Читать книгу The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization - Iwan 1872-1922 Bloch - Страница 9

“Smell,” says Heinrich Steffens, “is the principal sense of the higher animals; it represents for them their own inner world; it envelops their existence. Upon smell, wherein sympathy and antipathy are represented, is based the whole security of the higher animal instinct; for carnal desire is comprehended in this sense.... Indeed, in sexual union the subjective sensation which is developed by means of smell blends completely with the objective, and from the monistic union of the two arises the intenser libido, wherein the unfathomableness of the procreative force and the whole power of sex are absorbed.”

Ernst Haeckel ascribes to the two sexual cells a kind of inferior psychical activity; he believes that they experience a sensation of one another’s proximity; and indeed it is probably a form of sensory activity analogous to the sense of smell that draws them together. The sensation of the two sexual cells, which Haeckel believes to be situated especially in the cell nuclei, he denotes by the term “erotic chemotropism.” He attributes it to an attraction of the nature of smell, and considers that it represents the psychical quintessence, the original being of love.

A later investigator, Eugen Kröner, holds the same view. In the conjugation of two vorticellæ he recognizes the influence of the chemically operative sensation of smell; to him smell is the most important element in the sexual impulse of animals.

This theory is strongly supported, and indeed elevated to the rank of a natural law, by the circumstance that in the higher animals the sense of smell, in the course of phylogenetic development, has attained a continually greater significance in relation to sexuality; and by the fact that, according to the discovery of Zwaardemaker, there exists widely diffused throughout Nature a distinct group of sexual odours, the so-called capryl odours, which have a natural biological connexion with the vita sexualis. These capryl odours, which already in plants play a sexual part, are in animals and in the human species localized in or near the genital organs (odoriferous glands of the beaver, the musk-ox, etc., the secretions of the male foreskin and the female vagina), or in other cases are found in the general secretions, such as the sweat. Recently Gustav Klein has succeeded in proving that a definite group of glands in the female genital organs (glandulæ vestibulares majores, or glands of Bartholin) must be regarded as a vestige from the time of periodic sexual excitement (rutting). At that time in the human species, as now in the lower animals, the sexual impulse was periodic in its activity, and the secretion of these odoriferous glands of the human female then served as a means of alluring members of the male sex. At the present time these glands have for the most part lost their significance as specific stimuli. Now it is rather the exhalation from the entire surface of the female body which exercises the erotic influence. Cases in which such stimuli proceed exclusively from the female genital organs are regarded by Klein as a phylogenetic vestige of the primitive relations between the rutting odours of the female and sexual excitement in the male. Friedrich S. Krauss, in his “Anthropophyteia” (1904, vol. i., p. 224), reproduces a Southern Slavonic story in which a man is described who obtained sexual gratification only by enjoying the natural smell of the female genital organs. The remarkable classification of Indian women according to the various odours proceeding from their genital organs must not be forgotten in this connexion.

That this primitive phenomenon of love has even to-day a certain significance, although, in consequence of the enormous development of the brain and the predominance of purely psychical elements in man, its influence has been very notably diminished, is shown by the existing physiological connexion proved by Fliess to exist between the nose and the genital organs. On the inferior turbinate bones there exist certain “genital areas,” which, under the influence of sexual stimulus and excitement, as in coitus, during menstruation, etc., swell up. From these areas it is also possible to influence directly certain conditions of the genital organs.

It is noteworthy that civilization has to a large extent replaced the natural sexual odours by artificial scents, so-called perfumes, whose origin is partly due to the imitation or accentuation of the natural odours, in part, however, and especially in recent times, to an endeavour to conceal these natural odours, especially when the latter are of a disagreeable character. For this reason, in addition to penetrating perfumes, such as civet, ambergris, musk, etc., we have also mild perfumes, for the most part vegetable in origin. The markedly exciting influence of these artificial scents is employed especially by women, above all by professional prostitutes, in order to excite men.[3] Frequently also the simple perfume of flowers suffices for this purpose. Krauss tells us that in the kolo-dance of the Southern Slavs the girls fasten strong-scented flowers and sprigs in the front of their dress, and thereby excite intense sexual desire in the young men. In the East sexual stimulation by means of the sense of smell plays a far more extensive rôle than in Europe.

In the human species, however, as a specific elementary phenomenon of sexual reproduction, smell has long been thrust into the background by the strong development of other senses, especially that of sight. This fact is very clearly exhibited by the notable reduction which has occurred in the size of the organ of smell. In man the frontal lobes of the brain, the seat of the highest intellectual processes and of speech, have taken the place of the olfactory lobes in the lower animals. Besides, by means of clothing, the natural odours of men and women, which previously had such marked sexual significance, have been rendered almost imperceptible, and nowadays sexual stimulation may result merely from the senses of touch and of sight, so that the hands and the lips and the female breasts have been transformed into erotic organs. Notwithstanding, however, the notable weakening of the sexual significance of smell, this most primitive sense (actually associated, as we have shown, with the activity of the germinal cells) will never completely cease to influence the sexual life.

“Still, there always surrounds us a now gently moving and now stormy sea of odours, whose waves without cessation arouse in us feelings of sympathy or antipathy, and to the minutest movements of which we are not wholly indifferent” (Havelock Ellis).

Inasmuch as we have pointed out as the single primæval basis, as the most important elementary phenomenon, of human love, the conjugation of the male sperm cell with the female ovum (dependent probably upon a sensation analogous to that of smell), we denote this particular phenomenon of sexuality as primary, and we separate all the other phenomena as secondary, as more remote. Wilhelm Bölsche has also expressed this difference by denoting the union of the two reproductive cells as “fusion-love,” whilst all that has occurred later, in the course of many thousands of years of evolution, and that has transformed this primary process, by innumerable new influences, stimuli, and perceptions, into the love of modern civilized man, he denotes by the apt name of “distance-love.”

According to him,

“the ultimate act of love in a member of the most highly civilized community assumes the form of a sudden withdrawal from the entire world of surrounding artifacts, of alphabets, posts, telephones, submarine cables, etc.... At this instant the principle of union is once again victorious, as it were, in an ultimate posthumous vision in a vital experience of a portion of primæval Nature, of the primæval world, of an instant’s profoundest self-absorption into the great mystery of the obscure original basis of Nature, to which neither time nor old and new is known, but which is ever renewed in us in its elemental force—the procreative principle. At this instant the loving individual must return home to the heart of the all-mother—it is useless to resist. It must draw from the fountain of youth—must descend like Odin to the Norns, like Faust to the Mothers—and there all civilization is swallowed up; there cell body must join cell body, in order in the ardent embrace to reduce to a minimum the distance which usually sunders such large bodies. Indeed, in reality the sexual act goes further and deeper than this reduction of separation to a minimum. Within the body of one of the partners of the sexual act the ovum and the spermatozoon undergo an ultimate perfect fusion of soul and body, in comparison with which even the closest approximation of the great halves of the love partnership is no more than a mere mechanical apposition. The ultimate aim of the loving union is attained only in the coalescence of ovum and spermatozoon.”

To express the matter briefly, fusion-love fulfils the purpose of the species, while distance-love subserves rather the purpose of the individual. Thus the natural course of the development of love, which in the next chapter we propose to follow further, affords already the proof of the thesis propounded in the introduction regarding the duplicate nature of human love.

[3] According to Laurent (“Morbid Love,” pp. 133, 134, Leipzig, 1895), common prostitutes generally use musk; young working women, violet or rose-water; ladies of the bourgeoisie, penetrating perfumes, such as white heliotrope, jasmine, and ylang-ylang; women of the half-world, finer perfumes, or such “as are complex, like their own mode of life”—for example, lily-of-the-valley, or mignonette.