The Natural Philosophy of Love

sychologic dimorphism.-The insect world and the human.-Modern dimorphism, basis of the pair.-Solidarity of the human pa

; 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 l

ence; the females' sacks are very small. Other monkeys, notably howling apes, are provided with these air-chambers, as are also cer

rgans, and the secondary dimorphism with which the relation of sex is less evident or wholly uncertain. Limited to the non-sexual elements, human dimorphism is very feeble. Almost null in infancy, it develops with approaching puberty, is maintained during the genital period, and diminishes, sometimes almost to vanishing point, in old age.

ess 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 contrary 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 civilization has but accentuated a native dimorphism. This is more probable, for one does not see how civilization could have caused the dimorphi

gence to flatter prejudiced people. Ins

rly 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 male, the couple must be established and permanent. The male osmie (sort of solitary bee) sees the light before his female; he could prepare the nest, or at least choose its situation

most herbivora are polygamous) represent two sexes made to 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 Christians (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 conseq

ndian 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 sun-reddened, hardy cow-girl. Woman's liberty also accentuates the dimorphism but by another process. Freed from

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 b

d to accentuate her ?sthetic and her psychologic dimorphism. The ?sthetic 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 deepest 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 beauty, 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 has to have them lent to it. The 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 o

h short limbs. Both types are indeed, easy enough to distinguish, but they rarely present their characteristics with sufficient distinction, moreover the first is rather rare: it is the one which sculptors have vulgarized by amelioration. Compare a series of photographs of art with a series of photos f