Here the process of physical love finds its last stage, dying out of itself after it has accomplished its work, by developing in the living creature, during the period of his maturity, all the energies of his organization, animating his heart with the most intense emotions, inspiring the liveliest sallies of his intellect and imag-i• nation, and contributing necessarily to the perpetuation of his race and the preservation of his species.
2. In the domain of intellectual activity proper, the excitations of physical pleasure have an action as powerful as that they exercise in the sphere of purely psychical phenomena.
In proportion as the human being who has passed through the transitory phases of puberty accomplishes his physiological evolution, new ideas arise, unappeased desires are awakened ; he feels himself incomplete in his solitude, and comprehends that another being is designed to fill the void of his sentiments and desires.
I Ienceforth, urged on by his latent desires, he employs all the resources of his intelligence to seek out his future companion and to prepare for her the necessary material provision. He thinks of his social establishment ; he struggles ardently in the battle of life : the woman, and union with her in marriage, are the secret motives of his actions. It is the hope of attaining this end that sus tains his strength and maintains his courage ; and, later on, when he has attained this end, he still struggles (and puts forth all his intellectual activity in the struggle) to save his offspring from the troubles of the road along which they must follow him. He thinks of the future, and prepares the inheritance he will leave behind. He thus harmonizes all the intellectual activities, all the social forces he can command, with the different phases of the physiological process which is being inevitably xvcrked out in him ; and under the most diverse forms, in the most dissimilar circumstances, he always obeys the same necessary laws of evolution that press upon and metamorphose him insensibly, from the moment in which he becomes a candidate for marriage to that in which, after having been a husband and father, he becomes a grandfather, and sees in the second genera tion that springs up around him the secondary ramifica tions of the branches of which he is the parent stem. So that, whatever be the position of a man (I mean of a complete and regularly constituted man), on whatever rung of the social ladder we may imagine him placed, we are always sure to find at the bottom of his actions, open or secret, as the first cause of their motives, the craving for physical pleasure, and as a consequence, psychic pleasure, with all the sentiments to which it gives birth. It is this which, always present, always
active, becomes in every act of his life the natural stimulus of the briskness of his mind, the resources of his imagination, and the vigour with which he enters upon the struggle for existence. It tinges his whole personality, animates him incessantly, and produces such concordant action of all his powers that we may say, without fear of mistake, that the measure of his physical is also that of his moral virility.
3. Genital excitations play such an important part in the sum total of the operations of psycho-intellectual life, that when they are arrested in their development, in consequence of certain operations that nip them in the bud in the regions where they have their point of origin, a very remarkable effect is produced upon the intellect and character.
Every one knows how mild and easy castrated animals are to manage, and how this fits them for the rule of man, through the modification of their natural impetuosity. In man, the same practice pro duces similar effects. According to Godard,* castration performed on the adult singularly weakens the moral energy, as the following fact, reported by d'Escayrac, de Lauture, proves. " I have seen," he says, " six slaves belonging to the kachef of Abouharas, in Kor dofan, who, in consequence of a conspiracy against the life of their master, were emasculated by him. All were adults at the time of this mutilation, and none of them died. Their characters changed completely, and the submission they now show differs remarkably from the spirit of rebellion that animated them previously." Godard afterwards addst that, according to Dionis, castrated persons are unsociable, liars, and rascals, and that they never seem to practise any human virtue ; and that, according to Benoit Mojou, eunuchs are the vilest class of the human race, cowards and rascals because they are weak, envious and spiteful because they are unhappy.
Finally, he has noticed that even where no mutilation has been practised, individuals with congenital absence of the two testicles are effeminate, unenergetic, timid ; they blush easily, everything frightens them, and it is difficult even to examine them without a great deal of trouble.