Love's coming of age : a series of papers on the relations of the sexes.

  • Edward Carpenter
Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Love's coming of age : a series of papers on the relations of the sexes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Heine I think says somewhere that the man who loves unsuccessfully knows himself to be a god. It is not perhaps till the great current of sexual love is checked and brought into conflict with the other parts of his being that the whole nature of the man, sexual and moral, under the tremendous stress rises into consciousness and reveals in fire its god-like quality. This is the work of the artificer who makes immortal souls—who out of the natural love evolves even a more perfect love. “ In tutti gli amanti,” says Giordano Bruno, “ e questo fabro vulcano (“in all lovers is this Olympian blacksmith present”). It is the subject of this conflict, or at least differentiation between the sexual and the more purely moral and social instincts in man which interests us here. It is clear, I think, that if sex is to be treated rationally, that is, neither super- stitiously on the one hand, nor licentiously on the other, we must be willing to admit that both the satisfaction of the passion and the non-satisfaction of it are desirable and beautiful. They both have their results, and man has to reap the fruits which belong to both experiences. May we not say that there is probably some sort of Transmutation of sesences continually effected and effectible in the human frame ? Lust and Love—the Aphrodite Pandemos and the Aphrodite Ouranios—are subtly
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