerous examples of feminism, there are very
few of an equality of the sexes.
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER VIII
LOVE-ORGANS
Sexual dimorphism and parallelism. — Sexual organs oj
man and oj woman. — Constancy oj sexual parallelism
in the animal series. — External sexual organs oj placen-
tary mammijera. — Form and position oj the penis. —
The penial bone. — The clitoris. — The vagina. — The
teats. — Forked prong oj marsupials. — Sexual organs o]
reptiles. — Fish and birds with a penial organ — Genital
organs oj arthropodes. — Attempt to classify animals
according to the disposition, presence, absence oj ex-
terior organs for reproduction.
SEXUAL dimorphism, physic as well as psychic, has
evidently one sole cause, sex; nevertheless the organs
which differ least from male and female among species
which differ most, are precisely the sexual organs. That
is, they are rigorously made the one for the other, and
the accord in this case must be not only harmonic, but
mechanical and mathematical. They are cog-wheels which
must bite one on the other with exactitude, be it, as in
birds, that there is but an exact superposition of two
orifices, be it, as in mammals that the key must enter
the keyhole. There is a dimorphism, but it is that of the
mould to the cast, of the scabbard to the blade; for the
parts where the contact is less strict, the parallelism id
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
nevertheless quite sensible and quite apparent. This
similitude in difference has struck philosophers as well as
anatomists in all ages from the logical insinuations of
Aristotle to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's theory of analogies.
Galien had already noted certain analogies, more or less
exact: greater labia, and foreskin, ovaries and testicles,
scrotum and ma trice. He says, textually: "All parts of
man are found in woman; there is but one point of
difference, woman's parts are interior, man's exterior,
parting from the perineal region. Imagine those which
first present themselves to mind, no matter which, unfold
woman's or fold man's inward and you will find either a
replica of the other. Suppose first man's organs pushed
into him and extending interiorly between the rectum
and the vessie; in this supposition the scrotum would
occupy the place of the matrice, with the testicles
placed at each side of the exterior orifice. The prong
of the male would become the throat of the cavity thus
produced, and the skin of the prong's extremity, called
the foreskin would form the vagina. Suppose, inversely,
that the matrice should turn inside out and fall outside,
would not its testicles (ovaries) of necessity, find them-
selves inside its cavity and would not it envelop them
as a scrotum? Would not the throat, hidden up to the
perineum, become the male member, and the vagina,
which is but a cutaneous appendix of the throat, the
foreskin?" This is the passage which Diderot has trans-
posed and put au courant with science in his Reve
d'Alembert. This page of literary anatomy retains its
expressive value: "Woman has all man's parts, the
sole difference is like that between a purse hanging out-
65
THE NATURAL
side and a purse stuffed inside; a female foetus resembles
a male foetus, so as to deceive anyone; the part which
occasions the error, sinks in the female foetus in measure
as the purse extends inward; it is never obliterated to
the point of losing its primitive form; it also is the mover
of pleasure, it has its gland, its foreskin, and one notes
at its extremity a point which appears to have been the
orifice of a urinary canal which has closed; there is in
man from the anus to the scrotum, the interval called
the perinaeum, and from the scrotum to the end of the
prong, a seam which looks like the resewing of a basted
vulva; women with excessive clitoris, have beards, eunuchs
have not, their thighs increase, their hips widen, their
knees round out, and in losing the characteristic organ-
ization of one sex they seem to return to the character-
istic conformity of the other. ..." In terms less
literary, one considers as homologous, in man and
woman, the ovary and the testicle, lesser labia, clitoridian
cap and sheath, the hanging foreskin; the greater labia
and the envelope of the scrotum; clitoris and penis; the
vagina and the prostatic utricle. One will find the de-
tails of these analogies in special works, they can not
be given here with scientific precision. The sole point
to hold on to is that the two sexes not only in manr
and not only in mammifers, but in nearly all the animal
and vegetable series, are but a repetition of the same
creature with specialization of function. This special-
ization may extend to functions other than sexual, to
work (bees, ants) to war (termites). The soldier termite
is extraordinary; he is not more so than the male.
The sexual parallelism is constant among nearly all
66
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
vertebrates and arthropodes; it extends to identity among
hermaphrodite mollusks if one then compare not two
sexes but two individuals. It extends, for each sex con-
sidered separately, along the whole zoological chain.
Parting from link animals which separate into two parts,
one sees the sexual organs design themselves in the form
wherein they arrive in higher animals of great complex-
ity, such that, in acquiring differences of form and
position they retain a remarkable stability of structure;
one would say almost of identity in marsupials, reptiles,
fish, birds. For clarity one must proceed from the
known to the unknown; man is the figure to whom one
may compare necessarily the observations on other
animals.
There is no lack of point in knowing the normal love-
mechanism, since moralists pretend to regulate its move-
ments. Ignorance is tyrannic; the inventors of natural
ethics knew very little of nature: this permitted them to
be severe; for no definite piece of knowledge interfered
with the certitude of their gestures. One becomes more
discreet when one contemplates the prodigious picture of
the erotic habits of the animal world, and even entirely
incompetent to decide flatly, yes or no, whether a fact
is natural or unnatural.
Man is a placentary mammifer: by this title his
genital organs and their mode of employ are common to
him and to all hairy animals having teats and an um-
bilicus. He is not normally covered all over with hair,
but there is hardly a spot on his body where hairs may
not sprout, and both sexes are hairy often with extreme
abundance in pubis and arm-pits. The male and active
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THE NATURAL
organ of mammifers is the penis, usually completed
exteriority by the testicles. The penis is, at once, the
excreting conductor of urine and sperm; an analogous
relation exists in the female, and it is with exactitude
that these mingled organs have been called genito-urinary
or more recently, uro-genital; it is the same in all the
animal series, the urethra opens exteriority or it ends,
as in birds, in a cloaca, vestibule, for all the excretions.
The penis of two-handed (bimanous) creatures de-
scends freely, it hangs before the pubis in quadrumanes,
and in chiroptera (bats). The bat is strangely like
man, and like primates in general: five fingers to the
hand, one a thumb, five fingers on the foot, pectoral
teats, mensual flux, free penis; it is a little caricature
of man, abrupt and frightened in its evening flight about
houses. Among flesh-eaters, ruminants, pachyderms,
solipedes and several other families of mammals, the
penis is sheathed in a scabbard which stretches along the
belly; thus preserved against accidents and insect stings,
while its sensibility is maintained intact. Voyagers, ac-
cording to Buffon, have seen Patagonians trying to get
like results by tying the -foreskin above the gland, like
a bag with a cord. Thus man's hand permits him to
improve or mutilate his body. Mutilation and sexual
deformations, circumcision among Semites and savages,
excision of Russian illuminati, transversal perforation of
the gland, surgical flattening of the prong, are very
frequent. The hand of the chiroptera is shackled, that
of quadrumanes has only one sexual role, masturbation.
It may also serve as a shield against external danger;
many quadrumanes, better protected, make the same use
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
of their tail when they curl it between their legs, this is
sometimes a psychological gesture, female modesty or
refusal, sometimes a gesture of preservation. The move-
ments of Venus modest, of man coming naked from his
bath, have no other origin. Monkeys when they stop
moving about, place their hands on their sexual parts.
The Polynesians, before Christianity, had the custom
when standing upright, of holding theii scrotum in both
hands with the prong hanging between the fingers: the
posture of the wild dandy. Certain species lack scrotum
as Pliny had already remarked: Testes elephanto occulti.
In camels the testicles roll beneath the skin of the groin;
rats' testicles are internal, but emerge in the rutting sea-
son and assume an enormous development. Apes often
have the pouch-skin blue, red or green, like the other
bald parts of their bodies.
Camels, dromedaries and cats have the end of the penis
bent backward (this explains the tom-cat's manner of
urination), the tip does not straighten itself or point for-
ward save in erection. Not only the prong but the
sheath of rodents points backward and ends near the anus,
and in front of it. The penis is slender in ruminants,
and in wild boar; thick and round in solipedes, elephant,
lamentin (sea-cow, manatee) ; thick and conic in the dol-
phin, cylindrical in rodents and primates. The gland,
which takes all intermediary forms between ball and
point, has in the rhinoceros the shape of a gross fleur-de-
lys. In the cats small spikes rise and point toward the
base, and in agouti and gerboa there are holding flanges
which grip the organs of the female.
The prong of many mammifers, a real member, is held
69
THE NATURAL
up by an interior bone, formed at the cost of the con-
junctive partition which separates the two hollow cham-
bers. This penial bone is found in many quadrumanes,
chimpanzees, orang-outangs, most carnivora, dogs,
wolves, felines, martin, otter, badger, among rodents,
beaver, seal, and cetaceous animals; it is lacking in
ruminants, pachyderms, insectivora, toothless animals.
In man one sometimes finds a trace of it in the form of
a slender prismatic cartilage. In the enormous penis of
the whale it resembles a bell-clapper. The penial bone
diminishes the erectile capacity of the prong in stopping
the development of the hollow chambers, but it assures
the rigidity of the member, obtained in the other penial
type by the inflow of blood which causes the swelling.
Man ought to have the penial bone; he has lost it in the
course of ages, and this is doubtless fortunate, for a
permanent rigidity, or one too easily obtained would
have increased, to madness, the salacity of his species.
It is perhaps for this reason that great apes are rare,
although they are strong and agile. This view would be
confirmed if the penial cartilage were found regularly in
very lustful men or with a certain frequency among
human races most addicted to eroticism.
The penis is found in woman in the form of clitoris.
This is almost as voluminous as a true penis in quad-
rumanes; it is atrophied in other species. It varies in-
dividually in women, certain of them being in this
respect quadrumanes. Sometimes the clitoris is pierced
for the passage of the urethra (certain apes and the mole) ;
a slight trace of this meatus is seen at the head of the
woman's clitoris. In species whose males possess a
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
penial bone the female has often a clitoridian bone;
nothing more clearly affirms the parallelism of these two
organs, whereof one serves only for pleasure, after hav-
ing been, perhaps in a long distant era, when man romped
among marine invertebrates, a real instrument of fecun-
dation. The greater labia, limiting the general orifice of
the vulva, exist only in woman and, less markedly, in
the female orang-outang. Circular in rodents, trans-
versal in the unique case of the hyena, a heteroclite
animal, the vulva is longitudinal in all other mammifers.
Completely imperforate in the mole the vagina is more
or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears
in first encounter, in women, and several quadrumanes,
certain small monkeys, the marmoset, certain carnivora,
the bear, hyena, white-bellied seal, the daman (nailed) ; it
is replaced in dog, cat, ruminants by an annular gripping
between the vagina and the vestibule. The maidenhead
is, therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is
no glory in a privilege which one shares with the mar-
moset.
Menstruation is found in quadrumanes, in bats; other
female mammals show an emission of blood, which is,
however, limited to the rutting season. The position
of teats is variable, as also their number, they are in
the groin in ruminants, solipedes, cetaces; ventral in
dogs, pigs; pectoral and always two in nearly all pri-
mates, chiroptera, elephants, and sirenians, who for this
reason, doubtless, reminded the sailors of the ancient
world of their women.
Other particularities and correspondences are examined
in the next chapter which deals with the mechanism of
THE NATURAL
love, and the method used by divers animals to make
use of their organs according to the commandment of
nature. There remain for consideration the lesser
mammals and other vertebrates whose fecundatory in-
struments resemble those of mammifera.
In man and other placentaires, the forked prong is
a teratological fact only encountered in incomplete double
monsters. It is, on the contrary, the most general form
among marsupials. A double vagina corresponds to this
penis, double at least from the gland, thus in kangaroo
and opossum. This original biparity is found regularly
in the uterus of certain placentaires, hares, rats, bats,
carnivora. The uterus of marsupials is simple without
narrowing of the throat. One knows that their young
stay there but a short time, that they are born not as
foetus but as germs, and complete their development in
the marsupial pouch. An opossum, destined to attain
about the size of a cat, is at birth about bean-size.
These animals, therefore, differ profoundly from other
mammifera.
Some reptiles, like crocodiles and most chelonians,
have only a simple prong; some tortoises have a forked
tip to the penis, it is many-branched in the trionix,
carnivorous tortoise rightly called ferocious. The
saurians and ophidians can deploy outside the cloaca two
erectile prongs; in saurians, lizards, they are short, round
and bristle with prickles. The females have no clitoris
save when the male has a single prong; at least the
clitoris is only well constituted in crocodilians and
chelonians.
Copulation is unknown to batrachians, whose contact
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
is nevertheless very close; it is unknown to most fish,
whose amours are without even contact. Certain sela-
cians however (dogfish, skates), and perhaps also one or
two teleostians (bony fish), and the lamprey, have a
copulating organ which really enters the organ of the
female.
The birds which have a penis or an erectile and re-
tractile tubercle which serves, are the ostrich, the casso-
wary, the duck, the swan, the goose, the bustard, the
mandou and certain neighbouring species; their hens
have a clitoridian organ. The ostrich has a true prong,
five or six inches in length, cut by a groove which serves
as conduit for the seminal liquor; it is enormous in erec-
tion and tongue-shaped. The ostrich hen has a clitoris
and coition occurs exactly as among mammals. The swan
and duck are also very well provided with an erectile
tubercle suited for copulation, and this explains at once
the story of Leda, the libidinous reputation of the duck,
and his exploits in the barn-yards, veritable abbeys of
Theleme.
One can not here describe the copulative organs of
arthropodes, comprising insects properly so-called.
Enough to note that, however varied their forms, they
behave very much as those of superior mammifers and
are composed of two essential parts, the penis, sheathed
in a penial scabbard, and the vagina, prolonged by the
copulative pouch which receives the penis. Fish and
birds, lacking external apparatus are reduced to methods
which will be later examined. Hermaphrodite mollusks,
with a marvellously complicated sexual apparatus, ought
73
THE NATURAL
also to be studied separately. Finally, the amorous
habits of insects form a series of illustrative chapters.
From here, taking count only of exterior male organs
or of organs which, internal when at rest, emerge at
the moment of coition, one may attempt a vague and
new classification of animal series.
1. Presence of penis, or of an erectile copulating
tubercle: placentary mammals from man to marsupials
exclusively; certain runners and palmipedes; crocodil-
ians, chelonians, certain selacians, arthropodes, the
rotifera.
2. Presence of a forked penis: marsupials, saurians,
chelonians; scorpionides.
3. Disjunction of the secreting apparatus from the
copulating apparatus: spiders, dragon-flies.
4. Absence of penis, copulation by contact: mono-
tremes (ornithoryncus), birds, batrachians, crustaceans.
5. No copulation; exterior fecundation of eggs: fish,
echinoderms.
6. Indirect transmission of sperm with or without con-
tact (by the spermatophore) : cephalopodes, orthoptera.
7. Hermaphrodism: mollusks, tuniciers, worms.
8. Monagamous reproduction: protozoaires, and cer-
tain of the last metazoaires.
One needs many discriminations and exceptions to make
this table more precise. It is however, not untrue, al-
though incomplete and lacking nuances, and it permits
one to see: that the separation of sexes by well char-
acterized copulating apparatus is not a sign of animal
supeiiority, although it is found among the most gifted
animals; that birds with their genital system merely
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
sketched in, seem to represent a type elevated in nature
by the simplicity of organs and it means: that the sexes
in animals who are without copulation either profound
or superficial, tend, as in fish, to remain without differ-
ence; that all other modes of copulation are attributed
exclusively to inferior species; that hermaphrodism was
but a trial limited to a category of creatures lacking
everything not exclusively designed for the process of
reproduction; that the absence of sex characterizes only
the earliest forms of life.
If one considers no longer the mode of copulation
but the apparatus itself, with the male part, penis, and
the female part, vagina, one sees clearly that these
extremely particular organs are hardly found well de-
signed save in two great branchings where the intelligence
is most developed: mammifera and the arthropodes.
There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between
complete and profound copulation and the development
of the brain.
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THE NATURAL
CHAPTER IX
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
I. Copulation: vertebrates. — Its very numerous varieties
and its specific fixity. — The apparent immorality of
Nature. — Sexual ethnography. — Human mechanism. —
— Cavalage. — The form and duration of coupling in
divers mammifers. — Aberrations of sexual surgery, the
ampallang. — Pain as a bridle on sex. — Maidenhead. —
The mole. — Passivity of the female. — The ovule, psy-
chological figure of the female. — Mania of attributing
human virtues to animals. — The modesty of elephants.
— Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises. — In
certain ophidians and in certain fish.
i. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES. — Forberg's "Figurae
Veneris" exhausts in forty-eight illustrations the manners
of coupling accessible to the human species; the erotic
manuals of India imagine certain further variants and
voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these juxtaposi-
tions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of
them have only been invented in order to escape too
logical and too material a result. Animals surely, the
most liberated as well as the most stupid, are ignorant
of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to say no dis-
sociation can be made in their rudimentary minds be-
tween the sexual sensation and the maternal, between
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
sexual and paternal sensation, much less. The ingenuity
of each specie is small, but the universal ingenuity of
total fauna is immense, and there are few human imagin-
ings among those which we term perverse and even mon-
strous which are not the right and the norm in one or
another region of animal empire. Practices very analo-
gous to (although very different in aim from) divers
onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are
imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them
familial virtue and chastity. A physician, who has not
obtained much glory thereby, invented or proposed arti-
ficial fecundation: he was imitating spiders and dragon-
flies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood
and sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten
manual (Berquinade) if one contemplate, not without
bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious orthopter, the
praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la prego-
Diou as the Provengals call her, the prophetess as the
Greek said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who
wish
"aux choses de 1'amour meler 1'honnetete"
Mix seemliness into affairs of Love
have a value not only moral but scientific. In love every-
thing is just, everything is noble, as soon as, among the
maddest animals, it is a play moved by the desire of creat-
ing. It is more difficult doubtless to justify fantasies
which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble,
especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea
of specific finality; one may however affirm, and one will
say nothing more about the matter, that animals are not
ignorant either of sodomy or of onanism and that they
77
THE NATURAL
cede to them by necessity, in the absence of females.
Senancour has written wise and bold pages upon these
practices among humans.
Sexual ethnography hardly exists. The scattered data
on this subject, though extremely important, have not
been co-ordinated. That would be a small matter. They
have not even been verified. One knows nothing of coital
practices save what life teaches one, questions of this
sort being difficult to ask, and answers being always
equivocal. There is here an entire science which has been
corrupted by Christian prudery. An order was issued
long ago and is still obeyed; one has concealed all that
unites, sexually, man and animal, everything that proves
the unity of origin for all that lives and feels. Physicians
who have studied this question have known only the ab-
normal, the malady: it would be imprudent to base con-
clusions on general practices from their observations.
The best source, at least for Europeans, is still the casuist
writings. From the enumeration of sins against chastity
gathered by professional confessors, one could, after some
study, deduce the secret sexual habits of civilized human-
ity. But one must take care not to retain either the old
idea of sin, or the idea of the same under modern cloak,
of fault, crime or error. Practices common to an entire
ethnic group can not be judged to be other than normal,
it matters little whether they have been stigmatized by
the apologists of right living. What is good is what is
and what will continue to be. It is known that bimanes
and quadrumanes are very libertine, and that this is in
accord with their physical suppleness and their intelli-
gence. It is a fact undeniable and insurmountable, even
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
if annoying. The human couple has drawn from this ten-
dency a thousand erotic fantasies, which, in being disci-
plined have ended in the creation of a veritable sexual
method, be it disinterested pleasure, be it preservation
against fecundity; is this of no importance? How can
one lecture about depopulation if one lose sight of this
primordial fact? What can normal or patriotic reasoning
do against an instinct which has become or rebecome an
intelligent and conscious practice, bound to what is deep-
est in human sensibility? It is very difficult, especially
when dealing with man, to distinguish between normal
and abnormal. What is the normal; what the natural?
Nature ignores this adjective, and one has dragged out of
her bosom many illusions, perhaps in irony, perhaps in
ignorance.
It is not perhaps very useful to describe human
cavalage, which is not strictly a cavalage, as the woman
is attacked from the front. Veritable cavalage has been,
as one knows, praised by Lucretius, although, it has, and
this detracts nothing from its merits, an air frankly
animal; it is the form of love called by the theologians
more bestiarum and by Lucretius more jerarum which is
the same thing:
Et quibus ipsa modis tractetur blanda voluptas,
Quoque permagni refert; nam more ferarum,
Quadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur
Concipere uxores, quia sic loca sumere possunt,
Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis.
This mode, considered by Lucretius as the more favour-
able to fecundation, is that of most mammifers, of nearly
all insects and of many animal families. Apes great and
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THE NATURAL
small know no other. The architecture of their bodies
would make face to face copulation very difficult. One
must not forget that their upright position is never more
than momentary, even in orangs and chimpanzees; they
are not much better equilibrated than bears, much less
so than kangaroos, marmosets l and squirrels ; even when
they stand up one feels that they have four feet. Love
among them is not free from the seasons, and although
they are libidinous all the year, they do not seem fit for
generation save through the weeks of their rutting time:
then their genital organs acquire a permanent rigidity;
the udders of the females, ordinarily as small as those of
the males, only swell during this period. There is, there-
fore, a vast difference, from the sexual standpoint, be-
tween man and the great apes, his anatomic neighbours.
Man even in the humblest species has mastered love and
made it his daily slave, at the same time that he has
varied the accomplishments of his desire and made possi-
ble its renewal after brief interval. This domestication
of love is an intellectual work, due to the richness and
power of our nervous system, which is as capable of long
silences as of long physiological discourses, of action and
of reflection. The brain of man is an ingenious master
which has managed, without possessing any very evident
superiority, to get out of the other organs work of the
most complicated sorts, and most finely-sharpened pleas-
ures; its (the brain's) mastery is very feeble in quadru-
manes and other animals; it is very strong in insects as
will be explained in a following chapter.
* Here R. de G. uses the term marmot te; up to this the word
I have translated marmoset has been ouistiti.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
One need not wait for a minute description of the ex-
terior love mechanism of all animal species. It would be
long, difficult and boresome. A few characteristic ex-
amples will be enough. The duration of the coition is
extremely variable, even in superior mammals. Very
slow for dogs, coupling is but a thunderclap for the bull,
the ram's is called the "lutte" (strife). The bull merely
enters and leaves, and it is a spectacle for philosophers,
for one understands immediately that what drives the
fiery beast at his female is not the lure of a pleasure too
swift to be deeply felt, but a force exterior to the individ-
ual although included in his organism. By its long
grievous duration the coition of dogs leads to analogous
reflections
In triviis quum saepe canes discedere aventes
Diversi cupidine summis ex viribus tendunt.
— LUCRETIUS.
This is because the dog's penis contains a hollow bone
giving passage to the urethra. Around this bone are
gathered the erectile tissues whereof one, the node of the
prong, swells disproportionately during coition and pre-
vents the separation of the two animals after the act is
accomplished. They remain a long time uncomfortable,
not managing to free themselves until long after their
desire has turned to disgust, grotesque and lamentable
symbol of many a human liaison.
Our other familiar animal, the cat, is not more happy
in his affections. His penis is indeed furnished with
thorns, with horny papilla toward the tip, and the intro-
mission as well as the separation is only accomplished
81
THE NATURAL
with groans. What one hears at night are not cries of
voluptuousness but of suffering, the bowlings of a beast
whom nature has caught in the trap. This does not
prevent the female from being very enterprising; respond-
ing to the cries of the pursuing male she excites him in a
hundred ways, biting at neck and belly with an insistence
which has, they say, provided a metaphor in the erotic
vocabulary. Biting the neck is much more curious, as
it is of a much less direct intention. Bitches also bite the
neck of the dog in prelude. For near the neck is situated
the bulb, original knot of nerves governing the secret
parts and the genital region.
The pain which accompanies sexual acts ought to be
differentiated, with precision, from passive suffering. It
is very possible (women can testify to the fact) that
sighs and even cries emitted at such time are the ex-
pression of a mixed sensation, wherein joy has almost
as great a part as suffering. We must not judge feline
exclamations from the shrillness of timbre; tortured by
the male prong the she-cats howl, but they await the su-
preme benediction. The rigour of the first approaches is
perhaps but the promise of deeper delights: at any rate
some women have thought so.
One knows that a cat's tongue is rough: so is the tongue
and all the mucous surfaces of negroes. This roughness
of surface notably augments the genital pleasure, as men
who have known negresses testify. It has been perfected.
The Dyaks of Borneo pierce the extremity of the penis,
through the navicular channel and fit into it a pin to
both ends of which are attached tufts of stiff hair in the
form of a brush. Before surrender the women by cer-
82
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
tain tricks and certain traditional gestures indicate the
length of the brush desired. In Java one replaces this
apparatus known as the ampallang, by a sheath of goat
skin, more or less thick. In other countries there are
incrustations of little pebbles, which give the gland the
shape of an embossed mace; and these pebbles are some-
times replaced by tiny bells, so that the men make in
running a sound like mules, and attentive women can
judge their value according to the intensity of their
sexual music. These customs, noted by de Paw among
certain aborigines of America, have not been recently
observed, doubtless because the Christian modesty of
modern travellers has obliterated their eyes and ears at
convenient moments. No custom is abolished save in the
face of some other custom more useful to sensuality, and
the imagination seems rather to advance than to recede in
these matters. It is true that the inventors hide them-
selves, even in savage countries, sexual morality tending
toward uniformity.
These artifices, which appear curious to us, have cer-
tainly been created at the instigation of women, since
theirs is the profit of them. Males have submitted to
them, happy no doubt to be delivered at the price of
passing pain from the terrible lasciviousness of their fe-
males. Racked and flayed by such instruments the
women ought, at least for a few days, to flee the male
and brood in silence upon their luxurious memories.
Chinese and Japs, whose women are likewise lascivious,
are familiar with analogous means; to dominate their
companions they have also invented ingenious onanist
methods which give them time to attend to their own
83
THE NATURAL
affairs, while peace reigns over their hearthstones. In
the strange dissemblance between human races the
Aryans have, for the same purpose, made use of the
religious check-rein, of prayer, of the idea of sin, and
finally of liberty, that is to say of the pleasure of vanity
which bewilders the woman, and invites her to please
someone else before satisfying herself.
Woman is not the only mammal for whom, apart from
the peculiar form of the penis, the first approaches are
painful; but there is perhaps no female who has better
reason than the mole for fearing the male. Her vulva,
exteriorly unperforated, is covered by hide, downy as
that of the rest of her body; she must, to be fecundated,
undergo a veritable surgical operation. One knows how
these beasts live, burrowing in search of food, in long
subterranean galleries, of which the wastage, pushed up
here and there forms the mole-ridge. In rutting time,
forgetting his hunting, the male starts in quest of a
female; as soon as he divines her, he starts digging in her
direction, furiously excavating the hostile earth. Feeling
herself hunted, the female flees. Hereditary instinct
makes her tremble before the tool which shall open her
belly, before the redoubtable gimlet-armed penis which
has perforated her mother and all her female ancestors.
She flees, digs, as the male advances, cross-hatching tun-
nels in which her persecutor may end by losing his way;
but the male also is educated by heredity: he does not
follow the female but circles round her, heads her off,
ends by catching her in an impasse, and while she is still
ramming her blind muzzle into the earth, he grips, oper-
ates, fecundates. Charming emblem of modesty, this
84
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
small, soft, black-pelted beast. What human virgin would
show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who,
alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her
hands to open the walls, all her strength to flee from her
suitor? Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty
was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did
not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in na-
ture, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react,
at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our
virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and
the finest of them are those whr e explanation we are
forbidden to seek. Why is the slie .at violent, the she-
mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole observes
the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the
rule? There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which
we group in modes perceptible to our intelligence, facts
which are always provisory, and which a change of per-
spective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the notion
of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact
into the logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a
fashion of speaking, an abbreviation, a point of rest. The
law is half the facts plus one. Every law is at the mercy
of an accident, an unexpected encounter ; and yet, without
the idea of law all would be mere night in our conscious-
ness.
"The male," says Aristotle, in his Treatise on Genera-
tion, "represents the specific form, the female, the matter.
She is passive, in so much as she is female; the male is
active."
Sexual modesty is a fact of sexual passivity. The
moment will come for the female to be in her turn active
85
THE NATURAL
and strong, when she has been fecundated, and when
she must give birth and food to the posterity of her race.
The male then becomes inert; equable sharing of the
expense of forces, just division of labour. This passivity
of the female element is found again in the very figura-
tion of animality, formed by the egg and the spermato-
zoide. One sees the play under the microscope: the egg
waits, solid as a fortress or as a woman whom many men
look on and covet; the little animals begin their attack,
they besiege the enclosure, they butt it with their heads;
one of them breaks the wall, he enters, and as soon as
his tad-pole tail passes the breach, the wound recloses.
The entire activity of this embryonic female reduces it-
self to this gesture; the greater part of her great sisters
know no other. Their free-will nearly always consists in
this: they receive one among the arrivals, without one's
being able to know very well whether the choice is psy-
chological or mechanical.
The female waits, or flees, which is but another way
of waiting, the active way; for not only se cupit ante
videnti but she desires to be taken, she wishes to fulfill her
destiny. It is doubtless for this reason that, in species
where the male is feeble or timid, the female resigns her-
self to an aggression demanded by care for future genera-
tions. In short, two forces are present, the magnet and
the needle. Usually the female is the magnet, sometimes
she is the needle. These are details of mechanism which
do not modify the general march of the machine to its
goal. At the origin of all feeling there is a fact irreducible
and incomprehensible in itself. Common reasoning starts
from the feeling to explain the fact; this gives the absurd
86
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
result of making thought run in a set track, like a horse
in a circus. Kantian ignorantism is the masterpiece of
these training exercises, where, starting from the categoric
stable the learned quadruped necessarily thither returns,
having jumped through all the paper disks of scholastic
reasoning. Observers of animal habits fall regularly into
the prejudice of attributing, regularly, to beasts directive
principles which only a long philosophic education and
especially Christianity have rammed into restive human
docility. Toussenel and Romanes are rarely superior to
the possessors of a prodigious dog or miraculous cat: one
must reject as apocryphal the anecdotes of animals' in-
telligence, and especially those boasting their sensibility,
or celebrating their virtues; not that these are of neces-
sity, inexact, but because the manner of interpreting them
has vitiated, in principle, the manner of observation.
One sole observer appears to me trustworthy in these mat-
ters, namely J. H. Fabre, the man who, since Reaumur,
has penetrated furthest into the intimacy of insects, and
whose work is veritably the creator, perhaps without his
having suspected it, of a general psychology of animals.
The madness of attributing to beasts the intuitive
knowledge of our moral catechism has created the legend
of the elephant's sexual modesty. These chaste monsters
hide, they say, to make love; animated by a wholly
romantic sensibility, they can not give way to their feel-
ings save in the mystery of the jungle, in the labyrinth of
the virgin forests: that is why they have never been
known to breed in captivity. Nothing is more idiotic;
the elephant in the public garden or the circus is ready
enough to make love, although with less enthusiasm than
87
THE NATURAL
in his native forest, as is the case with nearly all beasts
newly captive. He breeds under man's eye with perfect
indifference, and no showman can prevent the she-
elephant, who is very lecherous, from manifesting with
full voice her shameless desires. As her vulva opens not
between her legs but toward the middle of her abdomen,
Buffon believed that she had to lie on her back to receive
the male. This is not so, but she has to make a par-
ticular gesture: she kneels.
Whales who are by far the greatest mammals, obey
a special rite, imposed by their lack of members and the
element in which they live; the two colossi heave over
on their sides like sprung ships, and join obliquely, belly
to belly. The male organ is enormous, even in the state
of rest, six or eight feet long and fifteen or sixteen inches
in circumference. The vulva of the female is longi-
tudinal ; near it is found the udder which projects greatly
when she gives suck. This udder has ejectory power, the
whale cub hooks on by his lips, and the milk is sent to
him as from a pump, marvellous accommodation of
organs to the necessities of the milieu.
Anatomy forces female seals and walruses to turn over
to receive the male. In the specie commonly called the
sea-lion, she seems according to observations perhaps too
sketchy, to make the advances. The male being stretched
out at rest she rolls before him, plagues him, while he
grumbles. She succeeds in moving him, and they go to
play in the water. On return the female lies on her
back, the male who is much thicker and longer covers
her, propping himself on his arms. The coupling lasts
seven or eight minutes. The posture of female seals is
88
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
also that of hedgehogs, and truly the cavalage here must
be particularly thorny. Despite his roof the male tor-
toise climbs onto the female and installs himself there,
clinging to her shell with the nails of his forefeet; there
he stays fifteen days having slowly introduced into her
patient organs his long round prong, ending in a sort
of pointed ball, pressing with all his strength the enormous
clitoris of the female. We find ourselves far from mam-
mifers and from the excitability of the bull ; this coupling
which lasts a whole season leads us toward the voluptuous
laziness of disgusting and marvellous gasteropodes. Ac-
cording to tales which are, perhaps, not contradictory,
crocodiles couple in the water, according to some, and on
land according to others; in water laterally; on land, the
female on her back. It is said to be the male who puts
her on her back, and who, coition completed, helps her
to right herself; charming spectacle, which I can not
guarantee to be so, but which would improve our idea
of the gallantry of these ancient divinities.
I don't know whether anyone has ever remarked that
the caduceus of Mercury represents two serpents coupled.
To describe the caduceus is to describe the love mech-
anism of ophidians. The bifurcated penis penetrates the
vagina, the bodies interlace fold on fold while the two
heads rise over the stiffened coils and look fixedly at each
other, for a long time, eye gazing into eye.
Certain fish have penial organs; they can then realize
true copulation; thus dog-fish, bounce, sharks, sea-hinds
(biches). The males grip the females and hold them
with hooks often formed at the expense of the abdominal
fin, by cartilaginous pieces which penetrate the female
89
THE NATURAL
orifice and serve as slide to the penis. The male skate
seizes the female, turns her over, clamps himself to her,
belly to belly, holds her with his penial tentacles and
finishes the coupling, releasing his seed which flows into
the cloaca. The operation is repeated several times;
separated by the emission of skatelets who are bora alive,
it continues until the female has discharged the greater
part of her
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER X
MECHANISM OF LOVE
//. Copulation (continued). — Arthropodes. — Scorpions.
— Large aquatic crustaceans. — Small crustaceans. — The
hydradhne. — Scutilary. — Cockchafer. — Butterflies. —
Flies, etc. — Variation of animals' sexual habits.
AMONG insects, batrachians, and mollusks one finds the
most curious modes of fecundation and those furthest
removed from the usual mechanism of mammals; before
coming to that we will give a few examples, toward form-
ing an idea of the sexual habits of various species chosen
from the arthropodes. In scorpions, let us say, terrestrial
representatives of aquatic crustaceans: the two sexes are
identical, genital organs usually invisible, hidden between
the abdomen and the cephalothorax, the front part of it
where the head without neck is prolonged directly into
the thorax. The male is provided with two rigid penes
englobed in a sheath — double but forming a single canal ;
holding the female belly to belly he inserts them in the
vulva, one branch bending to the left, the other to the
right toward each of the two oviducts. Same mechanism
in crustaceans, save in the rare cases when they are her-
maphrodite. Lobsters, langousts, ectevisses, crabs, like
the scorpion, couple in a manner singularly resembling
that of humans. Curious spectacle, that of the hen lob-
THE NATURAL
ster attacked by the male, turned on her back, patiently
permitting him to stretch over her, enlacing her claws
and his pincers! Vision of a sabbat which Callot or
Dore would only have painted in fear. Perhaps one
would consider this before opening the armoured belly
of these beasts who have bred their species among algae,
and in holes of the rocks? The genital glands of crus-
taceans are excellent; people gladly eat those of the sea-
anemone; the only good part of these spiny animals. The
males of the greater crustaceans have erectile ejectory
canals, rising in the form of double prong between the
forefeet; the females are correspondingly provided with
two vulvae opening in the third sternal segment, or at
the base of the feet corresponding to this segment. Copu-
lation is effected by quick acts, reiterated two or three
times, lasting a quarter of an hour. The male of the
fresh water prawn who swims leaning on his side, holds
his female between his claws and progresses by bounds;
she is much smaller than he is. Same mechanism in
aselle and talitre or sea-flea.
There are many singularities in the sexual habits of
small crustaceans, the male bopyre lives as parasite on
the female, who is four or five times larger; oddity in-
creased by the female herself being the parasite of the
palemon. It is she who forms the little bloatedness which
one notices, grayish when cooked, on the heads of shrimps,
turned pink. Fishermen state that this spot is a small
sole, but they also tell other yams: for example, that
anatifes, the peduncular mussels which one sees on
drift-wood are the embryos of wild-ducks, and one noble
92
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
sailor has himself seen them taking flight.1 The male
linguatula is also smaller than the female, he has one
testicle but two long copulating organs which simultane-
ously penetrate the female, ejaculating toward the two
ovaries. Another small male is the hydrachne, water
acarian, two or three times smaller than the female, he
alone is provided with a tail at the end of which are his
genital organs; the female's are formed by a papilla situ-
ated beneath the belly and marked by a white patch sur-
rounding the sluice. The male swims, the female comes
to meet him, lifts herself obliquely and brings her white
spot into touch with her lover's caudal extremity, the
junction is accomplished. One then sees the male drag
along the kicking female; the coupling, with periods of
rest, but without interruption of profound contact con-
tinues for several days.
With insects of superior talents it is, on the contrary,
the female who carries off the male: the ant carries hers
on her back, while he bends his abdomen into a bow
toward her vulva; thus weighted, she flies, mounts,
planes, then falls with him like a drop of water. He dies
on the spot, the female gets up, returns to the nest, lays,
before dying. The fetes of the ant are of the whole
ant hill at once, the fall of the lovers like a golden cas-
cade, and the resurrection of the females gleams in the
sun like a russet foam. The scutilary is an insect some-
times squarish or shield-shaped resembling the green
1 The name of these cirripedes bears witness to this supersti-
tion: anatife is the abridgement of anatifere, duck- bearing, latin
anas, anatis. "A tree equally marvelous, is that which produces
barnacles, for the fruits of this tree change into birds." (Mande-
ville's Travels.)
93
THE NATURAL
wood louse, sometimes long and cylindrical with points
and lines of all colours on its wings. One of them, scuti-
form, known as lineata, with red back and black stripes,
is common on umbellifera. Copulation takes place end
to end; one can see them thus, the female towing
the smaller male from leaf to leaf, from umbel to umbel.1
The forficula also couple end to end, fleas, whose male
is smaller, couple belly to belly with feet enlaced; the
position recalling that of dragon flies is more remark-
able, in the louvette, a small insect which lives on broom,
and readily throws itself upon man: the vulva is in fact,
near the mouth.
Coleoptera are given to cavalage, of duration varying
from ten hours to two days. The male cockchafer pur-
sues the female with fervour, he is so ardent that he often
mounts other males, deceived by the odour of rut floating
in the air. He seizes the female and holds her clamped
by his forelegs and genital hooks. The union continues
a day and a night, finally the male, exhausted, falls
over backward, and still hooked by the penial pincers, is
dragged along on his back by the impassive female who
moves on feeding, pulling him over the leaves until death
detaches him; then she lays and dies in her turn. But-
terflies are likewise very fervent, the males make veritable
voyages in quest of females, as Fabre has proved. They
often fly coupled, the stronger female easily carrying the
'This does not seem to be general. I have recently observed,
on the umbels of wild carrots, numerous couples of scutilaries,
proceeding by cavalage, the male inert, couched on the walking
female, who started at the least alarm. Form narrow, almost
cylindrical; colour: orange red, with two short black bands:
strong sucker, long antennae. Union lasting at least a day and
a night.— R. de G.
94
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
male: it is a quite frequent sight in the country, these
butterflies with four wings who roll, a little bewildered
from flower to flower, drunken ships going where the
sails bid them. With flies, feminism is brought frankly
into the love mechanism. The females have the copu-
lative apparatus ; they force their oviduct, then a veritable
prong, into the male's belly; it is the females who make
the mastering gesture, the male merely grips this gimlet
with the hooks which surround his genital fent. It is
this same augur which the female uses to bore the wood,
or earth or flesh where she deposits her eggs. The coup-
ling is end to end, and one of the easiest to observe.
Here are enough examples to show what is per-
manent in the mechanism of true copulation, and what
is variable in its exterior modes. Given the two chief
pieces of the apparatus, the sword and the scabbard, na-
ture, as one might say, leaves it to the imagination of
each specie to decide the best manner of using them;
all ways seem good if they fecundate. Nature has still
more remarkable methods, for the sexual inventions of
humanity are nearly all anterior or exterior to man.
There is not one whose model, even perfected, is not
offered him by the animals, by the most humble of
animals.
If there is no general rule, if there is no one moral man-
ner of fecundating a female, one must recognize that the
same mode is fixed in the same specie, in the same genus
or family. I do not think that anyone has observed vari-
ation in the sexual habits of an animal; yet acts of
sheer disembarrassment being possible, one can not con-
sider the love method as being rigorously fixed. It has
95
THE NATURAL
varied in social bees, parting from the relation of the
couple, the aggression of the male, to end in the political
and autocratic fecundation of a sole female by a sole male
chosen among an hundred slave favourites. The mechan-
ism itself must have changed with the change of the or-
gans, complying with corporal circumstances and with
those of the milieu, under pressure of the nervous sys-
tem which demands acts without caring for the instru-
ments which must execute them. One finds proof of these
changes in the accidental hermaphrodism of a great num-
ber of invertebrates and even of fishes, such as the cod,
the herring, the scomber: a fundamental change since it
shifts the animal from a superior to an inferior category;
a recall to origins, doubtless, and an indication that the
species liable to such accidents are far from being physio-
logically fixed. It is very probable that analogous acci-
dents, less accentuated, visible sometimes in exterior mal-
formation, invisible in their psychological influence, are
the cause of certain tendencies in contrast to the sex ap-
parent or even real. But this does not yet answer the
main question: are there in animals, apart from purely
mechanical aberrations, erotic fantasies? One can
not answer with certainty. The animal merely follows
a groove; when he has gone through it, if he lives for
another season, he merely goes over the same ground, at-
tentive to the same need, submitted always to the same
gestures. Very true, but the animals familiar to man or
his neighbours, the dog, the ape, perhaps the cat, are
assuredly capable of erotic fantasies; it is therefore diffi-
cult to deny this tendency to other animals, to the so
intelligent hymenoptera, for example. Who knows, more-
96
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
over, whether certain eccentric modes of copulation are
not fixed fantasies, become habit and having supplanted
an anterior method, the animal being little able to employ
two customs at once?
What we have found, at least, is that the love mech-
anism is, in nature, of infinite variety, and that if it ap-
pears stable in most of the fixed species, it is, in its
entirety extremely oscillating, capricious, and fantastic.
97
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER XI
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
///. Of birds and fish. — Males without penis. — Coup-
ling by simple contact. — Salacity of birds. — Copulation
of batrachians: accoucheur toad, aquatic toad, earth
toad, pipa toad. — Foetal parasitism. — Chastity of fish.
— Sexes separated in love. — Onanistic fecundation. —
Cephalopodes, the spermatophore.
III. Of birds and fish. It is toward the middle of the
second month that the separation of the cloaca into two
regions is marked in the human foetus: a partition is
formed which will absolutely isolate the digestive chan-
nel from the uro-genital. The persistence of the cloaca
is not a sign of primitivity, since one finds it in selacians,
batrachians, reptiles, monotremes and birds. The uro-
genital region of marsupials and of several rodents is
submitted to a single sphincter, witness of original union.
The bird's cloaca is divided into three chambers, for
the three functions, the outer orifice being necessarily
unique, by definition. It is with this rudimentary ap-
paratus that most birds turn to the pleasures of love.
The male being wholly deprived of any erectile tissue,
coition is by simple contact, a pressure, perhaps a rub-
bing; displeasing as the comparison may be, it is a play
analogous to the mouth to mouth kiss, or, if one prefer,
98
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
to the pressing of two sapphists clasped vulva to vulva.
Far from being a regression or a stop, it is perhaps a
progress, the male at least gaining in security and vigour,
being obliged to very little muscular development. The
salacity of certain birds is well known, and one does not
see that the absence of an exterior penis diminishes their
ardour, or attenuates the pleasure which they find in these
succinct contacts. Perhaps the direct genital pleasure is
concentrated in a vascular papilla which swells a little
at the moment of the approaches; this is very rudimen-
tary, often unnoticeable but it seems to be an exciting
organ, the producer of pleasure. The male mounts the
female, holds her with feet and beak, the two cloaca are
superposed, the sperm flows into the oviduct. One sees
sparrows repeat the sexual act as often as twenty times,
always with the same excitement, the same expression of
contentment; the female tires first, and shows her im-
patience. Birds' habits are especially interesting in
reason of the play with which they surround their love
making, their parades, their combats; we will deal with
this in later chapters.
Batrachians live for hardly anything save reproduction.
Outside their season of love, they remain stupefied. The
rut over-excites them, and these slow, frozen animals
then show themselves ardent and implacable. The males
fight for the possession of females; having seized a female,
nothing will make the male let go. One has seen him
stick to his post even after his hind legs were cut off,
even after losing half his body. Yet the copulation is
mere simulacrum, it takes place by simple contact in the
absence of exterior organs, even in salamanders, despite
99
THE NATURAL
the pads which surround the cloaca, sketch of an appara-
tus which has remained extremely rudimentary, or pos-
sibly problematic. With anours, the male, smaller than
the female, climbs on her back, passes his forefeet, his
arms, under her armpits and remains skin to skin for a
month, for two months. At the end of this time the
pressed flanks of the female finally let fall the eggs, and
he fecundates them as they fall. Such is the coupling of
frogs, lasting from fifteen to twenty days. The male
clambers onto the female, encircles her with his arms,
crosses his hands over her breast, and holds her tightly
embraced. He then remains immobile, in an ecstatic
state, insensible to every external shock, to every wound.
It would seem that the sole aim of this enlacing is to
exercise a pressure on, or to cause an excitement in, the
belly of the female and to make her deliver her eggs.
She lays a thousand and the male sprays them with sperm
as they pass.
All the anours (tailless batrachians) thus press their
females like lemons; but the method of fecundating the
eggs is quite variable. The mid-wife toad enlaced like
the others, aids the emergence of the egg garland with
his hind feet, he unrolls it grain by grain, with devotion,
while the female, immobile emptier, lends herself willingly
to this manoeuvre, which she feels perhaps as a caress.
The aquatic toad does not pull at the garland, he receives
it in his paws, and when he has ten eggs or so, he sprinkles
them, ejaculating with a movement of the flanks, which
old Roesel * compares to that of a dog's in coition. As
for the common land toad, whose note sounds like a
*In bis "Historia Naturalis Ranarum," 1758, Bufo aquaticus.
ICO
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
pure crystal bell in calm of the evening, he waits until
all the eggs have emerged, he arranges them in a heap,
then excited by somersaults, he drenches the lot of them.
But no batrachian patience is as curious as that of the
pipa toad. This is a hideous beast with small eyes,
mouth surrounded with whisker-prickles, skin blackish
green, full of warts and swellings. As the eggs are laid
the male fecundates them, then taking them in his large
webbed feet he spreads them out on the female's back.
Around each egg there forms a little protective pustule,
in which the young hatch. The female on whom a hatch
commences offers the odd spectacle of a back whence, here
and there, heads and feet are sprouting, or from which
emerge little toads as if born of a paradox.1 This forma-
tion is another proof that nature finds anything good
which happens to attain her purpose, and that she cares
only for the perpetuation of life. An incubatorial pocket
was necessary, and she had forgotten it; no matter, the
animal will make one for itself, at its own expense or at
the expense of some other specie. The small pipas exer-
cize a real parasitism, ordered by an absent-mindedness
of nature. Whether the deposit of eggs be in the mother's
back or in the tissue of some other animal the parasitism
is no less evident, at most it is a question of degree.
From this point of view it will be possible to consider
the normal, internal evolution of sexual products as a
parasitic evolution: the young of the mammal is a para-
site of its mother, as the little ichneumon is a parasite of
lrrhe back as gestative chamber is also found in woodlice,
during one of their parthenogenetic phases, cf. Fabre "Souvenirs"
VII, les Pucerons du terebinthe.
101
THE NATURAL
the caterpillar which serves it as uterus. Thus consid-
ered the notion of parasitism temporary or larval will
disappear, or, rather, take a much greater extension, en-
veloping a considerable number of facts up till now
separated in irreducible categories.
Fecundation by contact is very rare in fish, other than
selacians. One hardly finds it save in lophobranchi and
certain other viviparous fish, such as the blenny ; the milt
penetrates the female organs without copulation, and the
eggs develop either in these organs, or in a pouch which
the male carries under his belly, or even in the male's
mouth, he having thus the virtue of assuring the birth
of his offspring. The lophobranchi are wholly singular
fish, one of them, the sea-horse, horse-headed ludion,
gives a good idea of the family. Ordinary fish, such as
one knows and eats, however M. de Lacepede may have
classified them, are chaste animals void of all erotic
fantasy.
What would appear to be the essential of pleasure is
unknown to them. The males do not know possession
nor the females surrender, no touch, no rubbings, no
caress. The object of male desire is not the female but
the eggs, he watches for those she is about to lay, he
searches for those she has laid, an excitement quite like
those produced by onanism, or which are engendered by
fetishism in certain distorted minds and which operate
at the sight of a slipper or ribbon, and die down, even
to frigidity in the presence of the woman herself. The
fish spends his semen on eggs which he finds floating
and whose mother he has never seen. Often both eggs
and male milt are left floating and meet only in the
102
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
chance of current and wave. Sometimes fish form a
separate couple. The female swims up stream, stops
over a grass or sand bottom, the male follows, obeying
her gesture. Such habits have permitted people to
breed fish with as great a certainty as they breed mush-
rooms, or more so. One takes a female swelled with
eggs, squeezes her like an orange, then one empties a
male of his milt, and nature takes charge of the rest.
This procedure is not possible with certain species which
act in concert, the male tilted onto his back, his genital
orifice beneath that of the female, and ejaculating in time
with her.
One knows that salmon swim up rivers in troops, often
very dense, and into the branch streams and creeks, to
lay their spawn in quiet, favorable nooks. Then they
go down stream worn out by the dams and waterfalls
which they have mounted by tail-swishing, and tired by
their genital exercises. The column is often led by a
female, the other females follow. Then swim the old
males and lastly the young males. When the leaderess
has found a suitable place, one of the roes stops, hollows
the sand with her belly, leaves a packet of eggs in the
hole, an old male drenches them at once, but the patri-
arch has been followed by young bucks who imitate
him and fecundate the same eggs. Thus, with these fish
there is a sort of school where the experienced teach the
newcomers the procedure of fecundation. This mixture
of eggs and semen from fish of all ages should be very
favourable to the maintenance of a specific type, if the
instability of milieu did not bring about the encounter
of elements belonging to different neighbouring varieties:
103
THE NATURAL
despite the good will of naturalists, salmon and trout
form practically only one family, and nothing is more
difficult, for example, than to determine the specie of a
young salmon, or to state the difference between a salmon
and a sea trout.
The loves of fish (and also of echinoderms, star-fish,
sea-anemones, etc.) thus reduce themselves, in the main,
to those of ovule and spermatozoide. The essential.
But such simplification is rather shocking to the sensi-
bility of a superior vertebrate, or to an insect accus-
tomed to the amorous parade, to multiple and prolonged
contacts, to the presence and complexity of the opposite
sex. This fashion of love is, admittedly, not unknown
to men, but they seem to be led to it rather by necessity
than by taste, by morals rather than by the search for
the maximum pleasure. Genital satisfactions obtained
apart from contact, apart from being necessarily infecund,
save in scabrous scientific experiments, often cause a ner-
vous and muscular depression greater even than excess
committed in common. But this result is not so evident
that one can convert it into a moral principle, and
the fact remains that onanism, carefully considered, is
one among nature's gestures. A different conclusion
would be more agreeable; but millions of creatures would
protest, from all the oceans, and from beneath the reeds
of all rivers. One might go further, and insinuate that
this method which appears to us monstrous, or, since it
is a matter of fish, singular, is perhaps superior to the
laborious method of cavalage, so ugly, in general, and
so inconvenient. But there is not in terrestrial nature,
any more than in conceivable nature a high and low, a
104
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
wrong side and a right side; there is neither a good nor
evil manner, a right nor a wrong, but there are states of
life which fulfill their purpose, since they exist and since
existence is their aim. Doubtless the discord between
the will and the organs is constant in all stages of life,
and much accentuated in man where the wishes are multi-
plex, but where the nervous system remains, in short, the
master, and governs even to the danger of its life. It
is not the chance of circumstances and of milieu that has
swelled the spermoduct of certain fish into papilla,
and then into penis, or formed a sheath for this penis
at the expense of the caudal fin; it is the will force of
cerebral ganglia. The evolution of the nervous system
is always in advance of that of the organs, this is a
cause of incoherence, and at the same time, of progress
and change. The day when the brain has no more
orders to give, or when the organs have exhausted their
faculties of obedience, the specie is fixed; if fixed in a
state of incoherence it moves toward certain extinction,
as the monotremes. Many species seem to have been
destroyed in full evolution by the contradictory exi-
gencies of a tyrannous and capricious nervous system.
It is necessary that the male cephalopode fecundate
the female. How will he do it, having no organic sperm-
vector? He will make one. One thought for a long
time that the female argonauts were preyed on by a
parasite. This mysterious beast is nothing but the
instrument of fecundation. The male has a pouch where
sperm accumulates; in this pouch are made up little
bags called spermatophores, the animalcule move to-
ward the third arm of the argonaut (nautilus), and this
105
THE NATURAL
arm enlarges in spatula, equips itself with a scourge,
loses its suckers, and then when heavy with life as a
ripe grape, it falls off, moves toward the female, comes
alongside her belly, lodges in the palleal cavity and
oozes out its seed into the organs where this will encoun-
ter the ovules. The male organ, here, appears as a tem-
porary individual, a third being between father and
mother, a messenger which carries the male genital trea-
sure to the female. Neither of them knows the other.
The male is wholly ignorant of the female for whom he
detaches a limb, and the female knows nothing of her
fecundator save the sole organ which fecundates. A little
more complicated than that of the fish, this method is
probably older, and seems possible only for aquatic ani-
mals. It is nevertheless that of many vegetables; this
swimming arm recalls the winged grains of pollen which
travel far from their pistils. Very few flowers can fecun-
date directly; nearly all have need of an intermediary,
the wind, an insect, a bird. Nature had given wings to
the phallus, ages before the imagination of Pompeian
painters; she had thought of this, not for the pleasure
of bashful women, but for the satisfaction of the most
hideous beasts that people the ocean, cuttlefish, calama-
ries, octopL
106
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER XII
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
IV. Hermaphrodism. — Sexual life of oysters. — Gastero-
podes. — The idea of reproduction and the idea of plea-
sure.— Mechanism of reciprocal reproduction: helices.
— Spintrian habits. — Reflections on hermaphrodism.
FISH are the only vertebrates among whom one encoun-
ters hermaphrodism, either accidental: cyprins, herrings,
scombers; or regular, sargue, sparaillon, seran. The myx-
ines, very humble fish living as parasites, are alternative
hermaphrodites, like oysters, like ascides; the genital
gland functions first as testicle, then as ovary. The
amphioxus, the bridge between invertebrates and verte-
brates, is not hermaphrodite. The most strongly marked
and most complicated forms of hermaphrodism are found
in mollusks, and chiefly in gasteropodes. The alternate
hermaphrodism of oysters produces effects which have
been observed throughout antiquity. The advice to ab-
stain from oysters during months lacking an "r" is based
on a fact, and that fact sexual. From September to
May, they are males, they are testicles, they elaborate
sperm, they are good; from June to August the ovaries
bourgeon, fill with eggs which turn whitish as they ripen,
the oysters are females, they are bad; fecundation takes
place at this time, the spermatozoides, born in the pre-
107
THE NATURAL
ceding period, finally perform their office. Superstitions
before being rejected ought to be minutely observed and
analysed, there is nearly always a kernel of truth in
the gross envelope.
In the hermaphrodism of echinoderms, of fish, there
is never auto-fecundation; either the sexual products
meet outside the animals, which have neither copulating
organs, nor a related genital life; it is a simple growth
of germs; or, in a more complex phase the individuals
have exterior male organs, and female organs, but they
can not use them without the aid of another individual
acting either as male, or as female. Here a new dis-
tinction is imposed: either the animal will be successively
male, and then female; or it will be both at once. This
union of the two sexes seems useless, according to human
logic, when the two genital glands ripen at different sea-
sons ; one understands it better when the reciprocal fecun-
dation is simultaneous, since this doubles the number
of females and better assures the conservation of the
specie. One must set aside the idea of pleasure. Apart
from the fact that we can judge it only by a very distant
and even dubious analogy considering the difference be-
tween the nervous systems of man and mollusk, one must
set it aside as useless. Pleasure is a result not an aim.
In most animal species coition is but a prelude to death,
and often love and death work their supreme act in the
same instant. Copulation of insects is suicide: would it
be reasonable to consider it as produced by a desire to
die? One must dissociate the idea of pleasure and the
idea of love, if one wants to understand anything of the
tragic movements which perpetually beget life at the
108
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
expense of life itself. Pleasure explains nothing. People
might simply be commanded to die as a means of repro-
duction, they would obey with the same eagerness: this
is observed even in humanity. Dithyrambs on pleasure
would be misplaced apropos of the mutual ticklings of
two snails on a vine-leaf; the subject is rather uncom-
fortable.
Note then two helices, both bisexual, fulfilling exactly
the biblical phrase: "he created them male and female";
their genital organs are very well developed; the penis
and oviduct opening into a vestibule, which in the act of
copulation unbellies itself in part, so that the penis and
vagina come in touch with the orifice; mutual intromission
takes place. A third organ comes from the vestibule,
without analogy in superior animals; it is a little pocket
containing a small stiletto, a jewelled dagger; it is an ex-
citative organ, the needle to prick up desires. These
beasts who have prepared for love by fasting, by long
rubbings, by whole days of close pressure, finally come
to a decision, the swords come out of their scabbards,
they conscientiously stab each other, this causes the
penis to rise from its sheath; the double mating is
accomplished.
There are species in which the position of the organs
is such that the same individual can not be at the same
time the female of the one for whom he acts as male, but
he can at that moment serve as female to another male,
who is female to a third, and so on. This explains the
garlands of spintrian gasteropodes which one sees realiz-
ing innocently and according to the ineluctable wish of
nature, carnal imaginations that have been the boast of
109
THE NATURAL
erotic humanity. Facing this light from animal habits,
debauchery loses all character and all its tang, because
it loses all immorality. Man, who unites in himself the
aptitudes of all the animals, all their laborious instincts,
all their industries, could not escape the heritage of their
sexual methods; and there is no lewdness which has not
its normal type in nature, somewhere.
Before leaving this repugnant milieu, one may still
consider the leech. Hermaphrodite, they also practice
reciprocal fecundation, but the position of their organs
compels them to assume a peculiar position: the prong
emerges from a pore near the mouth ; the vagina is above
the anus. The copulation of these wretched animals
forms, therefore, a head-to-tail, the bocal sucker coin-
ciding with the anal sucker.
Animals having both sexes, do not necessarily show
sexual dimorphism. But neither this exact likeness of
individuals, nor the double function with which they are
charged, contradicts the general law which seems to wish
that an individual should be due to elements coming from
two different individuals. Autofecundation is exceptional,
is very rare. Whether or no the individual possess the
two genital glands, or one of them only, it needs a male,
or an individual acting as male, and a female or an indi-
vidual acting as female, to perpetuate life. Alternative
hermaphrodism confirms these propositions, be it that
the same gland transforms itself totally, turn by turn,
into male principle, then into female principle; be it
divided between a male half and a female half, these two
halves ripen simultaneously or successively. When there
is total or partial alternation, the male principle is ready
no
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
first, and waits: thus the aggressivity of the male, and
the passivity of the female are visible in the most ob-
scure manifestations of sexual life: the fundamental
psychology of an ascide does not differ from that of
an insect, or from that of a mammal.
in
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER XIII
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
V. Artificial fecundation. — Disjunction of the secreting
apparatus from the copulating apparatus. — Spiders. —
Discovery of their copulative method. — Brutality of
the female. — Habits of the epeire. — The argyronete. —
— The tarantula. — Exceptions: the reapers. — Dragon-
flies (libellule). — Dragon-flies (demoiselle) virgins and
"jouvencelle." — Picture of their love affairs.
THE apparatus for secreting sperm and that for copulat-
ing are sometimes separated. The female has a vagina
normally situated; the male has no penis, or else it is
situated in some part of the body not in symmetry with
the receiving apparatus. It is then necessary either for
the male to make an artificial penis, as one has seen in the
cephalopodes, and as in the spider, or for him to engage
in complicated manoeuvres to dominate the female, and
to engineer the conjunction of the two apparatus, as does
the dragon-fly (libellule).
The method of most arachnids strangely resembles the
medical practice called artificial fecundation, although
it is hardly more so than normal fecundation. In both
it is a question of putting spermatozoides in the way of
encountering ovules: it matters little whether phallus
or syringe be the vehicle. The spider uses a syringe.
112
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
For a long time people thought that the whole genital
apparatus was situated in the feelers of the male, but
anatomy could find nothing there to resemble it. Savigny
thought that the introduction of the feelers into the
vulva was merely an excitative manoeuvre, and that the
true copulation followed. One had only observed half
the act, the second phase. The first consists in the male's
gathering up the semence in his own belly with the
feelers; he then places it in the female organ. The
maxillary peripalpe or antenna, thus transformed into a
penis, contains a spiral canal which the male fills in
placing it against the opening of his spermatic canals.
One sees the joint of one of the knuckles open, letting
appear a white bourrelet (pad with a hole in the mid-
dle), this is bent, and plunged into the vulva, it emerges
and the insect flees. System marvellously adapted to the
circumstances, for the female is ferocious and quite ready
to devour her suitor. But is it the ferocity of the female
which has modified the fecundating system, or is it the
system, so lacking in tenderness, which has led the recep-
tress to find only an enemy in the aspirant who advances
horn to the fore? Acts which produce constant and useful
results always seem to us ordered by an admirable logic;
one need only give oneself up to a certain laziness of
mind, to be led quite gently to call them providential
and to fall little by little into the innocent nets of
finalism.
Doubtless — and undeniable — there is a general finality,
but one must conceive it as represented entire by the
present state of nature. This will not be a conception
of order, but a conception of fact, and in any case, the
"3
THE NATURAL
means used to attain this fact should in no way be
integrated in the finality itself. None of the procedures
of generation, for example, bears the mark of necessity.
It is not the ferocity of the she-spider which demands the
sexual habit; the female mantis is still more savage,
and mantis' method is cavalage. It does not seem as
if anything in nature were ordered in view of some
benefit; causes blindly engender causes; some maintain
life, others force it to progress, others destroy it; we
qualify them differently, according to the dictates of our
sensibility, but they are non-qualifiable; they are move-
ments, and nothing else. The pebble ricochets on the
water, or it doesn't; this has no importance in itself,
nothing more will come of it and nothing less. It is an
image of supreme finality: after eight or ten bounds,
life, like the pebble thrown by a child, will fall into the
abyss, and with it all the good and evil, all facts, all
ideas, and all things.
The idea of finality leads one back to the idea of fact,
one is no longer tempted to attempt an explanation of
nature. One would try modestly to reconstruct the chain
of causes and, as a great number of rings will always be
lacking, and as the absence of one ring alone would suf-
fice to unhook the whole reasoning, one will do this in a
piety tempered by scepticism.
The epirus, although a spider, is not an ill-conditioned
beast; she is episcopal, she carries on her back a pretty
white cross upside down. The large ones are the fe-
males; the very small ones, the males. Both hook their
webs upon bushes, on shrubs, live without knowing each
other until instinct has spoken. A day comes when the
114
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
male is restless; the gnats fail to satisfy him; he leaves,
he abandons the home he will perhaps not see again. He
is not, indeed, without misgivings, and fear is mingled
with his desire, for the mistress he seeks is an ogress.
Thus he prepares a way of retreat in case of combat;
he stretches a thread from the female's web to a neigh-
bouring branch, road of entry, gate of exit. Often, the
instant he shows himself with his excited air, the female
epirus leaps on him and eats him without formality. Is
it ferocity? No, stupidity. She also is awaiting the male,
but her attention is distraught between the coming of the
caller and the coming of prey. The web has shaken, she
leaps, enlaces, devours. Perhaps a second male if he
attempt the pass, will be gladly received, the first sacri-
fice accomplished, perhaps this mistake, if it is one, will
wake all the amorous attention of the distracted female?
Ferocity, stupidity; there is another explanation which
I will give later, apropos the mantis and the green grass-
hopper: it is very probable that the sacrifice of the male,
or of a male, is absolutely necessary, and that it is a
sexual rite. The little male approaches; if he is recog-
nized, and if his coming coincides with the genital state
of the female, she merely behaves like all the rest of her
peers, and even though she be the larger and stronger,
she flees; she lets herself, full of coquetry, slide down a
thread; the male imitates the play, he descends, she
mounts, he mounts, the acquaintance is made, they feel
each other, they pat each other, the male fills his pump,
the mating is accomplished. She is rapid, the male stays
on guard, ready to flee at the least movement of his
adversary; often he hasn't time. Scarcely has the fecun-
"5
THE NATURAL
dation been finished when the ogress turns, leaping, and
devours the suitor on the very spot of his amours. They
say that she does not always wait for the end of the
operation, and that preferring a good meal to a caress,
she interrupts the performance with a slap of her man-
dibles. When the male has the luck to escape he disap-
pears like a flash, goes down his thread like greased
lightning. The argyronete uses manoeuvres analogous,
but even more curious. It is a water spider, which goes
under water in an ingenious small diving-bell, a future
nest. The female having made her diving-bell, the male,
not daring to present himself thinks out the wheeze of
making another bell just next that of the female. Then
at a propitious moment he breaks through the dividing
wall and profits by the surprise of his sudden entry.
When it is a matter of not being eaten, all means are the
right ones.
The tarantula, whose habits are far from gentle, is not
cruel to her suitor. This monster who spins no web,
spins out a long idyllic courtship. Extended preludes,
puerile games, delicate caresses, lambkins' leapings. Fin-
ally the female surrenders fully. The male places her as
he wishes, chooses for her the pose most pleasing to him,
and lies obliquely against her, gently and repeatedly tak-
ing the sperm from his abdomen he insinuates each of
his palpes, one after the other in the swollen vulva of the
female. The break-away is sudden, a jump. Still more
tender are the courtships of the leaping spider; they ad-
vance by little rushes, stop, watch, leap on their prey,
insect or fly, or else float at the wind's will on the end of
a long hanging web-thread. When male and female meet,
116
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
they approach, tap each other with forefeet and tentacles,
separate, reapproach, recommence. After a thousand
salutations, they pose head to head, the male climbs onto
the female, stretches out until he reaches the abdomen.
Then he lifts the extremity of it, applies his palpe to
the vulva, and retires. The same act is begun again
several times, the female is all compliance and offers no
insult to her companion. There are certain exceptions to
the method of spiders; the reapers, little balls mounted
on immense legs, act by cavalage. The males have a
retractile prong fixed by two ligaments to the abdomen,
the female an oviduct which opens in vulva and spreads
interiorly into a vast pouch, the resting place for the
eggs. The male does not manage this female, a strong
objector, save by seizing her mandibles with his pincers.
Overcome by this bite she submits; the coupling lasts
several seconds.
The dragon-fly, gracefully called "la demoiselle," is
one of the finest insects in the world and certainly the
most beautiful of those which fly in our climate; no soft
butterfly colour is a match for the moving shimmer of its
supple abdomen, and the bright head-colours as of steely-
blue helmet. Description? It is difficult to find two
alike: one has tawny body and dove-grey abdomen,
spotted with yellow, and black feet, transparent wings
with brown borders or nerve-veinings, or these in black
and white; another has a yellow head, brown eyes, brown
corselet veined in green, an abdomen touched with green
and yellow, irised wings; another called "la Vierge" is
gilded green, or blue with green shimmer, and spotless
wings; another "la Jouvencelle" has wings thin to in-
117
THE NATURAL
risibility, is clothed in all shades, metallic blue, reddish-
brown green, iris violet, tawny chrysanthemum, whatever
her fundamental colour she encircles her elegant barrel
with rings of black velvet. Naturalists divide these insects
into libellules, aeshnes, agrions; Fabricius disputes with
Linnaeus; peasants and children (for grown-ups despise
nature) call them "demoiselles," "vierges" and "jouven-
celles." l Some fly very high, in the trees, others along
the streams and over pond edges ; others over ferns, reeds,
broom. I have passed days in the sun watching them,
waiting to see their courtships; I have seen them, and
know that Reaumur has not deceived us. It was on the
surface of a pond among the border flowers, a morning
of July, a flaming morning. The "Vierge," corselet of
blue green, almost invisible wings, fluttered in great num-
bers, slowly, as if seriously; the hour of parade had ar-
rived. And everywhere couples formed, rings of azure
hung from the grass blades, trembled on leaves of the
water-lentil, everywhere green arrows and blue arrows
played at flight, and wing-brushing, at joining. The big
eyes and strong head of the libellule give an air of gravity
to the brilliancy of this spectacle.
The ejaculatory canal opens at the ninth ring of the
abdomen, that is to say, at the point; the copulating
apparatus is fixed at the second ring, that is, near the
neck, and is composed of a penis, of hooks, and a reser-
voir: the male bending his long belly first fills the reser-
voir, then empties it into the organs of the female. For
*In America we have, so far as I know, only the terms
"dragon fly" and "darning-needle," and for the larger ones "devil's
darning-needle." — E. P.
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
a long time he pursues the desired mistress, plays with
her, finally seizes her above the neck with the terminal
pincers of his abdomen, then, turning like a serpent, he
bends forward and continues to fly, a beast with four
pairs of wings. In this attitude, the male, sure of himself,
with the air of the hour's indifferent master, chases
midges, visits flowers and the axilla of plants where the
midges sleep, nabs them with his feet and puts them into
his mouth. Finally the female accedes, bends downward
her flexible abdomen and makes its orifice coincide with
the male's pectoral penis: the two beastlets are but one
splendid ring with a double cup, a ring trembling with
life and with fire.
No gesture of love can be conceived more charming
than that of the female slowly bending back her blue
body, going half way toward her lover, who erect on his
forefeet bears, with taut muscles, the full weight of the
movement. It is so pure, so immaterial, one would say
that two ideas joined in the limpidity of ineluctable
thought.
119
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER XIV
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
VI. Cannibalism in sex. — Females who devour the male,
those who devour the spermatophore. — Probable use of
these practices. — Fecundation by the whole male. —
Loves of the white joreheaded dectic. — The green
grasshopper. — The Alpine analote. — The ephippigere.
— Further reflections of the cannibalism of sex. — Loves
of the praying mantis.
THE spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in
locustians, the female is fecundated by a spermatophore,
an enormous genital bunch-of-grapes. She gnaws through
this envelope of spermatozoides to the last shred. These
two facts should be brought together. Whether the
female swallow the male entire, or only the product of
his genital glands, it is probably in both cases a comple-
mentary act of fecundation. There are possibly in the
male, assimilable elements necessary for the development
of the eggs, almost as the albumen of seeds, little
aborted plants, is necessary for nourishing the vegetable
embryo, surviving plantlet. Plants, according to recent
study, are born twins: in order to live one must devour
the other. Shifted to animal life, and slightly modified,
this mechanism explains what one terms, from sentimen-
talism, the sexual ferocity of the she-mantis and the she-
120
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at
the expense of life. The male insect nearly always
dies immediately after the mating; in locustians he is
literally emptied by the genital effort: whether the
female respect, or devour him, his life would hardly be
longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed; why, if this
is for the good of the species should he not be eaten?
Anyhow, he is eaten. It is his destiny, and he feels it
coming, at least the male spider does, and the male mantis
allows himself to be gnawed with a perfect stoicism.
The spider jibs, the other submits. It is really a matter
of ritual, not of accident or of crime. One might try
experiments. One might prevent the female dectic from
pecking the mistletoe berry which the male has dis-
charged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes
and isolate them immediately: and then follow all the
phases from laying to hatching. If the spermatophagy
of the dectic is useless, if the murder of the male mantis
is useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections, and
others will rise.
The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass-
hoppers), a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal
era, and it is perhaps this antiquity which explains its
peculiar fecundative method. As the cephalopodes, his
contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore;
yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even
play and caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they
caress each other with long antennae "fine as hair," as
Fabre says; after a moment they separate. The next
day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day,
and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female,
THE NATURAL
who overwhelms him with her embrace; he gnaws her
belly. The male disentangles himself and escapes, but a
new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This
time the female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly
to belly; she bends back the extremity of her abdomen;
the victim does likewise; there is junction, and soon one
sees something enormous issue from the convulsive flanks
of the male, as if the animal were pushing out its entrails.
"It is," continues the best observer (Fabre, Souvenirs
VI), "an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour
of a mistletoe berry," a bottle with four pockets at least,
held together by feeble sutures. The female receives this
leather bottle, or spermatophore, and carries it off glued
to her belly. Having got over the thunder-clap, the male
gets up, makes his toilet; the female browses as she walks.
"From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into a
ring, seizes her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and
chews it gently." She breaks off little pieces, chews them
carefully, and swallows them. Thus while the fecun-
dative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which
they are to animate, the female devours the spermatic
pouch. After having tasted it piece by piece she suddenly
pulls it off, kneads it, swallows it whole. Not a scrap is
lost; the place is clear, and the oviscapte is cleaned,
washed, polished. The male has begun to sing again,
during this meal, but it is not a love-song, he is about to
die; he dies: passing near him at this moment, the female
looks at him, smells him, takes a bite of his thigh.
Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grass-
hopper, which takes place at night, but he observed the
long preludes; he has seen the slow play of soft anten-
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
nx. The result of the coupling is the same as with all
locustians; the female chews and swallows the genital
ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats alive
a huge cicada, who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a
wriggling cockchafer. One can't say whether she eats
her male, dead or alive; it is very probable for he is quite
timid. Another dectic, the Alpine analote, has given
Fabre the alarming spectacle: a male on his back, a
female on his belly, the genital organs joining end to end
in this single contact, and while she was receiving the
fecundative caress, the enigmatic female, with the fore
part of her body raised, was gnawing with little mouth-
fuls, another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly
chewed open. The male analote is much smaller and
weaker than the female; like his confrere the spider, he
flees with greatest possible speed after the end of coition;
he is very often nipped. In the case observed by Fabre,
the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding amour:
these locustians have the habit, rare among insects, of
receiving several suitors. Truly this cannibal Margue-
rite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and gives a
fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of
the serenity of nature, which permits all things, wills all
things, and for whom there are neither vices nor virtues,
but only movements and chemic reactions.
The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous,
nearly half the size of the animal. The nuptial feast is
finished according to the same rite, and the female, having
finished the leather-bottle spermatophore, adds thereto
the poor emptied male. She does not even wait until he
is dead; she chops him up, as he is dying, limb by limb:
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THE NATURAL
having fecundated her with all his blood, he must feed her
with all his flesh.
This male flesh is doubtless powerful comforting to the
mother to be. Female mammifers, after delivery, devour
the placenta. One has given different interpretations to
this habitual act. Some see a precaution against enemies:
it is necessary to obliterate traces of a condition which
clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless, surrounded
by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others
say it is a recuperation of energy. This latter opinion
seems more likely, especially if one consider the habits
of locustians. The spermatophore is indeed the preceding
analogy to the placenta. On the other hand, fecundation,
before being a specific act, belongs to the general phe-
nomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in
another force, and nothing more. The devouring of the
male, partial or complete, represents, then, only the most
primitive form of the union of cellules, this junction of
two unities in one, which precedes the segmentation, feeds
it, makes it possible during a limited time, after which
a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are
only a survival, if they have lasted after their utility has
disappeared, it is another question, and one which I leave
again to experimenters. It will be enough for me if I
have gained acceptance of the general principle that ani-
mals' acts, whatever they may be, can not be understood
unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications
beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, cor-
rupting them with providential finalism.
While fully recognizing the immense social value of
prejudices, analysis should be permitted to excoriate
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
them and to grind them. Nothing appears more clear
than maternal love, and nothing is more widespread
throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser inter-
pretation of the acts which these two words pretend to
explain. One makes a virtue of it, that is to say, in the
Christian sense, a voluntary act; one seems to think that
it depends on the mother to love or not to love her
children, and one considers culpable those who relax or
forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly
love is a commandment; it is the second condition of the
perpetuity of life. Mothers sometimes are without it;
some mothers also are sterile: the will intervenes neither
in one case nor in the other. As the rest of nature, as
ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do
what they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them.
The mantis who eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer
who prepares, passionately, the future of her progeny.
After Fabre's observations of couples of these insects
caged, the female much stronger than the male mantes,
are the predatory ones, who do combat for love. The
combats are deadly, the vanquished female is eaten at
once. The male is bashful. At the moment of desire he
limits himself to posing, to making sheep's eyes, which
the female seems to consider with indifference or disdain.
Tired of parade, he finally decides, and with spread wings,
leaps trembling upon the back of the ogress. The mating
lasts five or six hours; when the knot is loosed, the suitor
is, regularly, eaten. The terrible female is polyandrous.
Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries have
been fecundated, the mantis accepts two, three, four, up
to seven; and Bluebeard, eats them regularly after the
125
THE NATURAL
act is accomplished. Fabre has seen better. The mantis
is almost the only insect with a neck; the head does not
join the thorax immediately, the neck is long and flexible,
bending in all directions. Thus, while the male is enlac-
ing and fecundating her, the female will turn her head
back and calmly eat her companion in pleasure. Here is
one headless, another is gone up to the corsage, and his
remains still clutch the female who is thus devouring him
at both ends, getting from her spouse simultaneously the
pleasures ac mensa ac thoro, both bed and board from
her husband. The double pleasure only ends when the
cannibal reaches the belly: the male then falls in shreds
and the female finishes him on the ground. Poiret has
witnessed a scene perhaps even more extraordinary. A
male leaps on a female and is going to couple. The
female turns her head, stares at the intruder, and decapi-
tates him with a blow of her jaw-foot, a marvellous
toothed-scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges
up, spreads himself, makes love as if nothing abnormal
had happened. The mating took place, and the female
had the patience to wait for the end of the operation
before finishing her wedding breakfast.
The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the
insects' brain does not seem to have unique control of its
movements; these animals can live without the cervical
ganglion. A headless grasshopper will still lift his
bruised foot to his mouth, after three hours, with the
movement familiar to him in his complete condition.
The small mantis, or colourless mantis, is almost as
fierce as her great sister, the religious mantis; but the
empuse, a kindred specie, seems peaceful.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER XV
THE SEXUAL PARADE
Universality of the caress, of amorous preludes. — Their
role in fecundation. — Sexual games of birds. — How
cantharides caress. — Males' combats. — Pretended com-
bats of birds. — Dance of the tetras. — Gardener bird. —
His country house. — His taste for flowers. — Reflections
on the origin of his art. — Combats of crickets. — Parade
of butterflies. — Sexual sense of orientation. — The great-
peacock moth. — Animals' submission to orders of Na-
ture.— Transmutation of physical values. — Rutting cal-
endar.
ONE has convinced oneself in the preceding chapters that
the games of love, preludes, caresses, combats are in no
way peculiar to the human race. On nearly all rungs of
the animal ladder, or rather on all the branches of the
animal fan, the male is the same, the female is the same.
It is always the equation given in the intimate mechanism
of union of animalcule and ovule: a fortress toward which
amans volat currit ac Icetatur. The whole passage of the
Imitatio (L. Ill, chap, iv, 4) is a marvellous psychologi-
cal presentation of love in nature, of sexual attraction as
it is felt throughout the whole series of creatures. The
besieger must enter the fortress; he uses violence, some-
times gentle violence; more often trickery, the caress.
127
THE NATURAL
Caress, charming movements, grace, tenderness, we do
all these things of necessity, not because we are men, but
because we are animals. Their aim is to liven the sen-
sibilities, to dispose the organism to accomplish with joy
its supreme function. They are, very probably, agreeable
to the individual and they are perceived as pleasure only
because they are useful to the species. This character
of necessity is naturally more apparent in animals than in
man. In animals the caress has fixed forms, of which
the kiss, however, gives a good example; the caress is an
integral part of the cavalage. A prelude, but a prelude
which can not be omitted without compromising the essen-
tial part of the drama. It happens, however, that man,
able to overexcite himself cerebrally, may abridge, or even
neglect the prologue to coition: this is also noted in cer-
tain domestic mammifers, the bull and stallion. The mere
sight or smell of the other sex is doubtless enough to
produce a state permitting immediate union. This is
not the case with dogs, who are still more domestic,
the two sexes give themselves up to play, to explorations,
they demand each other's consent, courtship continues,
sometimes the male, despite his condition, retreats; more
often the female lowers the draw-bridge of her tail, and
closes the fortress. One knows the provocations of birds.
M. Mantegazza has agreeably recounted the sexual play
of two vultures, the female shut in the carcass of an al-
most devoured horse, interrupted her pecking of carrion,
to groan deeply, turning her head to look up into the
air. A male vulture soared above the larder, replying to
the groans of the female. However, when the overexcited
male descended toward the supposedly willing vulturess,
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
she retreated into the carcass, and after a short dispute
she made him understand that the time was not yet ripe,
and sent him off. After which the groans recommenced;
the female seemed annoyed; she mounted the cage of
bone, swelling her wings, lifting her tail, cooing. The
union finally took place in a great commotion of ruffled
feathers and shaken bones.
The same author has precisely noted the complicated
preludes indulged in by two sparrows. I give the resume,
graphically: A troop of sparrows on the roof in the
morning; calm, they make their toilet. Arrives a large
male who emits a violent cry; one of the females replies
at once, not by a cry but by an act : she leaves the group.
The male joins her, she flies to a neighbouring roof ; there
follows a long chatter beak to beak. New flight; the
male rests in the sun, then rejoins the minx. The as-
saults begin, the male is repulsed. The female moves
off, in little hops. The edge of the roof stops the flight,
she profits by this excuse and surrenders.
But it is the prodigious insect whom one must inter-
rogate. One knows the cantharides, these beautiful cole-
optera on whom pharmacy has inflicted so wicked a repu-
tation. The female gnaws her oak leaf, the male arrives,
mounts her back, enlaces her with his hind feet. Then
with his stretched abdomen he flagellates the female alter-
nately to right and left with frantic speed. At the same
time he massages her, lashes her neck furiously with his
front feet, all his body shakes and vibrates. The female
remains passive, awaiting the calm. It comes. Without
letting go the male stretches out his forelegs in a cross,
unbends a little, wagging from head and corselet. The
129
THE NATURAL
female starts eating again. The calm is short; the male's
follies recommence. Then there is another manoeuvre,
with the fold of his legs and tarses, he seizes the female's
antennae, forces her to lift her head, at the same time
redoubling the lashing of her flanks. New pose; new
start of the flagellation: finally the female opens. The
coupling lasts a day and a night, after which the male
falls, but remains knotted to the female who drags him
from leaf to leaf, the penis attached to her organs. Some-
times he also takes a mouthful here and there; when he
drops off it is to die. The female lays the eggs and dies
in her turn. The cerocome, an insect kin to the cantha-
ride, has analogous habits, but the female is even colder,
and the male is obliged to tap more than one before get-
ting an answer. In vain he beats the sides of his chosen
companion with his paws, she remains insensible, inert.
This action, moreover, has the full appearance of having
passed to a state of mania in the male muscles, so much
so that, in default of females, males mount and pummel
each other. As soon as a male is charged by another male
he takes the female attitude and remains quiet; one sees
pyramids of three or four males; in which case the top
one is the only one wildly waving his feet; the others
remain immobile, as if their position of mounts trans-
formed them into passive animals: probably because their
muscles are pinned down. (For these two observations
see Fabre, "Souvenirs" vol. II. Cerocomes, mylabres et
zonitis.)
It is rare for a female to assist the male in his work,
but there remains the obstacle of the other males. Con-
trary to what one might think, there is no relation be-
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
tween the male's social character and his amorous char-
acter. Ferocious animals show themselves at the moment
of love-making much more placid than gentle or even
timid animals. The scary rabbit is an impetuous, tyran-
nous and jealous lover. If the female does not accede to
his first desire, he rages. She is, moreover, very lascivious
and gestation in no way interrupts her amours. The
hare, who does not pass for audacious, is an ardent and
heady lover; he fights furiously with his peers for the
possession of a female. They are animals very well
equipped for love, the penis greatly developed, clitoris
almost as large. The males make real voyages, run for
entire nights in search of the doe-hare who is sedentary:
like the doe-rabbit, she never refuses, even when preg-
nant.
Martins, polecats, sables, rats fight violently during
the rutting season. Rats accompany their fights with
sharp cries. Stags and wildboars, and a great number
of other species fight to the death for the possession of
females; a practice not unknown to humanity. Even
heavy tortoises feel exasperation from love; the defeated
male is tilted onto his back.
Finer, destined perhaps for a superior and charming
civilization, the birds like combat; sometimes the duel
is serious, as in gallinaceae, cock-fights, often it is a cour-
tesy, a mimicry. The female of the rock-cock of Brazil
is tawny and without beauty, the male is yellow-orange,
with crest bordered in deep red, the long wing feathers
and tail feathers are red-brown. One sees the females
ranged in a circle as a crowd about jugglers, the males
are strutting, cutting capers, moving their colour-shot
THE NATURAL
feathers, getting themselves admired and desired. From
time to time a female admits that she is moved, a couple
is formed. But the tetras, heather-cocks of North
America, have still more curious customs. Their fights
have become exactly what they have with us, that is,
dances. It is no longer the tourney, it is the tour-de-
valse. What completes the proof that these parades are
a survival, a transformation, is that the males, being
amused by them, perform them not only before but after
coupling. They even practice them for diversion while
the females are sitting on the eggs, absorbed in maternal
duty. Travellers thus describe the tetras' dance (Milton
and Cheaddle, "Atlantic to Pacific," p. 171 of the French
translation) : "They gather, twenty or thirty in a chosen
place, and begin to dance like mad. Opening their
wings, they draw together their feet, like men doing the
danse du sac. Then they advance toward each other, do
a waltz turn, pass to a second partner, and so on. This
contre-danse of prairie chickens is very amusing. They
become so absorbed in it that one can approach quite
near."
Birds of Australia and New Guinea x make love with a
charming ceremony. To attract his mistress the male
makes a veritable country-house, or, if he is less skilful,
a rustic bower of greenery. He plants rushes, green
sprigs, for he is small, about the size of a blackbird;
he bends them into a vault, often a metre long. He
strews the floor with leaves, flowers, red fruits, white
1 One has the unpronounceable name, savants designating it by
the jumble of letters: Ptilinorhynches. The other is called the
132
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
bits of bone, bright pebbles, bits of metal, jewels stolen
in the neighbourhood. They say that when Australians
miss a ring or a pair of scissors, they search these green
tents. Our magpie shows a certain taste for bright
objects: people tell tales about him. The "gardener-
bird" of New Guinea is still more ingenious, to such a
degree that his work is mistaken for human work and
people are deceived thereby. With his beak and claws
he manages as well and better than peasants, often show-
ing a decorative taste which they lack. People search for
the "origin of art": there you have it, in the sexual game
of a bird. Our aesthetic manifestations are but a develop-
ment of this same instinct to please which, in one specie
over-excites the male, in another moves the female. If
there is a surplus it will be spent aimlessly, for pure
pleasure: that is human art; its origin is that of the art
of birds and insects.
The Grande Encyclopedic has given a picture of the
gardener-bird's pleasure house. He is called in most
scholarly parlance the Amblyornis inornata, because he
is lacking in personal beauty. One would take his house
for the work of some intelligent delicate pygmy. We
find the description of it, after the Italian traveller M. O.
Beccari x "In crossing a magnificent forest M. Beccari
found himself suddenly in the presence of a little conical
cabin, in front of which was a lawn strewn with flowers;
he at once recognized the sort of hut which M. Bruijn's
huntsmen had described to him as the work of a dark
'The title of his study is curious "Les Cabanes et les jardins
de 1'Amblyornis." (Annales du Musee d'histoire naturelle de
Genes, 1876).
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THE NATURAL
bird somewhat larger than a blackbird. He made a very
exact sketch of it, and verifying the native's tales by his
own observation, he found out how the bird makes this
building which is not so much a nest as a pleasure
house. The amblyornis chooses a little clearing with
unbroken lawn and a small tree in the middle. Around
this tree or bush which serves as axis, the bird places a
little moss, then he plants slantwise the branches of a
plant which will continue to grow for some time; jux-
taposition of branches form the inclined walls of the
hut. On one side they are left open to make a doorway,
before which is the garden whose elements are gathered
with difficulty, tuft by tuft, at some distance. After
having carefully cleaned the lawn, the amblyornis sows
it with flowers and fruits which he collects in the neigh-
bourhood, and which he renews from time to time." This
primitive gardener belongs to the bird of paradise fam-
ily, remarkable for the beauty of their plumage. It
seems that not being able to dress himself, he has ex-
teriorized his instinct. According to travellers, these
cabins are true houses of rendezvous, the country-boxes
of the seventeenth century, the "follies" of the XVIIIth.
The gallant bird ornaments it with everything that might
please the invited female; if she is satisfied, it is the
abode of love, after having been that of declarations.
I do not know whether these oddities have been given
the importance which they should have been, in the his-
tory of birds and of humanity. The scholar, the only
person knowing such details, usually fails utterly to un-
derstand them. One savant whom I read, thinks of the
thieving magpie, and adds, these traits which are common
134
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
to them ally them closely to birds of paradise and cor-
vida. Doubtless, but that is not very important. The
grave fact is the gathering of the first flower. The useful
fact explains animality; the useless fact explains man.
Now, it is of capital importance to show that the useless
fact is not peculiar to man alone.
Crickets also have courting fights, but perhaps for
a different reason: the feebleness of their offensive weap-
ons, and the solidity of their armour. There is, how-
ever, a winner and loser. The loser decamps, the con-
queror sings. Then he shines himself, stamps, seems
nervous. Fabre says that emotion often renders him
mute; his elytra (wing-shells) shake without giving a
sound. The female cricket, witness of the duel, runs to
hide under a leaf as soon as it is over. "She draws back
the curtain a little, and looks out, and wants to be seen."
After this play, she shows herself completely, the cricket
rushes forward, makes a half-turn, rears up and slides
under her belly. The work finished, he gets away as
fast as possible, for we are before an enigmatic orthop-
ter, the female is quite ready to eat him. It is the
male's song which attracts the female cricket. When
she hears it, she listens, takes her bearings, obeys the
call. It is the same with cicadas, even though the two
sexes usually live side by side. By imitating the sound
of the male, one can deceive the females and make them
come to one.
Sometimes sight, sometimes smell guides the male.
Many hymenoptera, furnished with a powerful visual
organ keep watch for the females, spying the vicinity.
Thus also many day butterflies. When the male riotices
THE NATURAL
a female, he pursues, but in order to get in front of her,
to be seen, and he seems to tempt her with slow waving
of his wings. This display lasts often quite a long time.
Finally their antennae touch, their wings stroke each other,
and they fly off in company. The coupling often takes
place in the air; thus among pierides. In certain species,
bombyx for example, the females are heavy and even
aptera, the male who is in contrast lively, fecundates
several, going from one to the other, which is doubtless
what gives butterflies their reputation for inconstancy.
They live too short a time to deserve it: many born in the
morning do not see the next day's sun. One might
rather make them a symbol for pure thought. There are
some who do not eat, and among those who do not eat
there are some whom nature has vowed to virginity.
Hermaphrodites of a singular sort, male on the right side,
female on the left, they seem to be two sexual halves
welded together along the medial line. The organs whose
centre is cut by this line are but demi-organs good for
nothing save the entertainment of observers. Hybrid
butterflies, produced by crossing of two species, are not
very rare; they also are incapable of reproduction.
The coupling of day butterflies lasts only a few minutes,
among night butterflies it is often prolonged for a day and
a night, as in sphinx, phalenes, noctuelles. If it is a re-
ward, it is due to their long courageous voyages in quest
of the female whom they have divined. The great-pea-
cock moth covers several leagues of country in the at-
tempt to satisfy his desire. Blanchard tells of a natur-
alist who having caught a female bombyx and put her
in bis pocket, returned home escorted by a cloud of over
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
two hundred males. In spring, in a place where the great-
peacock is so rare that one with difficulty finds one or
two per year, the presence of a caged female will draw
a hundred males, as Fabre has shown by experiment.
These feverish males are endowed with very brief ardour.
Whether or no they have touched a female, they live
but two or three days. Enormous insects, larger than
a humming-bird, they do not eat; their bocal pieces are
merely an ornament, a decor: they are born to reproduce
and to die. The males seem infinitely more numerous
than the females, and it is probable that not more than
one in an hundred can accomplish his destiny. He who
misses the pursued female, who arrives too late, is lost:
his life is so short that it would be very difficult for
him to discover a second. It is true that in normal
circumstances the female should stop emitting her sexual
odour as soon as she has been ridden; the males are thus
attracted by the same female through a proportionately
shorter time and there is this much less chance of their
searches being unfruitful. Is it their sense of smell alone
that guides them?
At 8 a. m. at Fabre's place in Serignan, one saw the
cocoon of a lesser-peacock moth open; a female emerged
and was immediately imprisoned in a wire cage. At noon
a male arrived, the first that Fabre, who had lived there
all his life, had ever seen. The wind was blowing from
the north. The male came from the north, that is to
say, against the scent. At two o'clock ten had arrived.
Having come as far as the house without hesitation, they
were troubled, got the wrong window, wandered from
room to room, never went directly toward the female.
137
THE NATURAL
One would say that at this point they should have used
another sense, perhaps sight, despite their being cre-
puscular creatures, or that the cage bothered them. Per-
haps also it is the custom for the female to come and
play before them? It is, in any case, evident that sense
of smell plays an important role; the mystery would not
be less great if one supposed the bringing into play of
a special sense, that of sexual orientation. Fabre has
obtained equal success with the female of a very rare but-
terfly, the oak bombyx, or banded minime: in one morn-
ing sixty males arrived, turning about the prisoner. One
has observed analogous if not identical things in certain
serpents, in mammifera: everyone has seen dogs in the
country, drawn by a female in heat, coming from a con-
siderable distance, nearly a league, without one's being
able to say how their organism had got the news.
Explanations are vain in these matters. They divert
the curiosity without satisfying the reason. What one
sees clearly is a necessity: the act must be accomplished,
to this end, all obstacles, whatever they are, will be
overcome. Neither distance, nor the difficulty of the
voyage, nor the danger of the approach can drive back
the instinct. In man, who has sometimes the power to
escape the sexual commandments, disobedience may have
happy results. Chastity, as a transmuter, may change
unused sexual energy into intellectual or social energy; in
animals this transmutation of physical values is impos-
sible. The compass needle remains in one immutable
position, obedience is unescapable. That is why there is
so deep a rumble in nature when the spring orders are
posted. Vegetable flowers are not the only ones to open:
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
sexes of flesh also flower. Birds, fish take on new and
more vivid colours. There are songs, plays, pilgrimages.
Salmon who live quietly at the river-mouths, must gather,
depart, climb the streams, pass weirs, scrabble against
rocks which form the dams and cataracts, wear themselves
out leaping as arrows against all human and natural
obstacles. Males and females arrive worn out at the
end of their journey, the jray&re of fine sand where they
are to lay their eggs, and the males heroically to spend
the milt distilled from their blood.
Spring is not the only rutting season. Love's calendar
covers the year. In winter, wolves and foxes; in spring,
the birds and fish; in summer, insects and many mam-
mals; in autumn the deer. Winter is often the season
chosen by polar animals; the sable couples in January;
the ermine in March; the glutton, at the beginning and
end of winter. Domestic animals have often several sea-
sons; for the dog, cat and house-birds, spring and
autumn. One finds young otters at any time. Most
insects die after mating; but not all hemiptera, nor the
queen bee, nor certain coleoptera, nor certain flies. The
stag and the stallion empty themselves, but not the ram,
nor the bull nor the he-goat. The duration of pregnancy
in placentaires seems to have some relation to the size
of the animal; mare, eleven to twelve months; ass, twelve
months and a half; cow, doe, nine months; sheep, goat,
wolf, vixen, five months; sow, four months; bitch, two
months; cat, six weeks; rabbit, one month.
There are oddities: fecundated in August, the roe is not
delivered until seven and a half months later, the embryo
remaining a long time stationary, and waiting for the
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THE NATURAL
spring to start again. In a she-bat ovulation does not
take place until the end of winter, although she has
received the male in the autumn: females caught during
hibernation have the vagina swollen with inert sperm
which does not act until the spring waking.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER XVI
POLYGAMY
Rarity of monogamy. — Taste for change in animals. —
Roles of monogamy and polygamy in the stability or
instability of specific types. — Strife of the couple
against polygamy. — Couples among insects. — Among
fish, batrachians, saurians. — Monogamy of pigeons, of
nightingales. — Monogamy in carnivora, in rodents. —
Habits of the rabbit. — The ichneumon. — Unknown
causes of polygamy. — Rarity and superabundance of
males. — Polygamy in insects. — In fish. — In gallinacea,
in web-footed birds. — In herbivora. — The antelope's
harem. — Human polygamy. — How it tempers the
couple among civilized races.
THERE are no monogamous animals save those which
love only once during their lifetime. Exceptions to this
rule have not sufficient constancy to be erected into a
counter-rule. There are monogamists in fact, there are
none of necessity, from the time an animal lives long
enough to commit the reproductive act several times.
Free female mammals nearly always flee the male who
has once served them, they need a new one. A bitch
does not receive last season's dog save in direst extremity.
This appears to me to be the struggle of the specie against
variety. The couple is the maker of varieties. Polygamy
141
THE NATURAL
drags them back to the general type of the specie. In-
dividuals of a specie frankly polygamous should present
a very great similarity; if the species incline toward a
certain monogamy, the dissemblances become more
numerous. It is not an illusion which makes us recognize
in human races almost monogamous, a lesser uniformity
of type than in polygamous societies or those given over
to promiscuity, or among animal species. The example
of the dog seems the worst that one could have chosen.
It isn't, it is the best, considering that in receiving suc-
cessively individuals of different variety, the bitch tends
to produce individuals not of a specialized breed, but on
the contrary of a type where several breeds will be
mixed, individuals which in crossing and recrossing in
their turn, will end, if the dogs live in a free state, in
forming one single specie. Sexual liberty tends to estab-
lish uniformity of type; monogamy strives against this
tendency and maintains diversity.1 Another consequence
of this manner of seeing is that one must consider mo-
nogamy as favourable to intellectual development, intelli-
gence being a differentiation which accomplishes itself
more often, in proportion as there are individuals and
groups who differ physically. Physical uniformity en-
genders uniformity of sensibility, thence of intelligence;
this does not need to be explained; now intelligences
count, and mark only their differences; uniform, they are
as if they were not; impotent to hook themselves one onto
the other, to react against each other, lacking asper-
1 That is to say in the eye of some imaginary divinity who
might be supposed to regard humanity, or even the slower
mammals from a timeless or say five century altitude. — Trans-
lator's note.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
ities, lacking contrary currents. This is the flock, in
which each member makes the same gesture of flight, of
biting, or of roaring.
Neither the conditions of absolute monogamy, nor
those of absolute promiscuity seem to be found at pres-
ent in humanity, nor among animals; but one sees the
couple, in several animal and human species, either in
state of tendency, or in state of habit. More often, espe-
cially among insects, the father, even if he survives it a
little while, remains indifferent, to the consequences of
the genital act. At other times, the fights between males
so reduce their number that a sole male remains the
master and servant of a great number of females. So
one must distinguish between true, and successive poly-
gamy; between the monogamy of one season, and that
of an entire lifetime; and finally one must set apart those
animals who make love only once, or during one season
which is followed by death. These different varieties
and nuances demand methodic classification. It would
be a long work, and would perhaps not attain true exacti-
tude, for in animals, as in man, one must count with
caprice in sexual matters: when a faithful dove is tired
of her lover, she takes flight, and soon forms a new
couple with an adulterous male. The couple is natural,
but the permanent couple is not. Man has never bent
to it, save with difficulty, even though it be one of the
principal conditions of his superiority.
The breasts of the male do not seem to prove the
primordiality of the couple in mammals. Although there
are veridic examples of the male's having given suck,
it is difficult to consider the male udder as destined for
143
THE NATURAL
a real role, or for an emergency milking.1 This replace-
ment has been too rarely observed for one to use it as a
basis of argument. Embryology gives a good explana-
tion of the existence of this useless organ. An useless
instrument is, moreover, quite as frequent in nature as
the absence of a useful instrument. Perfect concordance
of organ and act is rare. In the case of insects who live
but for one love-season, sometimes for two real seasons
if they can benumb themselves for the winter, polygamy
is nearly always the consequence of the rarity of males,
or the superabundance of females. Space is too vast,
their food too abundant for there to be truly deadly
combats between males. Moreover, their love accom-
plished, the minuscule folk ask only to die, the couple
is formed only for the actual time of fecundation, the
two animals at once resume their liberty, that is for
the female to deliver her eggs, and for the male to
languish, and sometimes to cast a final song to the
winds. There are exceptions to this rule, but if one
looks upon the exceptions with the same gaze as on the
rule, one would see in nature only what one sees on
the surface of a river, vague movements and passing
shadows. To conceive some reality, one must con-
ceive a rule, first, as an instrument of vision and of
measure. With most insects the male does nothing
but live; he deposits his seed in the female receptacle,
flies on, vanishes. He does not share any of the labours
preparatory to laying. Alone the female sphex engages
1 One believes nevertheless that the male bat suckles one of
the two young that the couple regularly produces. But these
animals are so odd and so heteroclite that this example, if it is
authentic, would not be a decisive argument.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
in her terrible and clever strife with the cricket, whom
she paralyzes with three stabs of her dagger in his
three moto-nervous centres; alone she hollows the oblique
burrow at the bottom of which live her larvae; alone
she adorns it, fills it with provisions, closes it. Alone
the female cerceris heaps up in the deep gallery the
stunned weevils and burn-cows, fruit of her excava-
tions, larder for her progeny. Alone the she-osmie, she-
wasp, she-philanthe — one would have to cite nearly all
the hymenoptera. One understands better, when the
insect deposits her eggs by chance, without prefatory
manoeuvres, or by special instruments, that the male
co-operation is lacking; only the female cicada can sink
her clever burrow in the olive bark.
There are however couples among insects. Among
coleoptera there are the "purse-maker," the necrophore.
Stercorian geotrupes, lunar copris, onitis bison, sisyphus,
work soberly side by side preparing the larder for their
coming families. In these cases, the male seems master,
he directs the manoeuvres in the complicated operations
of the necrophores. A couple get busy about a corpse,
say of a field mouse; nearly always one or two isolated
males join them, the troop is organized, one sees the
chief engineer explore the territory and give orders.
The female awaits them, motionless, ready to obey, to
follow the movement. As soon as there is a couple the
male necrophore commands. The male assists the female
during the work of arranging the cell and the laying.
Most purse-makers, sisyphus or copris make and trans-
port together the pill which serves as food for the larvae;
their couple is just like that of birds. One might be-
145
THE NATURAL
lieve that in this case monogamy is necessitated by the
nature of the work; not at all: the male in other quite
closely related species, sacred scarab, for example, leaves
the female alone to build the excremental ball in which
she encloses her eggs.
Coming up to vertebrata one finds also certain examples
of a sort of monogamy: when the male fish serves as
hatcher for his own eggs, either carrying them in a
special pouch, or heroicly sheltering them in his mouth.
This is rare, since, usually, the two sexes of fish do not
approach each other, do not even know each other.
Batrachians, on the contrary, are monogamous; the fe-
male does not lay save under male pressure, and it is so
slow an operation, preceded by such long manoeuvres that
the whole season is filled with it. The male of the com-
mon land toad rolls the long chaplet of eggs about his feet
as soon as it is divided, and goes in the evening to
place it in the neighbouring pool. Nearly all saurians
seem also to be monogamous. The he and she lizard
form a couple said to last several years. Their amours
are ardent, they clasp each other closely belly to belly.
Birds are generally considered monogamous, save
gallinaceae and web- footed birds; but exceptions appear
so numerous that one would have to name the species
one by one. The fidelity of pigeons is legendary, and is
perhaps only a legend. The male pigeon certainly has
tendencies to infidelity and even to polygamy. He de-
ceives his companion ; he goes so far as to inflict upon her
the shame of having a concubine under the conjugal
roof! And these two spouses, he tyrannizes over them,
he enslaves them by beating. The female, it is true,
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
is not always of an easy disposition. She has her
caprices. Sometimes, refusing her mate, she deserts
him and gives herself to the first comer. One will not
find here any of the zoological anecdotes on the industry
of birds, their union in devotion to the specie. The
habits of these new-comers in the world, are very un-
stable; yet among certain gallinaceae, monogamous for
exception, like the partridge, the males seem pulled by
contrary desires, they undergo the couple rather than
choose it, and their share in the rearing of young is
often very slight. One has seen the male red partridge,
after mating, abandon his female and rejoin a troop of
male vagabonds. The nightingales, perfect pair, sit on
the eggs turn by turn. The male, when the female
comes to relieve him, remains near by and sings until
she is comfortably settled on the eggs. Still more
devoted is the male talegalle, a sort of Australian tur-
key. He makes the nest, an enormous heap of dead
leaves; when the female has laid, he watches the eggs,
comes from time to time to uncover them for exposure
to the sun. He takes his share of watching the young,
sheltering them under leaves until they are able to fly.
Of mammals, the carnivora and rodents often prac-
tice a certain, at least temporary, monogamy. Foxes
live in couples, and educate the young foxes. One finds
their real habits in the old "Roman du Renart": Renard
the fox goes vagabond, hunting for prey and windfalls,
while Madame Hermaline, his wife, waits at home, in
her bower at Maupertuis. The vixen teaches her chil-
dren the art of killing and dividing; their apprentice-
ship is made on the still living game which the male
147
THE NATURAL
purveyor has brought to the house. The rabbit is very-
rough in love; the hamster, another rodent, often be-
comes carnivorous during the rutting season; they say
that he is quite ready to eat his young, and that the
female, fearing his ferocity, leaves him before delivery.
These aberrations are exaggerated in captivity, and af-
fect even the female. One knows that the she-rabbit
sometimes eats her young; this happens especially when
one has the imprudence to touch or even to look too
closely at the young rabbits. This is enough to bring
on a violent disturbance of maternal sentiment. The
same dementia has been observed in a vixen who had
kittened in a cage; one day someone passed, and looked
steadily at the young foxes, a quarter of an hour later
they were throttled.
Various explanations are given for this practice among
she-rabbits, the simplest being that they are driven
by thirst to kill the young in order to drink the blood.
This is rather Dantescan for she-rabbits. They say
also, regarding both wild and tame rabbits, that the
female when surprised kills the young because she has
not industry like the doe-hare, cat, or bitch, to transport
them to some other place or to save at least one, by
the scruff of its neck. The third explanation is that,
devouring the afterbirth, like nearly all mammals, and
this from physiological motive, the doe-rabbit acquires
a taste, and continues the meal, absorbing the young as
well. Without rejecting any of these explanations one
may present several others. First, it is not only the
females who eat the young, the males are equally given
to it. Being very lascivious, the male rabbit tries to
148
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
get rid of his young, in order to stop suckling, and
have his female again. On the other hand, it is a
regular fact, that as soon as she has retaken the habit
of having the male, the mother rabbit, even if she is still
giving suck, at once ceases to recognize her offspring,
her brief ideas already turned toward her new, coming
family. Different causes may engender identical acts,
and different lines of reasoning bring the same con-
clusions. There is reasoning in this case of the rabbit;
there is no reasoning save in case 01 initial error, when
there is trouble in the intellect. This trouble and the
final massacre is all that one can state definitely:
the reasoning escapes our analysis.
Is the rabbit really monogamous? Perhaps, with a
monogamy for the season, or from necessity. The
male, in any case pays no attention to the young, unless
it be to throttle them; thus the female as soon as she is
gravid, takes refuge in an isolated burrow. Their coup-
ling, which occurs especially toward evening, is re-
peated as often as five or six times an hour, the female
crouching in a particular manner; the break away is
very sudden, the male throwing himself back, sidewise
and uttering a short cry. What really makes one doubt
the monogamy of the rabbit is that one male is enough
for eight or ten females, that he is a great runner,
that the males have murderous fights among themselves.
Doubtless one must take each specie separately. Buf-
fon pretends that in a warren the oldest buck rabbits
have authority over the young. An observer of rabbit
habits, M. Mariot-Didieux, admits this trait of superior
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THE NATURAL
sociability in angoras, which is just the specie Buffon
had studied.
Buck rabbits have still other aberrations, hunters pre-
tend that they pursue doe-hares, tire them and wear
them out by their lustiness; it is certain that these
couplings give no result.
The Egyptian ichneumon lives in families. It seems
that it is very interesting to see them on a hunting
expedition, first the male, then the female, then the
young in Indian file. Female and young do not take
their eyes off father, and imitate all his gestures with
care: one might think the train was a large serpent mov-
ing in reeds. The wolf who like the fox lives in pairs,
helps his female and feeds her, but he does not know
his young and will eat them if they come to hand. Cer-
tain great apes, gibbon and orang are temporarily
monogamous.
Polygamy would be explained by the rarity of males;
which is not the case with most mammals, among whom
the males are almost constantly more numerous. Buffon
was the first to note this predominance, neither has he
nor has anyone since, given a satisfactory explanation.
People have said that in man, at least, the elder parent
gives the sex to the offspring, and the more surely as
the difference in age is greater, but, by this reckoning
one would have almost nothing but males. People have
also said that the younger the woman, the more likely
the child to be male. The early marriages of the past
are supposed to have yielded more males than the late
marriages of the present. None of these statements is
serious. What remains past doubt is that European
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
humanity, to consider only that, gives an excess of
males. The general average is about 105, with ex-
tremes of 1 01 in Russia, and 113 in Greece; the French
average is the same as the general average. One has
not been able to make out, in these variations, either in-
fluence of race, or of climate, or of taxes, or of national-
ity, or anything else in particular. There are more
male humans, more male sheep: it is a fact, which being
regular, will be difficult to explain.
We find here superabundance, there penury of males,
but neither does the abundance determine the customs,
nor is it likely the lack of males would do so. There are
so few males among gnats that Fabre was the first to rec-
ognize them, the proportion about one male to ten females.
This in no way produces polygamy, for the male dies the
instant after coupling. Nine out of ten gnat females die
virgin, and even without having seen a male, without
knowing that males exist: perhaps celibacy augments
their ferocity, for it is the female gnat and she alone who
sucks our gore. One supposes also that female spiders
outnumber the males ten or twenty to one: perhaps the
buck who has escaped the jaws of one mistress has the
courage to risk his life yet again? It is possible, the male
spider who survives his amours may live on for several
years. Polygamy seems to exist, and in its most refined
form, with one sort of spider, the ctenize, whose males are
peculiarly rare. The female digs a nest in the earth,
into which the male descends; he lives there some time,
then he leaves, comes back: there are several houses
between which he divides his time equitably.
The polygamy of a curious little fish, the stickleback, is
THE NATURAL
of the same sort, although more naive. The male builds
a grass nest, then goes in search of a female, brings her
back to the nest, invites her to lay; scarcely has his first
companion departed when he brings in another. He only
stops when there is a satisfactory treasure of eggs, then
he fecundates them in the usual manner. Thence on he
guards the nest against malefactors, and watches the
hatching. In the odd reversal of roles, the young recog-
nize their father; their mother may be the fish passing
between them, or the one gliding off like a shadow, or
the one chewing a grass blade. When the stickleback
world becomes reasonable, that is to say absurd, it will
perhaps give itself up to the "recherche de la maternite"?
Their philosophers will demand "Why should the father
alone be charged with the education of his offspring?"
Up to the present one knows nothing except that he edu-
cates them with joy and affection. Among sticklebacks
and among men there is no answer to such question save
the answer given by facts. One might as well ask why
humanity is not hermaphrodite, like the snails, who
strictly divide the pleasures and burdens of love, for all
snails commit the male act, and all lay. Why has the
female ovaries, and the male testicles: and this flower
pistils, and this one stamens? One ends in baby-talk.
The wish to correct nature is unnecessary. It is hard
enough to understand her, even a little, as she is. When
she wishes to establish the absolute responsibility of the
father, she establishes the strict couple, and especially,
absolute polygamy. The pigeon is no longer certain of
being the father of his young; the cock can not doubt
it, he being the sole male among all his hens. But nature
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
has no secondary intentions, she keeps watch that, tem-
porary or durable, fugitive or permanent the couples are
fecund; that is all.
Gallinaceae and web-feet present certain birds best
known and most useful to us. They are nearly all poly-
gamous. The cock needs about a dozen hens, he can do
with a much larger number, but in that case his ardour
wears itself out. The duck, very licentious, is accused
of sodomy. Not only is he polygamous, but anything
will serve him. He might better be a natural example of
promiscuity. A gander is good for ten or twelve geese,
the cock-pheasant for eight or ten hens. The lyrure
tetras needs many more, he leads a sultan's harem be-
hind him. At dawn, in the season of amours, the male
starts whistling with a noise like steel on a grindstone,
simultaneously stretching himself up, and spreading the
fan of his tail, opening and puffing his wings. When the
sun clears the horizon he rejoins his females, dances be-
fore them, while they devour him with their eyes, then
he mounts them, according to his caprice, and with great
vivacity.
Polygamy is the rule among herbivora; bulls, bucks,
stallions, bison are made to reign over a troop of females.
Domesticity changes their permanent polygamy into
successive polygamy. Stags go from female to female
without tying up to any; the females follow this example.
A specie immediately akin gives, on the contrary, an
example of the couple; the roebuck and his doe live in
family, and bring up their young until these are ready
to mate. The male of a certain Asian antelope needs
more than a hundred docile females. Naturally, these
153
THE NATURAL
harems can only be formed by the destruction of other
males. This hundred females represents possibly more
than a hundred males put out of business, males being
always the more numerous sex, among mammals. The
utility of such hecatombs to the race is not certain.
Doubtless one may suppose that the surviving male is
the strongest, or one of the strongest of his generation,
that is the lucky element, but whatever his vigour it may
be expected to wane at some point or other before a
hundred females desiring satisfaction. Some females are
forgotten, others fecundated in moments of weariness:
for a certain number of good products, there are a num-
ber of mediocre creations. True, these are destined, if
male, to perish in future combats; but if they are female,
and if they receive the favours of the chief, this system
might have for consequence the progressive degradation
of the specie. It is however, probable that the necessary
equilibrium is re-established; combats between females,
combats of coquetry, incitements of femininity, doubtless
take place, and it is the triumph of the malest male and
of the most female females.
Virey asserts, in Deterville's "Nouveau dictionnaire
dliistoire naturelle," that the greater polygamous apes
get on very well with women indigenes. It is possible,
but no product has ever been born of these aberrations,
which we must leave to theological works on bestialitas.
Men and women, even of the Aryan race have at times
set out to prove the radical animality of the human
specie by the peculiarity of their tastes. The interest in
these matters is chiefly psychological, and if one can
draw no proof of evolution from the chance relations
154
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
between woman and dog, man and goat, the coupling of
primates of different orders offers no evidence either.
There is however a relation between man and apes, it is
that they are both divisible into polygamists and monog-
amists, at least temporary; but this does not differentiate
them from most other animal species.
In most human races there is a radical polygamy,
dissimulated under a show-front of monogamy. Here
generalizations are no longer possible, the individual
emerges and with his fantasy upsets all observations,
and annihilates all statistics. The monogamist's brother
is polygamous. A woman has known only one man, and
her mother was every one's fancy. One may assert the
universal custom of marriage and deduce monogamy as a
conclusion, and this will be false or true according to the
epoch, milieu, race, moral tendencies of the moment.
Moral codes are essentially unstable, since they represent
only a hand-book ideal of happiness; morality will
modify itself according to the mobility of this ideal.
Physiologically, monogamy is in no way required by
the normal conditions of human life. Children? If the
father's help is necessary it can be exercised over the
children of several women as well as over those of one
woman only. The duration of tutelage among civilized
people is, moreover, excessive; it is dragged out, when
it is a matter of certain careers, almost until ripe age.
Normally puberty ought to liberate the young human,
as it liberates the young of other mammals. The couple
need then last only ten or fifteen years; but female
fecundity accumulates children at a year's interval, so
that, as long as the father's virility lasts, there might be
THE NATURAL
always one feeble creature having right to demand
protection. Human polygamy could then, never be suc-
cessive polygamy, save by exception, that is, if man were
an obedient animal, submitting to normal sexual rules,
and always fecund; but this successivity is frequent and
divorce has legalized it. The other and true polygamy,
polygamy actual, temporary or permanent, is still less
rare among people of European civilization, but nearly
always secret and never legal; it has for corollary a
polyandry exercised under the same conditions. This
sort of polygamy is very different from that of Mormons,
Turks, gallinaceae and antelopes, it is nothing more than
promiscuity. It does not dissolve the couple, in dimin-
ishing its tyranny it renders it more desirable. Nothing
so favours marriage, and consequently, social stability, as
the de facto indulgence in temporary polygamy. The
Romans well understood this, and legalized concubinage.
One can not here deal with a question so remote from,
natural questions. To condense one's answer into brief-
est possible space, one would say that man, and princi-
pally civilized man, is vowed to the couple, but he only
endures it on condition that he may leave and return to
it at will. This solution seems to conciliate his contra-
dictory tastes, and is more elegant than the one offered
by divorce, which is always the same thing over again;
it is in conformity not only with human, but also with
animal tendencies. It is favourable to the species, in as-
suring the suitable up-bringing of children, and also to
the complete satisfaction of a need, which, in a state
of civilization is inseparable either from aesthetic pleasure
or sentimental pleasure.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
CHAPTER XVII
LOVE AMONG SOCIAL ANIMALS
Organization of reproduction among hymenoptera. — Bees.
— Wedding of the queen. — Mother bee, cause and con-
sciousness of the hive. — Sexual royalty. — Limits of in-
telligence among bees. — Natural logic and human
logic. — Wasps. — Bumble-bees. — Ants. — Notes on their
habits. — Very advanced state of their civilization. —
Slavery and parasitism among ants. — Termites. — The
nine principal active forms of termites. — Great age of
their civilization. — Beavers. — Tendency of industrious
animals to inactivity.
SOCIAL hymenoptera, bumble-bees, hornets, wasps, bees,
have peculiar love customs very different from those of
other animal species. It is not monogamy, since one
finds in it nothing resembling the couple, nor polygamy,
since the males know only one female, when they have
even that adventure, and since the females are fecundated
for the whole of their life by a single fecundation. It is,
rather, a sort of matriarchate, even though the queen bee
is not generally the mother of more than a part of the
hive whereover she rules, the other part having sprung
from the queen who has gone off with the new swarm, or
from the one who has remained in the former hive. In
very numerous hives there are about six or seven hun-
157
THE NATURAL
dred males to one female. Copulation takes place in
the air; as is the case with ants, it is only possible after
a long flight has filled with air the pouches which cause
the male's organ to emerge. Between these pockets, or
aeriferous bladders shaped like perforated horns, emerges
the penis, a small white body, plump and bent back at
the point. In the vagina, which is round, wide and
shallow, the sperm-pouch opens; it is a reservoir which
can contain they say, a score of million of spermato-
zoides, destined to fecundate the eggs, during several
years in proportion as they are to be laid. The form of
the penis and the manner in which the sperm is coagu-
lated by a viscous liquid into a veritable spermatophore,
cause the death of the male. The copulation ended, he
wishes to disengage himself but only manages to do so in
leaving in the vagina not only the penis but all the organs
attached to it. He falls like an empty bag, while the
queen, returned to the hive, stops at the entrance, makes
her toilet, aided by the workers who crowd about her:
with her mandibles she gently removes the spine which
has remained in her belly, and deans the place with
lustral attention. Then she enters the second period of
her life: maternity. This penis which remains fast in
the vagina makes one think of the darts of fighters which
also remain in the wound; be it love or war the over-
courageous beastlet expires, worn out and mutilated;
there is in this a peculiar facility of dehiscence which
seems very rare.
The wedding of the queen bee remained a long time
absolutely mysterious, and even today there are only a
very few observers who have been the distant witnesses
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
of it. Reaumur, having isolated a queen and a male, wit-
nessed a play or combat with movements which he inter-
preted with ingenuity. He could not see the actual coup-
ling, which only takes place in the air. His story, is
unique and nothing since has confirmed it. He shows
us a queen approaching a male, sucking him with her
proboscis, offering him honey, stroking him with her feet,
and finally irritated by the coldness of her suitor, mount-
ing his back, applying her vulva to the male organ,
which Reaumur describes very well ("Memoirs," tome
V) and which he represents as covered with a white
viscous liquid. The real preludes, at least in a state of
liberty, contradict the great observer. The female seems
in no way aggressive. Here are the three authentic
accounts I have been able to discover:
"6th July, 1849, M. Hannemann, bee-keeper at Wur-
temburg, Thuringia was seated near my hive when his
attention was aroused by an unaccustomed buzzing.
Suddenly he saw thirty or forty drones" (i. e., false
drones, male bees) "rapidly pursuing a queen-bee, about
twenty or thirty feet up in the air. The group filled a
space about two feet in diameter. Sometimes, in their
flight, they came as low as ten feet from the ground,
then rose, flying north to south. He followed them about
a hundred yards, then a building interrupted him. The
group of drones formed a sort of cone with the queen at
the summit, then the cone enlarged into a globe of which
she was the centre: at this moment the queen succeeded
in getting away and rose vertically, still followed by
the drones who had reformed the cone under her." l
1 Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) Janvier, 1850.
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THE NATURAL
"Some years later the Rev. Millette, at Witemarsh,
observed the final phase of the act. During a hiving,
he noticed a flying queen, who an instant later, was
stopped by a male. After having flown about a rod they
fell to the ground hooked to each other. He approached
and captured them both, at the very moment when the
male had abandoned himself to the embrace; he carried
them to the house and let them loose in a closed room.
The queen, angry, flew toward the window; the male
after dragging himself for an instant across the open palm
of the observer's hand, fell to floor and died. Both
male and female had at the tip of the abdomen drops of
a milky white liquid; by squeezing the male, he saw
that the male had lost his genital organs." (Farmer and
Gardener, 1859.)
"Having seen the queen go out, M. Carrey closed the
entrance of the hive. During his absence, which lasted
a quarter of an hour, three false-drones came to the en-
trance and finding it closed, continued flying. When the
queen on her return was only about three feet from the
hive, one of the drones flew very rapidly toward her,
throwing his legs around her body. They stopped, rest-
ing on a long grass-blade. Then an explosion was dis-
tinctly heard, and they separated. The drone fell to
the ground quite dead, with abdomen much contracted.
After a few circles in the air, the mother entered the
hive." (Copulation of the mother bee, in 1'Apiculteur,
6e annee, 1862.)
Save the remark about the final explosion, these three
accounts accord well enough, and give an exact idea of
one of the couplings most difficult to get sight of.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
It is, moreover, the one half-obscure point in bee life.
One knows all the rest, their three sexes, rigorously
specialized, the precise industry of the wax-workers, the
diligence of the collectresses, the political sense of these
extraordinary amazons, their initiatives, when the hive
is too full, their starts for the formation of new swarms,
the duels of queens where the populace intervene, the
massacre of males as soon as they are useless, the nurse's
art in transforming a vulgar larva into the larva of a
queen, the methodical activity of these republics where
all wills, united in a single conscience, have no other aim
but the common well-being and the conservation of the
race. It is however these over-mechanical virtues which
constitute the inferiority of the bee; the workers are
extremely laborious and well-behaved, but they lack even
that slight personality which characterizes sexed insects.
The much less reasonable queen is more living, she is
capable of jealousy, rage, of despair when she feels her
royalty menaced by the new queen whom the nurses
have bred up in secret. Even the useless, noisy, pillag-
ing, parasitic males, drunk and swollen with vain sperm
are more attractive than the honest workers, and hand-
somer also, stronger, more slender, more elegant. Bee-
lovers generally despise these musketeers, yet it is they
who incarnate the animality, that is to say the beauty
of the specie. If it is true as M. Maeterlinck believes
(La Vie des Abeilles), that the most vigorous of seven
or eight hundred males finally seduces the royal virgin,
then their laziness, their greediness, their giddy stagger-
ing are but so many virtues.
It seems that the queen and even the workers can
161
THE NATURAL
without fecundation lay eggs which will hatch into males;
but copulation is necessary in order to produce females
and queens; now as only the queen can receive the
male, a hive without a queen is doomed. That is the
practical point of view, the sexual point of view leads
to other reflections. A female can, quite alone, give
birth to a male: but to have an egg hatch female, it
must be fecundated by a male born spontaneously: one
observes here the real exteriorization of the male organ,
a segmentation of the genital power, into two forces, the
male force and the female. Thus disunited, it acquires
a new faculty which will fully unfold itself by the reinte-
gration of the two halves of the initial force into a single
force. But why do the virgin-born ovules necessarily
give birth to males, among bees, and to females among
plant lice? That is the question defying answer. All
that one sees is that parthenogenesis is always transitory,
and that after a number of virginal generations, normal
fecundation always intervenes.
One can not say that the mother bee is a true queen,
a veritable chief, but she is the important personage in
the hive, the one without whom life stops. The workers
have the air of being mistresses; in reality their nervous
centre is in the queen; they act only for her, and by her.
Her disappearance sets the hive crazy, and drives it
to absurd endeavours, such as the transformation of a
nurse into a layer, though she will give eggs of one sex
only, so many useless mouths. In reflecting on this last
expedient one can measure the importance of sex, and
understand the absolutism of its royalty. Sex is king,
and there is no royalty save the sexual. The making
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
neuter of the workers, which sets them out of norm,
if it is a cause of order in the hive, is above all a cause
of death. There are no living creatures save those
who can perpetuate life.
The interest offered by bees is very great, but does
not pass that offered by the observation of most hymenop-
tera, social or solitary, or of certain neuroptera, such as
termites ; or even by beavers, and many birds. But bees
have been through many ages our sugar-producers, and
they alone; hence man's tenderness for insects more valu-
able than all others to him. Their intelligence is well de-
veloped, but soon shows its limitations. People pretend
that bees know their master, a manifest error. The
relations of bees and man are purely human. It is evi-
dent that they are as ignorant of man as are all the
other insects, and all other invertebrata. They allow
themselves to be exploited, in the sense of their instinct,
to the limit of famine and muscular exhaustion. Virgil's
phrase is excessively true, in all the senses one wishes
to take: Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. (Bees mak-
ing honey not for yourselves.) These clever, witty
creatures are fooled by the gross fakes of our industrial
cunning. When they have stacked their winter's pro-
visions, honey, into their wax combs, one removes the
honeycombs, and replaces them by sockets of varnished
paper: and the solemn bees, set themselves to forgetting
their long labours; before these virgin combs, they have
but one idea: to fill them. They restart work with a
bustle which would excite veritable pity in any man but
a bee-keeper. These commercials have invented a hive
163
THE NATURAL
with moveable combs. The bees will never know.
Bees are stupid.
But we who see the limits of intelligence in bees,
should consider the limits of our own. There are limits;
it is possible to conceive brains who observing us, would
say: men are stupid. All intelligence is limited; it is
just this shock against the limit, against the wall, which
by the pain it causes, engenders consciousness. We are
not to laugh too much at the bees who gaily furnish the
mobile combs of their improved hives. We are perhaps
the slaves of a master who exploits us, and who will re-
main forever unknown. The polygamy, or if one wish,
the polyandry of bees, pretext for this digression, is
then purely virtual; it is in the state of possibility, but
it will never be realized, since the fecundity of the queen
is assured by a single act. The excessive multiplicity of
males corresponds doubtless to an ancient order in which
the females were more numerous. In any case only
two or three males out of about a thousand, are used,
or let us say ten, if you wish to suppose very frequent
swarming, this demonstrates that one must not pre-
judge the habits of an animal specie by the over-
abundance of one sex or another, and that, in a general
fashion, one must place natural logic above our human
logic, derived from mathematical logic. Facts in nature
are connected by a thousand knots of which no one
is solvable by human logic. When one of these tangles
is unravelled before our eyes we marvel at the simplicity
of its mechanism, we think we understand, we make gen-
eralities, we prepare to open neighbouring mysteries with
the same key: illusion. One always has to begin again
164
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
at the start. Thus the sciences of observation become
increasingly obscure as one penetrates further into the
labyrinth.
Among wasps and hornets there is nothing resembling
polygamy, even potentially. A fecundated female after
passing the winter, constructs, by herself, the first foun-
dations of a nest, lays the eggs, from which sexless in-
dividuals are born; these workers then assume all material
labours, finish the nest, watch the larvae which the
female continues to produce. These are now males and
females: after coupling the males die, then the workers,
the females become languid, those who survive will
found as many new tribes.
The generation of bumble-bees is more curious, the
differentiation of castes more complicated. There are
among them, males, workers, small females, great females.
A great female, having passed the winter, founds a nest in
the earth, often in moss (there is a sort called the moss
bee), she constructs a wax comb, lays. From the first
eggs come workers who, as in wasps, construct the defini-
tive nest, pillage, make honey, and being more industrious
than the other sort of bees who fear dampness, they scour
the country long after sunset. After the workers, the
little females see light; they have no function save lay-
ing, without fecundation, the eggs which will hatch male.
Simultaneously the queen produces great females who
will soon couple with the males. Then, as with wasps,
all the colony dies except the fecundated great females,
by whom the cycle will recommence, the following spring.
There are three casts of ants, or four if one count
the division of neuters into workers and fighters, as
165
THE NATURAL
among termites. Here, as with bees, the neuters are the
base of the republic, the males die after mating, the
females after laying. "There are," says M. Janet
(Recherches sur I'anatomie de la jourmt) "workers so
different from the others, in the development of their
mandibles and the largeness of their heads that one
calls them soldiers, a name according with the role they
fill in the colony." These soldiers are also butchers, who
cut up prey which is too large or dangerous. Specializa-
tion is the only superiority of the neuters who for the
rest seem inferior to the females and to the males in
size, muscling and visual organs. The females are some-
times half as large again as the neuters, the males being
between the two sizes. The ant shows much more in-
telligence than the bee. Before this tiny people one
seems really to touch humanity. Consider that the ants
have slaves, and domestic animals. First the plant lice,
preferably those who live on roots, and, at need, those
of the rose-bush, who are milked, and who permit it,
subjected by long heredity. Aphis jormicarum vacca,
says Linnaeus briefly (beetle the ants' cow). But wan-
dering herds are not enough for them, they keep in the
interior of their ant-hills, colonies of slave plant-lice, of
domesticated staphylins. The staphylins are small
coleoptera with mobile abdomen, one of their species is
only found among ants. They are domesticated to the
point of no longer being able to feed themselves: the ants
stuff the necessary food into their mouths. In return the
staphylins furnish their masters a revenue analogous to
that which they get from the plant-lice: from the bunch
of hairs rising at the base of their abdomen they seem to
1 66
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
exude a delectable liquor, at least one sees the ants suck
these hairs with great eagerness. These animals permit
it. They are so much at home, that the same observer
(Muller, traduit par Brulle, dans le Dictionnaire d'his-
toirc naturelle de Guerin, au mot Pselaphiens} has seen
them coupling without fear in the midst of the busy ant
people, the male hunched on the back of the female,
solidly crammed against the mellifluous tuft of ant's
delicacies.
One knows that the red ants make war on the black
ants and steal their nymphs, who, retained in captivity,
make them excellent domestics, attentive and obedient.
White humanity also, at one point in its history, found
itself faced with a like opportunity, but less prudent
than the red ant, it let it pass, from sentimentalism, thus
betraying its destiny, renouncing, under Christian inspira-
tion, the complete and logical development of its civiliza-
tion. Is it not amusing that slavery is presented to us as
anti-natural, when it is on the contrary, normal and ex-
cessively natural to the most intelligent of animals?
And in an order of ideas more closely related to the sub-
ject of this book, if the making neuter of a part of the
population, placing them in castes vowed to continence,
is an anti-natural attempt, how is it that social hymenop-
tera, ants, bees, bumble-bees, and termites among neurop-
tera, have managed it so well, and have made it the
basis of their social state? Doubtless there is nothing
like it among animals; but mammals, apart from man,
that monster, even including beavers, are infinitely in-
ferior to insects. If the habits of social birds (for there
are such) were better known, one might find analogous
167
THE NATURAL
practices among them. The sexual co-operation of all
the members of a people being useless so far as the con-
servation of the race is concerned; and on the other
hand inferior species living as neighbours to a superior
species being destined to disappear, slavery is good for
the inferiors as it assures them perpetuity and a sort of
evolution suited to their feebleness.
A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers
establishes itself as parasite in an ant-hill and gets itself
served by workers of another species in order to live.
What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility of the sexless!
The worker ants are clearly degenerate females, among
whom sexual sensibility has been completely trans-
formed into maternal sensibility. One observes, more-
over, in many species an intermediate type of woman-
worker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should
note that after fecundation the females do not all re-
enter the city; where they fall, they build, as mother-
bumble-bees, a provisory nest, acting then like workers,
and await the first egg-laying, which will produce ex-
clusively real workers and will thereby permit the normal
construction of the new ant-hill.
There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaph-
rodites along the medial line, or sometimes along an
oblique line: this gives absurd creatures, half one thing,
half the other, or singularities such as a female with a
worker's h?ad who functions as a worker.1
Polygamy by massacre of males, as among herbivora,
and gallinaceae seems a step toward a more logical and
»E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Moeurs des fourmis (Biblio-
theque universelle, tome LV).
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
more economic distribution of the sexes. If antelopes
perpetuate themselves very well with one male to an
hundred females, is it not an indication that a part at
least of the sacrificed males might have dispensed with
being born? And would it not be better, in the interest
of the antelopes, that a part of these males, if they ought
to continue to be born, should be normally sexless, as
with termites, and entrusted with some social duty?
The organization of termites is very pretty; it will
do to finish off this brief review of animal societies
founded on the unsexing of sexes. One has already
noted, in the chapters on dimorphism, the diversity of
sexual forms, corresponding to four quite distinct castes.
The minute examination of one of their republics per-
mits one to assert differentiations much more numerous,
for each of the principal castes passes through active
larval and nymphal forms, adolescent forms, such as
most neuroptera and libellules also present. In taking
count of all the nuances one may observe in a state
(to use the familiar word) of termites fifteen different
forms, all with marked characteristics. The principal
are: i. Workers, 2. Soldiers, 3. Small males, 4. Small
females, 5. Large males, 6. Large females, 7. Nymphs
with little cases, 8. Nymphs with long cases, 9. Larvae.
When one attacks an ant hill, the soldiers arrive at the
breach, very threatening, odd, with their bodies all head,
all mandibles. The enemy routed, the workers come to
repair the damage. There are sometimes several female
egg-layers; sometimes there is only one male: copula-
tion always takes place outside the hill, and as with ants,
the males perish, while the fecundated females become
169
THE NATURAL
the origin of a new state. The expeditions of travelling
termites, common as fighting termites in South Africa,
are naturally directed by soldiers. Sparmann (cited in
Guerin's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle) observed
them during his voyage to the Cape, and says they be-
have rather as non-coms in close rank, or climbing onto
grass blades, watch the defile, beating with their feet,
if the order were bad, or too slow. The signal is at once
understood, and obeyed by the rank at once, is answered
by a whistle. There is in this something so marvellous
that one hesitates to accept the traveller's interpreta-
tion in entirety. It is not the spontaneous and mechani-
cal discipline of the ants, but the consenting obedience,
so difficult to obtain from inferior humanities. After
all, nothing is impossible, and without being credulous
in these matters, one need be astonished at nothing.
Nevroptera are, moreover, exceeding old on the earth;
they date from before the coal-beds: their civilization is
some thousands of centuries older than human civiliza-
tions.
Beavers are the only mammals, man excepted, whose
industry indicates an intelligence near that of insects.
But their societies offer no complication, they are a
simple grouping of couples. They do not construct their
dams until the females have been delivered, this hap-
pens toward the end of July, one sees no other con-
nection between their sexual habits and their remark-
able works.
These enormous trees felled and made to lie where
intended, these piles stuck in the river-bed and inter-
bound with twisted branches, these impermeable dams,
170
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
all this hard and complicated work, the beaver accepts
when pushed by necessity. He needs an artificial lake
with unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature,
he accepts it, and limits himself to erecting his regular
huts. Thus osmies-, chalicodomes, or xylocopes, — or men,
if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten to profit
by it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind ;
it is a faculty which will not be employed very often
save in extremity: the present inhabitant of the Loire
valley still arranges the caves for domestic use. To its
injury, but of that it knows nothing, the bee profits
by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone
beaver has rested ever since men erected such excellent
dams there. The fairy palace which rises in mid forest
for the rubbing of a ring is the human, and animal,
ideal.
I must close these observations on natural societies,
in pointing out that if they are today based on some-
thing quite different from polygamy, it seems likely
that they were in origin societies either of polygamy or
of sexual communism. If one starts from communism
one will very soon evolve either toward the couple, or
toward polygamy, if it is a matter of mammals; or toward
sexual neutralization if it is a matter of insects. The
couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual
communism is not a method, and for that reason one
must consider it as the chaos from which order has
little by little emerged.
171
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER XVIII
THE QUESTION OF ABERRATIONS
Two sorts of sexual aberration. — Sexual aberrations of
animals. — Those of men. — Crossing of species. — Chas-
tity.— Modesty. — Varieties and localizations of sexual
bash fulness. — Artificial creation of modesty. — Sort of
modesty natural to all females. — Cruelty. — Picture of
carnage. — The cricket eaten alive. — Habits of carabes.
— Every living creature is a prey. — Necessity to kitt
or to be killed.
SEXUAL aberrations are of two sorts. The cause of the
error is internal, or external. The flower of the arum
muscivorum (fly-catching arum) by its cadaverous odour
attracts flies in search of rotting flesh in which to lay
their eggs. Schopenhauer has supported by this, or
analogous, fact a theory just, but somewhat summary, of
aberration from external cause. Aberration from internal
cause is sometimes explained by the statement that the
same arteries irrigate and the same nerves animate the
region of the sacrum, anterior and posterior; the excretal
canals being always near each other, and sometimes
common, at least for part of their length. One has spoken
seriously of the drake's sodomy, but anatomy refuses to
understand it. Whether a drake frequents another
drake or a duck, he addresses himself in both cases
to the single door of a vestibule into which all excre-
172
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
tions are poured. Doubtless the drake is aberrated, and
his accomplice still more so, but nature deserves part of
the blame. In general, animal aberrations require very
simple explanations. There is a keen desire, and very
urgent need, which if unsatisfied produces an inquietude,
which may augment until a sort of momentary madness
takes hold of the animal, and throws it blindly upon all
sorts of illusions. This may go, doubtless, to the point
of hallucination. There is also a need, purely muscular,
of at least sketching in the sexual act, either passive or
active; one sees, by singular inversion, cows in heat
mounting each other, perhaps with the idea of exciting
the male, or perhaps the visual representation which they
make themselves of the desired act, forces them to try
an imitation: it is a marvellous example, because it is
absurd, of the motor force of images.
There are two parts in the sexual act; that of the
specie, and that of the individual; but that of the specie
is only given it by means of the individual. In relation
to the male in rut, it is a question of a very simple
natural need. He must empty his spermatic canals:
lacking females they say the stag rubs his prong on
trees to provoke ejaculation. Bitches in heat rub their
vulva on the ground. Such are the rudiments of onanism,
suddenly carried by primates to such a high degree of
perfection. One has seen male cantharides, themselves
ridden, riding other males; the argule, a small crustacean
parasite of fresh-water fish, is so ardent that he often
addresses himself to other males, or to gravid or even
dead females. From the microscopic beasts to man,
aberration is everywhere; but one should, rather, call it,
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THE NATURAL
at least among animals, impatience. Animals are by
no means mere machines, they, as well as men, are
capable of imaginations, they dream, they have illusions,
they are subject to desires whose source is in the interior
movement of their organism. The sight or odour of a
female over-excites the male; but far from any female,
the logic of the vital movement suffices perfectly to put
them in a state of rut; it is absolutely the same with
females. If the state of rut, and if the sensibilization of
the genital parts is established far from necessary sex,
we have here a natural cause of aberration, for it is this
special sensibility which must be used: the first simu-
lacrum, or even the first propitious obstacle will be the
adversary against which the exasperated animal exercises
the energy by which he is tormented.
One may apply the general principles of this psychology
to man, but on condition that we do not forget that
man's genital sensibility is apt to be awakened at any
moment, and that for him the causes of aberration are
multiplied ad infinitum. There would be extremely few
aberrated men and women if moral customs permitted a
quite simple satisfaction of sexual needs, if it were pos-
sible for the two sexes to meet always at the opportune
moment. There would remain aberrations of anatomical
order; they would be less frequent and less tyrannic, if
our customs, instead of contriving ways to make sexual
relations very difficult, should favour them. But this
easiness is only possible, in promiscuity, which is possibly
a worse ill than aberration. Thus all questions are in-
soluble, and one can only improve nature by disorganiz-
ing her. Human order is often a disorder worse than
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
spontaneous disorder, because it is a forced and pre-
mature finality, an inopportune turning of the vital
river out of its course.
Sexual selection is probably not a source of variation
(i. e., of type) ; its role is, on the contrary, to keep the
specie in statu quo. The causes of variation are prob-
ably changes of climate, the nature of the soil, the general
milieu, and also disease, the troubles of blood and nerve
circulation — perhaps certain sexual aberrations. I say.
"perhaps," for the cross-breeding between individuals ol
different species, living in liberty, seems difficult, as soon
as the species is really something different from a variety
in evolution, a form still seeking itself. At that stage
anything is possible; but one is speaking of species
(i. e., set species). Mules, bardots, leporides are artificial
products; one has never found them in free nature.
It is very difficult to obtain the copulation of a hare and
she-rabbit; the she-rabbit is refractory and the hare
lacking enthusiasm. The mare very often refuses the
ass; if she turns her head at the moment of his mounting,
one has to bandage her eyes to overcome her disgust; it is
the same with the she-ass whom one offers a stallion for
producing the bardot. As for the product of bull and
mare, the celebrated jumart is a chimaera: comparison of
the meagre prong of the bull to the massive one of the
stallion is enough to convince one that such dissimilar
instruments can not replace each other. Nevertheless it
would be imprudent wholly to rule out this form of
sexual aberration from the causes of variability of species.
That is perhaps one of its justifications.
Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most curious is
I7S
THE NATURAL
chastity. Not that it is anti-natural, nothing is anti-
natural, but because of the pretexts it obeys. Bees, ants,
termites, present examples of perfect chastity, but of
chastity that is utilized, social chastity. Involuntary,
congenital, the neuter state among insects is a state
de facto, equivalent to the sexual state, and the origin
of a characterized activity. In humans it is a state, often
only apparent or transitory, obtained voluntarily or de-
manded by necessity, a precarious condition, so difficult
to maintain that people have heaped up about it all
sorts of moral and religious walls, and even real walls
made of stones and mortar. Permanent and voluntary
chastity is nearly always a religious practice. Men, in
all ages, have been persuaded that perfection of being
was only obtainable by such renunciation. This seems
absurd; it is, on the contrary, very direct logic. The only
means of not being an animal is to abstain from the act
to which all animals without exception deliver them-
selves. It is the same motive that has made people
imagine abstinence, fasting; but as one can not live
without eating, and as one can live without making
love, this second method of perfectionment has remained
in the state of outline.
It is true, asceticism, of which humanity alone is
capable, is one of the means which may lift us above
animality; but by itself it is insufficient to do this; by
itself it is good for nothing, save perhaps to excite sterile
pride; one must add to it an active exercise of the intel-
ligence. It remains to know whether asceticism, which
deprives the sensibility of one of its healthiest and most
stimulating nutriments is favourable to the exercise of the
176
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
intelligence. As it is not the least necessary to answer
this question here, we will say nothing save this, proviso-
rily: one need not scorn chastity nor disdain asceticism.
Is modesty an aberration? Indulgent observers have
believed that they noticed it in elephants as well as
in rabbits. The modesty of the elephant is a popular
maxim which makes right-minded women cast sheep's
eyes, in circuses, at the great beast who hides for her
amours. During copulation, says a celebrated rabbit-
raiser x "the male and female should be alone, in demi-
obscurity. This solitude and obscurity are more neces-
sary in view of the fact that certain females show signs
of modesty." The modesty of animals is a fancy. Like
modesty among humans, it is merely the mask of fear,
the crystallization of timorous habits, necessitated by the
animals being unarmed during coupling. This is very
well known and needs no explanation. But the need of
reproduction is so tyrannic that, even among the most
timid animals, it does not always leave them presence of
mind enough to hide themselves during the amour. The
most domesticated of animals, one knows it only too
well, shows at this moment neither fear nor shame.
In man, among the civilized and among the uncivilized,
sexual fear, shame, has taken a thousand forms which,
for the most part, seem to have no longer any relation to
the original feeling whence they are derived. One notices
however that if the milieu where the couple finds itself
is such that no attack, no ridicule is to be feared, shame
1 Mariot-Didieux, Guide pratique de 1'educateur de lapins.
Bibliotheque des professions industrielles et agricoles, serie H.
No. 17.
177
THE NATURAL
vanishes, in part, or entirely, according to the degree of
security, and the degree of excitement. For a crowd
of populace on a fete night there is hardly any modesty
save "legal modesty"; the example of one bolder couple
is enough, if there is no authority to be feared, to set
loose all the appetites, and one then sees clearly that
man who does not hide in order to eat, only hides to make
love under pressure of usage.
From the genital act, modesty is stretched over the
exterior sexual organs by a mechanism very simple and
very logical. But here, I think, one must distinguish
between genital modesty bred from the custom of cloth-
ing the whole body, and that which has led men to cover
only a particular part. Heat, cold, rain, insects explain
clothing, but not the savage's cotton drawers or the fig
leaf; especially when the leaf, imposed on married
women, for example, is forbidden to virgins, or when
this symbolic leaf is so reduced that it serves no purpose,
save that of a sign. In this last case, it has not even
any direct relation to genital modesty; it is only a
matrimonial ornament, analogous to the ring or the
collar, a sign, indeed indicating a condition. It is pos-
sible also, that among certain peoples where the men go
entirely naked, the women wear an apron merely to
keep off flies, gad-flies, rather as a peasant drapes his
horse's muzzle with grass and leaves. Quite often, how-
ever, one is forced to recognize in these customs, the
proof of a particular genital sensibility, analogous to
civilized modesty. An English sailor, at the time of
the first explorations got himself rejected by the Maori
women not because he appeared without clothing, a
178
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
state which custom required, but because he appeared
with his organ unsheathed. This detail shocked them
extremely. A curious example of the localization of
shame: all parts of the body could and should show
themselves, all save this small surface. On reflection,
the modesty of Europeans at a ball or on the beach is
almost as absurd as that of the Maoris, or as that of the
fellaheen women who at the approach of a stranger re-
move their shirts, their sole garments, in order to cover
their faces.
Sexual modesty, as one observes it today, among the
most various peoples, is utterly artificial. Livingstone
assures us that he developed modesty in little Kaffir
girls by clothing them. Surprised in neglige, they covered
their breasts — and this in a race where the women go
wholly naked, save for a string round the middle, from
which another string hangs. Clothing is only one of the
causes of modesty, or of customs which give us the illusion
of it, and the sentiment of fear associated with the sexual
act does not explain all the rest. There is a shame par-
ticular to the female, an ensemble of movements, which
one can assimilate to nothing, which one can attach to
nothing. The gesture of Venus modest is not purely a
woman's gesture; nearly all females, especially mam-
mifers, have it; the female, who refuses, lowers her tail
and clamps it between her legs ; there is here, evidently,
the origin of one of the particular forms of modesty.
We have given characteristic examples in an earlier
chapter.
Man is un-get-at-able; the slightest of his habitual
sentiments has multiple and contradictory roots in a
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THE NATURAL
sensibility variable and always excessive. He is the least
poised and the least reasonable of all animals, although
the only one who has been able to construct for him-
self an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to
say one who flows out on all sides, who unravels every-
thing in theory, and tangles up everything in fact, who
desires and wills so many things, who throws his muscles
into so many divers activities that his acts are at once
the most sensible and the most absurd, the most con-
forming and the most opposed to the logical development
of life. But he profits even by error, especially by the
error fatal to all animals, and that constitutes his original-
ity, as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats.
If the word modesty (pudeur} is not exact, when
applied to animals, although one finds in their habits
the distant origin of this complex and refined sentiment,
the word cruelty, is not so either, when applied to their
natural acts of defence or nutrition. Human cruelty is
often an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity,
a normal fact, often the very condition of their existence.
An anarchist philosopher, ardent and naive disciple of
Jean- Jacques believed that he traced an universal altru-
ism in nature; he has redone with other words and
another spirit, and a few new examples, the infantile
works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and has abused,
under pretext of inclining mankind to kindness, the right
which one has to promenade about nature without seeing
and without understanding her. Nature is neither good,
nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of
forces whereof none cedes save under superior pressure.
Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
indifference, it is of an absolute equity. But the sensi-
bility of a balance is of a single order, single dimension;
the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions and re-
actions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the
weak the strong, there is no compensation save in our
human illusion; in reality one life is enlarged at the ex-
pense of another life, in one case as in the other, the
total energy has been neither diminished nor augmented.
There is neither strong, nor weak, there is a level
which tends to remain constant. Our sentimentalism
makes us see dramas where nothing occurs more dis-
turbing than the general facts of nutrition. One may
however look at these facts a little more closel>, and
then the parity of animal organism and the human organ-
ism will lead us to qualify as cruel, certain acts which
would deserve this title if committed by man. One must
say cruelty in order to understand it oneself; it is also
necessary to remember that this cruelty is unconscious,
that it is not felt by the devouring animal, that no
element of ill-will enters into its act, and that man him-
self, the judge, in no way deprives himself of eating
live creatures when they are better raw than cooked,
living than dead.
A philanthe, sort of wasp, catches a bee to feed its
larvae; while carrying the prey to his nest, he presses
the belly, sucks the bee, empties it of all its honey. But
at the entrance of the nest a mantis is waiting, its double-
saw pf an arm is unfolded, the philanthe is nipped in
passing. And one sees the mantis gnawing the belly of
the philanthe while the philanthe continues sucking the
bee's belly. And the mantis is so voracious that you
181
THE NATURAL
can cut her in two without making her let go; a chain,
truly, of carnage.
The larvae of the sphex, another wasp, are fed on live
crickets that have been paralyzed by a stab. As soon
as it hatches the larva attacks the cricket in the belly at
the chosen spot where the egg has been layed. The poor
insect protests by feeble movements of antennae, and
mandibles: in vain; he is eaten alive, fibre by fibre, by
a great worm which gnaws his entrails, and with so
great a skill that it begins on the parts not essential to
life, and thus keeps the prey fresh and tasty to the last.
Such is the gentleness of nature, the good mother.
The carabes are fine coleoptera, violet, purple, and
golden. They feed only on living prey, which they chew
slowly, beginning at the belly, and boring slowly into the
palpitating cavity. Helices, and slugs are thus torn apart
by bands of carabes who dig them up and dissect them in
a boiling of saliva.
Such are theft and murder, in nature. These are the
normal acts. Herbivorous species alone are innocent
perhaps from imbecility; always occupied in eating, be-
cause their food is so unsubstantial, they have not time
to develop their powers: they are the inevitable prey, a
sort of superior grass which will be browsed at the first
opportunity. But the carnivora are in the same way
eaten by their stronger and more adroit fellow-boarders.
Very few beasts have a quiet death. The geotrupes,
scarabs, necrophores their work finished, the egg-laying
accomplished, devour each other to pass the time, per-
haps, to lend a little gaiety to their last moments.
Animals are of but two sorts, hunters and game, but
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
there is scarcely a hunter who is not game in his turn.
One does not find in nature the purely human invention
of breeding for slaughter, or the more extraordinary one
of breeding for hunting. Ants know how to milk their
cows, the plant-lice, or their goats the staphylins; they
do not know how to fatten them and to slit their gullets.
A hundred other signs of animal cruelty are scattered
through this book. One may collect many others, and
this might form a work edifying in this era of sentimental-
ism. Not because one wishes — quite the contrary — to
offer them to men as so many examples; but because this
might teach them that the first duty of a living being
is to live, and that all life is nothing but a sum sufficient
of murders. Men or tigers, sphex or carabes are under
the same necessity: to kill or to die, or to shed blood or
eat grass. But to eat grass, is not much better than sui-
cide: ask the lambkins.
183
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER XIX
INSTINCT
Instinct. — Can one oppose it to intelligence? — Instinct
in man. — Primordiality of intelligence. — Instinct's con-
servative role. — Modifying role of intelligence. — In-
telligence and consciousness. — Parity of animal and
human instinct. — Mechanical character of the instinc-
tive act. — Instinct modified by intelligence. — Habit of
work creates useless work. — Objections to the identi-
fication of instinct and intelligence taken from life oj
insects.
THE question of instinct is perhaps the most nerve-
racking there is. Simple minds think they have solved
it when they have set against this word the other word:
intelligence. That is merely the elementary position of
the problem. Not only does it explain nothing, but it
opposes all explanations. If instinct and intelligence are
not phenomena of the same order, reducible one to the
other, the problem is insoluble and we will never know
what instinct is, nor what is intelligence.
In the vulgar contrast one overhears the considerable
naivete that animals have instinct and man, intelligence.
This error, pure rhetoric, has prevented, up to the pres-
ent, not the answer to the question which still seems a
long way off, but the scientific exposure of the question
itself. It includes but two formulae: Either instinct is a
fructification of intelligence; or intelligence is an aug-
184
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
mentation of instinct. One must choose, and know that
in choosing one makes, as the case may be, either instinct
or intelligence, the seed or flower of a single plant: the
sensibility.
One will first establish that for manifestations of in-
stinct and for those of intelligence, there is no essential
difference between man and animals. The life of all men,
quite as well as that of all animals, is based on instinct,
and doubtless there is no animal who can not give signs
of spontaneity, that is to say, of intelligence. Instinct
seems anterior because in all animals except man the
quantity and especially the quality of instinctive facts
greatly surpasses the value and number of intellectual
facts. This is so, but in admitting this hierarchy, if
one thereby explain with considerable difficulty, the for-
mation of intelligence in man and in the animals which
show more or less perceptible gleams of it, one also re-
nounces by so doing, all later attempts that might fur-
nish some notions as to the formation of instinct. If the
bee makes his combs mechanically, if this act is as neces-
sary as the evaporation of warmed water, or the crystal-
lization of freezing water, it is useless to search any
further: one is in the presence of a fact which will never
yield anything else.
If, on the contrary, one consider intelligence as an-
terior, the field of investigation stretches out to infinity
and instead of one problem radically insoluble, one has a
hundred thousand or more, as many as there are animal
species, and of these problems none is simple, none
absurd. This manner of looking at it, brings, I admit,
grave consequences. One must then look at matter as
185
THE NATURAL
a simple allotropic form of intelligence, or, if you prefer,
consider intelligence and matter as equivalents, and admit
that intelligence is merely matter endowed with sensi-
bility, and that its power of extremely diversifying itself
finds impassable limits in the very forms which clothe
it. Instinct is the proof of these limits. When acts have
become instinctive, they have become invincible. A
specie is a group of instincts whose tyranny becomes, one
day, deaf to all attempts at movement. Evolution is
limited by the resistance of what is, striving against what
might be. There comes a moment when a specie is a
mass too heavy to be moved by intelligence: then it
remains in its place; this is death, but is compensated by
the steady arrival of other species; new forms assumed
by the inexhaustible Proteus.
One will add nothing, here, to this theory, save a
few facts favourable to it, and a handful of objections.
The old distinction between intelligence and instinct,
although false and superficial, may be adapted to the
views just abbreviated. We will attribute to instinct the
series of acts which tend to conserve the present condi-
tion of a specie; and to intelligence, those which tend to
modify that condition. Instinct will be slavery, sub-
jection to custom ; intelligence will represent liberty, that
is to say, choice, acts which while being necessary, since
they occur, have yet been determined by an ensemble
of causes anterior to those which govern instinct. In-
telligence will be the deep, the reserve, the spring which
after long digging emerges between the rocks. In every-
thing that intelligence suggests, the consciousness of the
species makes a departure; what is useful is incorporated
186
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
in instinct, enlarging and diversifying it; what is useless
perishes — or perhaps flowers in extravagances, as it does
in man, in dancing and gardening birds, or the magpies
attracted by a jewel, larks by a mirror! One will then
call instinct, the series of useful aptitudes; intelligence,
the series of aptitudes de luxe: but what is useful, what
useless? Who will dare brand a series of bird notes or
a feminine smile as lacking utility? There is neither
utility nor inutility unless there be also finality. But
finality can not be considered as an aim; it is nothing
but a fact, and one which might be other.
This utilization of old terms, if it were possible, could
never be the pretext for a new radical differentiation be-
tween instinct and intelligence; one could only use it to
define by contrast two states whose manifestations pre-
sent appreciable nuances. The great objection to the
essential identification of instinct and intelligence comes
from a habit of mind which spiritistic philosophy has
for long imposed upon us: instinct should be unconscious,
intelligence, conscious. But psychological analysis does
not permit us rigorously to tie intellectual activity to
consciousness. Without consciousness, every thing might
happen, even in the most thoughtful man, exactly as
it does under the paternal eye of this consciousness. In
M. Ribot's interesting analogic comparison, consciousness
is an internal candle lighting a clock-face; it has the
same influence on the movement of the intelligence that
this candle has on the clock. It is difficult to know
whether animals have consciousness, and it is perhaps
useless, unless at least, one admit that this candle, by its
luminous or calorific rays, does, as M. Fouillee teaches,
187
THE NATURAL
affect the march of the mechanism. In sum, con-
sciousness also is a fact, and no fact dies without con-
sequences; there are neither first causes nor last causes.
In any case one will, since it is evident, cling to one state-
ment that even if consciousness is a possible reactive,
intelligence can act without it: the most conscious of
men have phases of unconscious intellectuality; long
series of reasonable acts may be committed without their
reflection being visible in the mirror, without the candle
being lit before the clock. In brief, it does not seem as
if nervous matter could exist without intelligence or
sensibility; but consciousness is an extra. There is no
need to take count of the old scholastic objection to the
identification of the intelligence and the instinct.
What is there serious in the other objection: that man,
if he once had instincts, has lost them?
The animal having the richest instincts ought also to
have, or to have had, the richest intelligence. And
reciprocally: intellectual activity supposes a greatly
varied instinctive activity, either in the present or in
the future. If man have not instincts, he ought to be
in the way of making them. He has numerous instincts,
and makes more every day: a part of his consciousness
is constantly crystallizing itself into instinctive acts.
But if one consider the different instincts of animal
species one will scarcely find any which are not also
human. The great human activities are instinctive.
Doubtless man may refrain from building a palace, but he
can not dispense with a cabin, a nest in a cave, or in the
fork of a tree, like the great apes, many mammals, birds,
and most insects. His food depends very little on
188.
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
choice, it must contain certain indispensable elements:
a necessity identical with that which rules the animals,
and even the plants whose roots reach down toward the
desired juice, and whose branches reach toward the light.
Song, dance, strife, and, for the group, war; human
instincts are not unknown to all animals. The taste for
brilliant things, another human instinct is frequent enough
in birds; it is true that birds have not yet made anything
of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary arts.
There remains love, but I think this supreme instinct is
the consecrated limit of the objections.
Useful acts habitually repeated may become invincible,
like veritable instinctive movements. A hunter x spend-
ing the winter in an isolated cabin in Canada engaged an
Indian woman to keep house for him. She arrives in the
evening, melts the snow, begins to wash up, shifts every-
thing, prevents his getting any sleep. He rages. Si-
lence. As soon as he is asleep, the woman mechanically
begins to work again, and so on, until the humble Indian
gets the last word. Here, exactly as among insects, one
has the example of work which once begun must go on
until it is finished. The insect can not be interrupted;
if it is interrupted by external cause it starts work again
not at the point where it actually finds the work, but at
the point where it, the insect, left off. Thus, one entirely
removed the nest which a chalicodome was building on a
shingle; the bee returns, finds nothing, since there is
nothing to find, but instead of recommencing the building,
continues it. There was nothing to be done but close the
hole; the bee closes it, that is to say she deposits the last
1 Vide Milton and Cheaddle, works already cited.
I89
THE NATURAL
mouthful of mortar on the ideal dome of an absent nest:
then with instinct satisfied, sure of having assured her
posterity, she retires, she goes to die. One can get the
same result with the pelopee, and with other builders.
Processional caterpillars are accustomed to make long
trips in Indian file on the branches of their native pine-
tree, in search of food: if one place them on the rim
of a basin they will stupidly circulate for thirty hours,
without one of them having the idea of interrupting the
circle by going off at a tangent. They will die in their
track, stuck fast in obedience; when one falls another
steps into his place, the ranks close, that is all. Here are
the extremities of instinct, and to our great surprise they
are almost the same in an Indian of the great lakes and
in a processional pine caterpillar.
But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free
intelligence, give examples of human sagacity. We have
seen these same mason bees and xylocopes and domestic
bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a hole bored
in wood, by artificial combs set ready to take their
honey; the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds, in
which they arrange a series of chambers, accommodated
themselves under Fabre's guidance in glass tubes which
permitted the great observer to know them intimately.
Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelli-
gent as a brain; these two extremes should correspond
with very ancient and very recent habits. It is certainly
but a relatively short time since the peasant's pruning-
bill began preparing cut reeds for the osmie; before that
time she constructed her nest, as she still does, in empty
snail shells or in some natural cavity. They are very
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
interesting these osmies, extremely active solitary bees;
one sees them having exhausted their ovaries, but not
their muscular force, building extra nests, provisioning
them with honey, without having laid a single egg in
them ; they will even make and close them without honey,
if they do not find more flowers, thus showing a real crazi-
ness for work, an authentic mania analogous to that
which moves man to move pebbles, to smoke, to drink
rather than remain immobile.1 If the osmie lived longer,
she might perhaps invent some game which, vain at the
start, would end by becoming both a need and a benefit
to the whole species.
The theory which makes instinct a partial crystallization
of intelligence is extremely seductive: I dare say we will
have to accept it as true. Yet the contemplation of the
insect world raises an enormous objection. In the course
of his wonderful memoirs Fabre has formulated it ten
times and with always fresh ingenuity. Here is the insect,
nearly always born adult, and after the death of her
parents, she has received from them neither direct educa-
tion nor education by example, as do the young of birds
or mammals. A hen teaches her chick to scratch for
worms (it is true that she does not teach her ducklings
to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our
amusement), an osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet
now osmies do exactly what their ancients have done.
The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennae, performs
its toilet, opens its wings, flies off for life, moves without
1 Compare this with the valuable remarks of a gamekeeper,
"One must know the habits of animals, even their manias, for
they have them, just as we do." Figaro, 31, Aug. 1903.
191
THE NATURAL
hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and
flees the enemies of its race, makes love, and finally con-
structs a nest identical with the cradle from which it has
emerged.1
One sees quite well that the acquisitions of the indi-
vidual have passed to the descendant, but how? How
have they fixed themselves in the nerves and blood dur-
ing a few short days of life? Without any apprentice-
ship the sphex paralyzes with three stabs the cricket which
is to feed its larvae; if the cricket is killed and not para-
lyzed, the larvae will die, poisoned by the carrion; and
if the paralysis is not durable the cricket will come to,
and destroy the sphex in the egg. The manoeuvre of this
wasp and of many other killing hymenoptera has this
tiresome point for our reasoning, the act must be perfect,
on pain of death. Nevertheless it must be admitted that
the sphex has formed itself slowly, like all complex ani-
1 To my mind a slight unsoundness creeps into Chap. XVI, and
here both Fabre and Gourmont seem to me to go astray in con-
sidering the insect as a separate creature, i. e. a creature cut off
from its larva or cocoon life. Surely the animal may be sup-
posed to exist while in its cocoon or larva, it may reasonably be
supposed to pass that period in reflection, preparing for pre-
cisely the acts of its desire (as for example an intelligent young
man might pass his years in a university under professors, await-
ing reasonable maturity to act or express his objections). The
larva has its months of quiet, precisely the necessary pre-reflec-
tion for the two days' joy-ride of exterior manifestation, amours,
etc., its contemplatio, or what may be counted as analogous,
passing in its cell. The perfection and precision of its acts,
being, let us say, proportionate to the non-expressive period.
Having spent God knows how long in that possibly monotonous
nest, it seems small wonder that the insect should know the
pattern by heart. Small wonder, that is to say wonder not
incommensurate with the general wonder of the whole process.
— E. P.
IQ2
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
mals, and that its genius is only the sum of intellectual
acquisition slowly crystallized in the specie.1 As for
the mechanism of this transformation of intelligence into
instinct, it has for motive the principle of utility; intelli-
gent acts which are useful for the preservation of the
specie, are the only ones which pass into instinct.
The science of these hymenoptera goes so far that it
was ahead of human science until yesterday. The insect
attacks the nervous system; it knows that the power of
beginning a movement lies in the nervous system and not
in the limbs. If the nervous system is centralized as in
weevils, their enemy the cerceris gives only one dagger-
stab; if the movement depends on three ganglia, it gives
three stabs; if on nine ganglia, nine: thus does the shaggy
ammophile when it needs the caterpillar of the noctuelle,
commonly called the gray worm, for its larvae; if a
single sting in the cervical ganglion appears too dangerous,
the hunter limits himself to chewing it gently, in order
to induce the necessary degree of immobility. It is odd
that the social hymenoptera who know how to do so
many difficult things, are ignorant of this savant dagger-
play. The bee stings at random, and so brutally that
she mutilates herself while often inflicting but an insig-
nificant wound on her adversary. Collective civilization
has diminished the individual genius.
1Vide translator's postscript.
193
THE NATURAL
CHAPTER XX
TYRANNY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
Accord and discord between organs and acts. — Tarses and
sacred scarab. — The hand of man. — Mediocre fitness of
sexual organs for copulation. — Origin of "luxuria." —
The animal is a nervous system served by organs. — The
organ does not determine the aptitude. — Man's hand
inferior to his genius. — Substitution of one sense for
another. — Union and role of the senses in love. — Man
and animal under the tyranny of the nervous system. —
Wear and tear of humanity compensated by acquisi-
tions.— Man's inheritors.
IT is a universal belief that nature or God, in their wis-
dom, have made the corporal organs in the best possible
form: perfection of the eye, of the hand, of the paw-jaw
of the mantis, of the sexual apparatus of man, of the
bird or the scarab, the furnishing tarses of hymenoptera,
the beaver's tail, the grasshopper's hams, the cicada's
tambourine. It is sometimes true and very often false.
It happens that there appears an exact concord between
the organ and the act which it is to perform; but it
happens also, and that not rarely, that the organs seem
in no way fashioned for the deed they must accomplish:
most of them are indeed chance tools, with which the
194
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
creature manages, as he can, the acts which he wants to,
or should, do.
The forefeet of scarabs are so little destined for model-
ling and rolling mud-balls that their tarses are worn out
in the process, as human fingers would perhaps be worn
if they had to knead the raw clay and mortar. In con-
sidering the scarab one has to think of a humanity lack-
ing fingers, having lost them by a long and slow diminu-
tion of nails, bones, flesh. The scarab is a modeller,
nothing would be more useful to him than fingers; instead
of losing them by use, he ought to have grown them
longer and more supple. He has lost them, and it is
with the arm stumps that he turns the little balls which
are to be food for himself or his offspring. This insect
is condemned to a labour that will become increasingly
difficult as the species grows increasingly older. It re-
mains to know whether the ancestors of the sacred scarab
had tarses. Horus Apollo grants them as many fingers
as the month has days, that is thirty, which corresponds
quite well with the six feet and five tarses of the scarab.
If he was a good observer, the question is answered, but
a single testimony is insufficient, and moreover it is un-
likely that so great a wearing-away would have occurred
in so small a number of centuries. Horus, and a savant
like Latreille himself, have been the dupes of symmetry;
if either has looked closely at a scarab, and if he has seen
the forefeet lacking tarses, he has put this down to chance
or to accident. Fabre has at least noted one indisputable
fact, it is that neither as nymph nor adult has the scarab
tarses on his forefeet. If it ever had them, our reasoning
draws new vigour from the negation, for then less than
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THE NATURAL
ever is it possible to find the least logical concordance
between the insect's stumps and the need of modelling
and turning to which nature condemns it.
This scarab is a type to which one can relate a great
number of other examples: purveyor hymenoptera are
wholly deprived of tools adapted to their work as quarry-
men and well-diggers: thus, at the end of their labours
the greater part of these fragile insects are very much
damaged. One knows the beaver's constructions, but
who without the certitude we have gained by observation,
would have dared to attribute them to these great rats?
Eighteenth century philosophers set themselves the
question: Is man man because he has hands; or has he
hands because he is man? One may answer boldly, that
man's hands marvellous as they appear to us, add almost
nothing to his intelligence. One does not see that they
are indispensable for anything save for playing the piano.
What constitutes man is his intelligence, his nervous
system. The exterior organ is secondary: no matter what
exterior organ, beak, prehensile tail, teeth, proboscis,
paws would have done the work of the hands. There are
birds' nests which no manual cleverness could weave.
The reproductive organs are no better adapted to their
purpose than are the working organs. Doubtless they
attain very often their end, but at the cost of efforts
which a better disposition would have attenuated or elim-
inated altogether. The interior mechanism is, or seems,
marvellous; the external mechanism is rudimentary and
gives no result, save, as they say, thanks to the ever-
renewed ingenuity of the couples. Instinct, in one of
its most necessary acts, is often put to difficult proof.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably
often repeated, even though the limberness of the human
form is well suited to coition; but who has not been
surprised to see a heavy bull leap clumsily onto a lowing
cow, bending his useless hocks along her back, panting,
and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices
of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages
(Orbigny's "Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle"), the ex-
ternal orifice of the generative organs opens in a cloaca
so placed under the tail that one hardly understands how
the coupling takes place.
Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the ani-
mal whether it be the scutillary, a tiny insect, or the ele-
phant, a colossus, is compelled to take positions abso-
lutely different from its normal postures. Nature who
firmly intends the perpetuity of the species, has not yet
found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having
found it, in budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the
diversity of organs, means, and movements. There are
none, even to those of our own specie which man may
not criticize, even though he prize them; he has criticized,
and his criticism has been to diversify them still further,
which simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter.
Morals term this diversification "luxure." * This term is
a pejorative which may be applied also to the exercise
of our other senses. All is but luxuria. Luxuria, the
variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning, the cul-
ture of special garden plants; luxuria: the exercises of
'The Latin luxuria and French luxure have no exact English
equivalent; our "luxury," is the French luxe; the phrase "the
exercise of pleasant lusts" is perhaps as near as I can come to
a definition of luxure. — Translator.
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THE NATURAL
the eye, decoration, the toilet, painting; luxuria, music;
luxuria, the marvellous exercises of the hand, so marvel-
lous that direct hand work can be mimicked by a machine
but never equalled; luxuria, flowers, perfumes; luxuria,
rapid voyages; luxuria, the taste for landscape; luxuria,
all art, science, civilization \luxuria, also the diversity of
human gestures, for the animal in his virtuous sobriety
has but one gesture for each sense, and that gesture un-
varying; or if the gesture, as probable, undergoes a
change, it is but a slow, invisible change, and there is at
the end but one gesture. The animal is ignorant of di-
versity, of the accumulation of aptitudes; man alone is
"luxurieux," is libidinous.
There is a principle which I will call the individualism
of species. Each specie is an individual which profits
as best it may, for its useful ends, by the instruments
which have devolved to it. A specie of hymenoptera
feels itself obliged to protect its eggs from new enemies,
by digging holes in the ground ; it makes use of the tools
which it has, without taking count of the fact that these
tools have not been made for excavation; it acts thus at
pressure of necessity, as man climbs trees in a flood, or
gets onto the roof in case of fire. The need is independent
of the organ; it precedes it, and does not always create
it. In the sexual act, need commands the gesture: the
animal adapts itself to positions which are strange to it,
and very difficult. Coupling is nearly always a grimace.
One would say that nature has set the male organ here,
and the female there, and left to specific ingenuity the
care of effecting the junction.
It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the medi-
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
ocre fitness of animals to milieu, and of organs to acts,
that it is not the milieu which absolutely fashions, or the
organs which absolutely govern, the acts. One then feels
oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald's definition of man,
and even to find it admirable, just, and strict: An intel-
ligence served by organs. Not "obeyed," not always, but
served, service implying imperfection, a discord between
the order and its fulfillment. But the phrase applies not
to man only, and its spiritualistic origin in no way
diminishes its aphoristic value; it qualifies every animal.
The animal is a nervous centre, served by the different
tools in which its branches terminate. It commands, and
the tools, good or bad ones, obey. If they were incapable
of performing their work, at least the essential parts of
it, the animal would perish. There are forms of parasitism
which seem to be the consequence of a general renuncia-
tion of organs; impotent to enter into direct relations
with the outer world, unmanned by the softness of the
muscles, the nervous system brings the skiff it was pilot-
ing into some harbour or other, and beaches it.
Fabre says, thinking particularly of insects: "The or-
gan does not determine the aptitude." And this most
aptly confirms Bonald's manner of seeing. Thrown in
at the end of a chapter, with scarcely anything directly
to justify it, this affirmation but gains in value. It is
the conclusion, not of a dissertation, but of a long se-
quence of scientific observations. As for the facts that
one can set inside it, they are innumerable; one would
group them under two heads: The animal serves himself
as best he can with the organs he possesses; he does not
always make use of them. The flying-stag, the best
199
THE NATURAL
armed of all our insects, is inoffensive; while the carabe,
of peaceful appearance, is a formidable beast of prey.
Apropos of the pill in which the scarab shuts its egg, the
skill with which it is worked up and felted, in a dark
hole by a stump-armed insect, Fabre says simply: "It
gave me the idea of an elephant wanting to make lace."
But in what insect will we see perfect accord of work and
organ? In the bee? It would scarcely seem so. The bee
uses for building, modelling, waxing, bottling honey, ex-
actly the same organs that her sisters, the ammophile,
bembex, sphex, ant, chalicodome, use for hollowing earth,
excavating sand, making cellars, mud houses. The
libellule does nothing with the hooks which render the
termite dangerous, and she loafs, while her industrious
brother, also nevroptera and nothing more, builds Hima-
layas.
The mole-cricket is so well organized for digging with
her short powerful bow legs that she could cut sandstone:
she frequents only the soft soil of gardens. The anto-
phore, on the other hand, with no instruments save her
mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws, forces the cement
which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hard-
ened earth of the slopes by the roadside.
Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than
to do nothing and to let their tools sleep; the xylocope,
that fine violet bumble-bee, who ought to bore into wood,
a gallery twice a hand's length wherein to lay her eggs,
if she finds a suitable hole ready made, confines herself
to the meagerest possible works of accommodation. In
sum, the insects who like the saw-fly (tenthredes) use a
precise instrument for a precise job, are almost rare.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to
him because he is intelligent. In itself the hand is noth-
ing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their
hands only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack
nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broad-
cast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the
saurians have them, and are not a bit more clever thereby.
It is without fingers, without hands, without members that
the larvae of insects construct for themselves marvellous
mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk-floss, exer-
cise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter. But
this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior
to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine
it, complicate it, in order to obtain obedience to the in-
creasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the
hand created machines? Man's intelligence immeasure-
ably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it de-
mands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the
railway, the telegraph, the microscope and everything
which multiplies the power of organs which have become
rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the brain
being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual
organs more than they were able to give: it is to satisfy
these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with
so many dreams and rose-leaves.
It is difficult to make people understand that the eye
sees, not because it is an eye, but because it is situated
at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive
tc light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the
eye would hear. Doubtless it is adapted to its function,
as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an effect,
201
THE NATURAL
not a cause. Insects' eyes are very different from ours.
One has spoken of the experiments of a German savant
who wished to throw visual images on the brain without
the eye's intervention. This is suspicious, but not ab-
surd: insects are gifted certainly with the power to smell,
but one has never been able to discover the organ in
any single one of them; and, also, the role of the anten-
nae which seems very considerable in their life, remains
very obscure, since the removal of these appendices has
not always a measurable effect on their activity.1
Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed
in a position which diminishes their value. Notice a
resting horse, and another horse coming toward him (ob-
servation can be made quite easily in the streets of
Paris), what is he to do to gauge the danger, and re-
connoitre the movement? Look at the other horse? No.
His eyes are made to look sideways, not forward. He
uses his long ears, raises them, shifts their open side to-
ward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and re-
establishes his calm. The horse looks with his ears.
The blinkers by which people pretend to make him look
forward, merely blind him, and perhaps, thereby diminish
his impressionability. Blind horses moreover do the same
work as the others.
The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for
the other, in a certain degree; but in the normal state
they seem rather to reinforce each other mutually, and
lend each other a certain support. One does not shut the
eyes to hear better, save when one has determined the
1Fabre's experiments on mason bees, the shaggy ammophile,
and great-peacock moth.
202
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better?
Is it not rather to reflect and to hear at the same time,
to manage an interior concentration with which the eye,
essentially an explorative organ, would interfere?
It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most
intimately exercised. In superior animals, as well as in
man, each sense, together or in groups, comes to reinforce
the genital sense. None remain inactive, eye, ear, scent,
touch, even taste come into play. Thus one explains the
gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual odours. The
female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye;
the contrary is true of humanity; but female birds and
women are particularly moved by song or words. The
two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to scent; sight
seems to play but an insignificant role in their sexual
access, since minuscule canine beasts do not fear to ad-
dress themselves to monsters, which for man would be
in proportion more than that of a mammoth. Insects
before mating often caress each other with their mysteri-
ous antennae; the male is sometimes given a sounding
apparatus: cricket and grasshopper drum to charm their
companions.
It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially
in the male, all the senses concur in the amour, at least
when moral and religious prejudices do not stop their
impetus. It should be so, in an animal so sensitive, and
of so complex and multiple a sensibility. The abstention
of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble
the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many wo-
men may proceed less from a diminution of their genital
sense, than from the general mediocrity of their
203
THE NATURAL
Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit of the general sensi-
bility, its intensity is very often found to be in a certain
relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute coldness
might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many
exceptions for one to generalize in this matter. It hap-
pens indeed that intelligence instead of being the sum
total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the deviation or
transmutation. There remains very little sensibility;
it is nearly all turned into intelligence.
Every organized animal has a master: its nervous sys-
tem; and there is, doubtless, no real life save where a
nervous system exists, be it the magnificent infinitely
branching tree of mammals and birds, be it the double,
knotted cord of the mollusks, or the nail head which is
planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice.
As soon as this new matter appears, it reigns despoti-
cally, and the unforeseen appears in the world. One
would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder, a parasite
come in by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal role.
Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their
master asks fewer things. Often it only asks one: to
create a being in its exact likeness. The animal is sane,
that is to say, ruled; man is mad, that is to say, out of
rule: he has so many orders to execute at once, that he
scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he
can hardly reproduce himself and the specie is in danger.
It would disappear, if the means of protecting it did not
compensate the sterility.
One can not say that humanity has attained its in-
tellectual limits, although its physical evolution seems
completed; but as superior human specimens are nearly
204
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
always sterile, or capable of only mediocre posterity, it
is found that, alone among values, intelligence is not
transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and
the same effort ends ceaselessly in the same recommence-
ment. However, even here, artificial means intervene, and
the transmission of the acquisitions of intelligence is rela-
tively assured by all sorts of instruments. This mech-
anism, much inferior to carnal generation, permits us,
if the most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear as
fast as they flower, to preserve at least part of their
contents. Notions are transmitted, that is a result, even
though most of them are vain, in default of sensibilities
sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real
life of them.
Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely,
animality is rich enough to raise up an inheritor. The
candidates for humanity are in great number, and they
are not those whom the crowd supposes. Who knows if
our descendants may not some day find themselves faced
with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation
has not gone on strike, since man appeared: since making
this monster, nature has continued her work: the human
hazard might reproduce itself on the morrow.
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THE NATURAL
TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT
"II y aurait peut-etre une certain correlation entre la copula-
tion complete et profonde et le deVeloppement cerebral."
NOT only is this suggestion, made by our author at
the end of his eighth chapter, both possible and probable,
but it is more than likely that the brain itself, is, in
origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital
fluid held in suspense or reserve; at first over the cervical
ganglion, or, earlier or in other species, held in several
clots over the scattered chief nerve centres; and augment-
ing in varying speeds and quantities into medulla oblon-
gata, cerebellum and cerebrum. This hypothesis would
perhaps explain a certain number of as yet uncorrelated
phenomena both psychological and physiological. It
• would explain the enormous content of the brain as a
maker or presenter of images. Species would have de-
veloped in accordance with, or their development would
have been affected by, the relative discharge and reten-
tion of the fluid; this proportion being both a matter of
quantity and of quality, some animals profiting hardly
at all by the alluvial Nile-flood; the baboon retaining
nothing; men apparently stupefying themselves in some
cases by excess, and in other cases discharging apparently
only a surplus at high pressure; the gateux, or the genius,
the "strong-minded."
I offer an idea rather than an argument, yet if we con-
206
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
sider that the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the
power of exteriorizing a form; and if we consider the lack
of any other known substance in nature capable of grow-
ing into brain, we are left with only one surprise, or
rather one conclusion, namely, in face of the smallness
of the average brain's activity, we must conclude that
the spermatozoic substance must have greatly atrophied
in its change from lactic to coagulated and hereditarily
coagulated condition. Given, that is, two great seas of
this fluid, mutually magnetized, the wonder is, or at least
the first wonder is, that human thought is so inactive.
Chemical research may have something to say on the
subject, if it be directed to comparison of brain and
spermatophore in the nautilus, to the viscous binding of
the bee's fecundative liquid. I offer only reflections, per-
haps a few data. Indications of earlier adumbrations of
an idea which really surprises no one, but seems as if it
might have been lying on the study table of any physician
or philosopher.
There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic reli-
gions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging,
head-on, the female chaos. Integration of the male in
the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any
new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sen-
sation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.
Without any digression on feminism, taking merely
the division Gourmont has given (Aristotelian, if you
like), one offers woman as the accumulation of heredi-
tary aptitudes, better than man in the "useful gestures,"
the perfections; but to man, given what we have of his-
tory, tl*e "inventions," the new gestures, the extrava-
207
THE NATURAL
gance, the wild shots, the impractical, merely because in
him occurs the new up-jut, the new bathing of the cere-
bral tissues hi the residuum, in la mousse of the life sap.
Or, as I am certainly neither writing an anti-feminist
tract, nor claiming disproportionate privilege for the
spermatozoide, for the sake of symmetry ascribe a cog-
nate role to the ovule, though I can hardly be expected
to introspect it. A flood is as bad as a famine; the
ovular bath could still account for the refreshment of
the female mind, and the recharging, regracing of its
"traditional aptitudes;" where one woman appears to
benefit by an alluvial clarifying, ten dozen appear to be
swamped.
" Postulating that the cerebral fluid tried all sorts of
! experiments, and, striking matter, forced it into all sorts
of forms, by gushes; we have admittedly in insect life a
female predominance; in t>ird, mammal and human, at
least an increasing male prominence. And these four
important branches of "the fan" may be differentiated
according to their apparent chief desire, or source of
choosing their species.
Insect, utility; bird, flight; mammal, muscular splen-
dour; man, experiment.
The insect representing the female, and utility; the
need of heat being present, the insect chooses to solve
the problem by hibernation, i.e., a sort of negation of
action. The bird wanting continuous freedom, feathers
itself. Desire for decoration appears in all the branches,
man exteriorizing it most. The bat's secret appears to
be that he is not the bird-mammal, but the mammal-
insect: economy of tissue, hibernation. The female prin-
208
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
ciple being not only utility, but extreme economy, woman,
falling by this division into a male branch, is the least
female of females, and at this point one escapes from a
journalistic sex-squabble into the opposition of two prin-
ciples, utlfity and a sort of venturesomeness.
In its subservience to the money fetish our age returns
to the darkness of medievalism. Two osmies may make
superfluous egg-less nests, but do not kill each other in
contesting which shall deposit the supererogatory honey
therein. It is perhaps no more foolish to go at a her-
mit's bidding to recover an old sepulchre than to make
new sepulchres at the bidding of finance.
In his growing subservience to, and adoration of, and
entanglement in machines, in utility, man rounds the
circle almost into insect life, the absence of flesh; and
may have need even of horned gods to save him, or. at
least of a form of thought which permits them.
Take it that usual thought is a sort of shaking or shift-
ing of a fluid in the viscous cells of the brain; one has
seen electricity stripping the particles of silver from a
plated knife in a chemical bath, with order and celerity,
and gathering them on the other pole of a magnet. Take
it as materially as you like. There is a sort of spirit-
level in the ear, giving us our sense of balance. And
dreams? Do they not happen precisely at the moments
when one has tipped the head; are they not, with their
incoherent mixing of known and familiar images, like the
pouring of a complicated honeycomb tilted from its
perpendicular? Does not this give precisely the needed
mixture of familiar forms in non-sequence, the jumble
of fragments each coherent within its own limit?
209
THE NATURAL
And from the popular speech, is not the sensible man
called "level-headed," has he not his "head well screwed
on" or "screwed on straight;" and are not lunatics and
cranks often recognizable from some peculiar carriage
or tilt of the head-piece; and is not the thinker always
pictured with his head bowed into his hand, yes, but
level so far as left to right is concerned? The upward-
" jaw, head-back pose has long been explained by the rela-
tive positions of the medulla and the more human parts
of the brain; this need not be dragged in here; nor do
I mean to assert that you can cure a lunatic merely by
holding his head level.
Thought is a chemical process, the most interesting of
all transfusions in liquid solution. The mind is an up-
spurt of sperm, no, let me alter that; trying to watch the
process: the sperm, the form-creator, the substance which
compels the ovule to evolve in a given pattern, one mi-
croscopic, minuscule particle, entering the "castle" of
the ovule.
"Thought is a vegetable" says a modern hermetic,
whom I have often contradicted, but whom I do not wish
to contradict at this point. Thought is a "chemical
process" in relation to the organ, the brain; creative
thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of
the human seed, but given that cast, that ejaculation, I
am perfectly willing to grant that the thought once born,
separated, in regard to itself, not in relation to the brain
that begat it, does lead an independent life much like a
member of the vegetable kingdom, blowing seeds, ideas
from the paradisal garden at the summit of Dante's
Mount Purgatory, capable of lodging and sprouting
210
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
where they fall. And Gourmont has the phrase "fecun-
dating a generation of bodies as genius fecundates a
generation of minds."
Man is the sum of the animals, the sum of their in-
stincts, as Gourmont has repeated in the course of his
book. Given, first a few, then as we get to our own con-
dition, a mass of these spermatozoic particles withheld,-
in suspense, waiting in the organ that has been built
up through ages by a myriad similar waitings.
Each of these particles is, we need not say, conscious
of form, but has by all counts a capacity for formal
expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing
and form-combining?
That is to say we have the hair-thinning "abstract
thought" and we have the concrete thought of women,
of artists, of musicians, the mockedly "long-haired," who
have made everything in the world. We have the form- v
making and the form-destroying "thought," only the
first of which is really satisfactory. I don't wish to be
invidious, it is perfectly possible to consider the "ab-
stract" thought, reason, etc., as the comparison, regimen-
tation, and least common denominator of a multitude of
images, but in the end each of the images is a little spoiled
thereby, no one of them is the Apollo, and the makers of
this kind of thought have been called dry-as-dust since
the beginning of history. The regiment is less interesting
as a whole than any individual in it. And, as we are
being extremely material and physical and animal, in the
wake of our author, we will leave old wives' gibes about
the profusion of hair, and its chance possible indication
211
THE NATURAL
or sanction of a possible neighbouring health beneath the
skull.
Creative thought has manifested itself in images, in
music, which is to sound what the concrete image is to
sight. And the thought of genius, even of the mathemati-
cal genius, the mathematical prodigy, is really the same
sort of thing, it is a sudden out-spurt of mind which takes
the form demanded by the problem; which creates the
answer, and baffles the man counting on the abacus.
I query the remarks about the sphex in Chapter XIX,
"que le sphex s'est forme lentement," I query this with a
conviction for which anyone is at liberty to call me
lunatic, and for which I offer no better ground than
simple introspection. I believe, and on no better ground
than that of a sudden emotion, that the change of species
is not a slow matter, managed by cross-breeding, of
nature's leporides and bardots, I believe that the species
changes as suddenly as a man makes a song or a poem,
or as suddenly as he starts making them, more suddenly
than he can cut a statue in stone, at most as slowly as
a locust or long-tailed Sirmione false mosquito emerges
from its outgrown skin. It is not even proved that man
is at the end of his physical changes. Say that the di-
versification of species has passed its most sensational
phases, say that it had once a great stimulus from the
rapidity of the earth's cooling, if one accepts the geolo-
gists' interpretation of that thermometric cyclone.
The cooling planet contracts, it is as if one had some
mud in a tin pail, and forced down the lid with such pres-
sure that the can sprung a dozen leaks, or it is as if one
had the mud in a linen bag and squeezed; merely as
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
mechanics (not counting that one has all the known and
unknown chemical elements cooling simultaneously), but
merely as mechanics this contraction gives energy enough
to squeeze vegetation through the pores of the imaginary
linen and to detach certain particles, leaving them still
a momentum. A body should cool with decreasing
speed in measure as it approaches the temperature of its
surroundings; however, the earth is still, I think, sup-
posed to be warmer than the surrounding unknown, and
is presumably still cooling, or at any rate it is not proved
that man is at the end of his physical changes. I return
to horned gods and the halo in a few paragraphs. It is
not proved that even the sort of impetus provided by a
shrinking of planetary surface is denied one.
What is known is that man's great divergence has been
in the making of detached, resumable tools.
That is to say, if an insect carries a saw, it carries
it all the time. The "next step," as in the case of the
male organ of the nautilus, is to grow a tool and de-
tach it.
Man's first inventions are fire and the club, that is
to say he detaches his digestion, he finds a means to get
heat without releasing the calories of the log by internal
combustion inside his own stomach. The invention of
the first tool turned his mind (using this term in the
full sense) ; turned, let us say, his "brain" from his own
body. No need for greater antennae, a fifth arm, etc.,
except, after a lapse, as a tour de force, to show that he
is still lord of his body.
That is to say the langouste's long feelers, all sorts of
extravagances in nature may be taken as the result of a
213
THE NATURAL
it*,?***
. • single gush of thought. A single out-push of a demand,
made by a spermatic sea of sufficient energy to cast such
a form. To cast it as one electric pole will cast a spark
to another. To exteriorize. Sometimes to act in this
with more enthusiasm than caution.
Let us say quite simply that light is a projection from
the luminous fluid, from the energy that is in the brain,
down along the nerve cords which receive certain vibra-
tions in the eye. Let us suppose man capable of exteri-
orizing a new organ, horn, halo, Eye of Horus. Given a
brain of this power, comes the question, what organ, and
to what purpose?
Turning to folk-lore, we have Frazer on horned gods,
we have Egyptian statues, generally supposed to be
"symbols," of cat-headed and ibis-headed gods. Now in
a primitive community, a man, a volontaire, might risk
it. He might want prestige, authority, want them enough
to grow horns and claim a divine heritage, or to grow
a cat head; Greek philosophy would have smiled at
him, would have deprecated his ostentation. With primi-
tive man he would have risked a good deal, he would
have been deified, or crucified, or possibly both. Today
he would be caught for a circus.
One does not assert that cat-headed gods appeared in
Egypt after the third dynasty; the country had a long
memory and such a phenomenon would have made some
stir in the valley. The horned god would appear to have
persisted, and the immensely high head of the Chinese
contemplative as shown in art and the China images is
another stray grain of tradition.
But man goes on making new faculties, or forgetting
214
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
old ones. That is to say you have all sorts of aptitudes
developed without external change, which in an earlier
biological state would possibly have found carnal ex-
pression. You have every exploited "hyper-aesthesia,"
i.e., every new form of genius, from the faculty of hearing
four parts in a fugue perfectly, to the ear for money (vide
Henry James in "The Ivory Tower" the passages on Mr.
Gaw). Here I only amplify what Gourmont has indi-
cated in Chapter XX. You have the visualizing sense,
the "stretch" of imagination, the mystics, — for what there
is to them — Santa Theresa who "saw" the microcosmos,
hell, heaven, purgatory complete, "the size of a walnut;"
and you have Mr. W., a wool-broker in London, who
suddenly at 3 a. m. visualizes the whole of his letter-
file, three hundred folios; he sees and reads particularly
the letter at folder 171, but he sees simultaneously the
entire contents of the file, the whole thing about the
size of two lumps of domino sugar laid flat side to flat
side.
Remains precisely the question: man feeling this pro-
tean capacity to grow a new organ: what organ? Or
new faculty; what faculty?
His first renunciation, flight, he has regained, almost
as if the renunciation, so recent in terms of biology, had
been committed in foresight. I Instinct conserves only the
"useful" gestures. Air provides little nourishment, and
anyhow the first great pleasure surrendered, the simple
ambition to mount the air has been regained and regrati-
fied. Water was never surrendered, man with sub-
aqueous yearnings is still, given a knife, the shark's van-
quisher.
215
THE NATURAL
The new faculty? Without then the ostentation of an
organ. Will? The hypnotist has shown the vanity and
Blake the inutility of willing trifles, and black magic
its futility. The telepathic faculty? In the first place
is it new? Have not travellers always told cock and
bull stories about its existence in savage Africa? Is it
not a faculty that man has given up, if not as useless, at
any rate as of a very limited use, a distraction, more
bother than it is worth? Lacking a localizing sense,
the savage knowing, if he does, what happens "some-
where" else, but never knowing quite where. The faculty
was perhaps not worth the damage it does to concentra-
tion of mind on some useful subject. "Instinct preserves
the useful gestures."
Take it that what man wants is a capacity for clearer
understanding, or for physical refreshment and vigour,
are not these precisely the faculties he is forever hammer-
ing at, perhaps stupidly? Muscularly he goes slowly,
athletic records being constantly worn down by milli-
metres and seconds.
I appear to have thrown down bits of my note some-
what at random; let me return to physiology. People
were long ignorant of the circulation of the blood; that
known, they appeared to think the nerves stationary;
Gourmont speaks of "circulation nerveuse," but many
people still consider the nerve as at most a telegraph
wire, simply because it does not bleed visibly when cut.
The current is "interrupted." The school books of
twenty years ago were rather vague about lymph, and
various glands still baffle physicians. I have not seen the
suggestion that some of them may serve rather as fuses
216
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
in an electric system, to prevent short circuits, or in
some variant or allotropic form. The spermatozoide is,
I take it, regarded as a sort of quintessence; the brain is
also a quintessence, or at least "in rapport with" all parts
of the body; the single spermatozoide demands simply
that the ovule shall construct a human being, the sus-
pended spermatozoide (if my wild shot rings the target
bell) is ready to dispense with, in the literal sense, in-
carnation, en-fleshment. Shall we postulate the mass of
spermatozoides, first accumulated in suspense, then spe-
cialized?
Three channels, hell, purgatory, heaven, if one wants
to follow yet another terminology: digestive excretion,
incarnation, freedom in the imagination, i.e., cast into
an exterior formlessness, or into form material, or merely
imaginative visually or perhaps musically or perhaps
fixed in some other sensuous dimension, even of taste
or odour (there have been perhaps creative cooks and
perfumers?).
The dead laborious compilation and comparison of
other men's dead images, all this is mere labour, not
the spermatozoic act of the brain.
Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures,
clever, practical, as Gourmont says, not inventive, al-
ways the best disciple of any inventor, has been always
the enemy of the dead or laborious form of compilation,
abstraction.
Not considering the process ended; taking the indi-
vidual genius as the man in whom the new access, the
new superfluity of spermatozoic pressure (quantitative •
and qualitative) up-shoots into the brain, alluvial Nile-
217
THE NATURAL
flood, bringing new crops, new invention. And as Gour-
mont says, there is only reasoning where there is initial
error, i.e., weakness of the spurt, wandering search.
In no case can it be a question of mere animal quantity
of sperm. You have the man who wears himself out and
weakens his brain, echo of the orang, obviously not
the talented sieve; you have the contrasted case in the
type of man who really can not work until he has relieved
the pressure on his spermatic canals.
This is a question of physiology, it is not a question
of morals and sociology. Given the spermatozoic thought,
the two great seas of fecundative matter, the brain lobes,
mutually magnetized, luminous in their own knowledge
of their being; whether they may be expected to seek
exterior "luxuria," or whether they are going to repeat
Augustine hymns, is not in my jurisdiction. An exterior
paradise might not allure them "La betise humaine est
la seule chose qui donne une idee de 1'infini," says Renan,
and Gourmont has quoted him, and all flesh is grass, a
superior grass.
It remains that man has for centuries nibbled at this
idea of connection, intimate connection between his sperm
and his cerebration, the ascetic has tried to withhold all
his sperm, the lure, the ignis fatuus perhaps, of wanting
to super-think; the dope-fiend has tried opium and every
inferior to Bacchus, to get an extra kick out of the organ,
the mystics have sought the gleam in the tavern, Helen
of Tyre, priestesses in the temple of Venus, in Indian
temples, stray priestesses in the streets, un-uprootable
custom, and probably with a basis of sanity. A sense
of balance might show that asceticism means either a
218
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
drought or a crowding. The liquid solution must be
kept at right consistency; one would say the due pro-
portion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation;
the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting per-
haps most of all; the balance of ejector and retentive
media.
Perhaps the clue is in Propertius after all:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit.
There is the whole of the Xllth century love cult, and
Dante's metaphysics a little to one side, and Gourmont's
Latin Mystique; and for image-making both Fenollosa
on "The Chinese Written Character," and the paragraphs
in "Le Probleme du Style." At any rate the quarrel be-
tween cerebralist and viveur and ignorantist ends, if
the brain is thus conceived not as a separate and desic-
cated organ, but as the very fluid of life itself.
EZRA POUND
June 21, 1921.
219
THE NATURAL
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PRINCIPAL WORKS CONSULTED
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220
PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
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1900, in 8vo.
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scientifique, 21 March, 1903.
F. LeDantec, La Sexualite. Paris, s. d. Scientia, No. 2.
M. Maeterlinck, La Vie des Abeilles. Paris, 1901. (Con-
tains a bibliography of the bee.)
P. Mantegazza, L'Amour dans Phumanite, Essai d'une
ethnologic de Pamour. Paris, 1886, in -18.
P. Mantegazza, Physiologie de Pamour. Paris, 1886.
Mariot-Didieux, Guide-pratique de Peducateur de lapins.
Paris, s. d.
221
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