This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ...them. Opinions have varied from ancient national aphorisms to the effect that women have no souls to the most ultramodern utterances of biologist-publicists that the differences between men and women are the differences between two species. There are other epigrams, vast sweeping generalities, extant concerning the nature of sex, and women particularly. All partake of the complexity of truth and therefore own a certain validity. Still, since as a matter of fact, these items have been based upon superficial observations colored by the tradition and verbiage of the milieu, they are valuable more as human documents, as material for the psychologist, than as scientifically obtained data, able to stand unblinking before the rays of the critical searchlights. Science vs. Art Not that all the vast accumulation needs to be thrown pell-mell, higgledy-piggledy into the discard. The love lyrics of the poet, the magic of the emotions of Shelley and Poe, for instance, with their marvelous music and exquisite intonings of feeling, furnish us with important information. They are the facts of the sex life, as much as the song of the nightingale, or the mocking laughter of the cuckoo pursued by its mate. So Sappho and Elizabeth Browning, to take only two samples, have contributed some of the feminine reaction. The erotic motive in literature has but paralleled the erotic motive in life, with all of its vagaries, delusions, confusions, ecstasies and suffering. We have had concerning sex not knowledge, but a series of attitudes, the attitude of virtue, the attitude of pruriency, the attitude of good taste, the attitude of the theoretic libertine, the attitude of the satyr's vulgarity. All these poses, of course, have supplied not an iota to an understanding of the...
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