Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct

Very few ever fully appreciate the powerful influence which sexuality exercises over feeling, thought, and conduct, both in the individual and in society. Schiller, in his poem, "Die Weltweisen," recognizes it with the words: -

"Einstweilen bis den Bau der Welt
Philosophie zusammenhalt,
Erhalt sie das Getriebe
Durch Hunger und durch Liebe."

It is remarkable that the sexual life has received but a very subordinate consideration on the part of philosophers.

Schopenhauer("The World as Will and Idea") thought it strange that love had been thus far a subject for the poet alone, and that, with the exception of superficial treatment by Plato, Rousseau, and Kant, it had been foreign to philosophers.

What Schopenhauer and, after him, the Philosopher of the Unconscious, E. v. Hartmann, philosophized concerning the sexual relations is so imperfect, and in its consequences so distasteful, that, aside from the treatment in the works of Michelet ("L'amour")and Mantegazza ("Physiology of Love"), which are to be considered more as brilliant discussions than as scientific treatises, the empirical psychology and metaphysics of the sexual side of human existence rest upon a foundation which is scientifically almost puerile.

The poets may be better psychologists than the psychologists and philosophers; but they are men of feeling rather than of understanding, and at least one-sided in their consideration of the subject. They cannot see the deep shadow behind the light and sunny warmth of that from which they draw their inspiration.

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