The law may be expressed otherwise as follows:
If we take μ, any individual regarded in the ordinary way as a male, and denote his real sexual constitution as Mμ, so many parts really male, plus Wμ, so many parts really female; if we also take ω, any individual regarded in the ordinary way as a female, and denote her real sexual constitution as Wω, so many parts really female, plus Mω, so many parts really male; then, if there be complete sexual affinity, the greatest possible sexual attraction between the two individuals, μ and ω,
(1) Mμ (the truly male part in the “male”) + Mω (the truly male part in the “female”) will equal a constant quantity, M, the ideal male; and
(2) Wμ + Wω (the ideal female parts in respectively the “male” and the “female”) will equal a second constant quantity, W, the ideal female.
This statement must not be misunderstood. Both formulas refer to one case, to a single sexual relation, the second following directly from the first and adding nothing to it, as I set out from the point of view of an individual possessing just as much femaleness as he lacks of maleness. Were he completely male, his requisite complement would be a complete female, and vice versâ. If, however, he is composed of a definite inheritance of maleness, and also an inheritance of femaleness (which must not be neglected), then, to complete the individual, his maleness must be completed to make a unit; but so also must his femaleness be completed.
If, for instance, an individual be composed thus:
( 3⁄4 M
μ ( and
( 1⁄4 W,then the best sexual complement of that individual will be another compound as follows:
( 1⁄4 M
ω ( and
( 3⁄4 W.It can be seen at once that this view is wider in its reach than the common statement of the case. That male and female, as sexual types, attract each other is only one instance of my general law, an instance in which an imaginary individual,
χ ( 1 M
( 0 W,finds its complement in an equally imaginary individual,
γ ( 0 M
( 1 W.There can be no hesitation in admitting the existence of definite, individual sexual preferences, and such an admission carries with it approval of the necessity of investigating the laws of the preference, and its relation to the rest of the bodily and mental characters of an individual. The law, as I have stated it, can encounter no initial sense of impossibility, and is contrary neither to scientific nor common experience. But it is not self-evident. It might be that the law, which cannot yet be regarded as fully worked out, might run as follows:
Mμ — Mω = a constant;
that is to say, it may be the difference between the degrees of masculinity and not the sum of the degrees of masculinity that is a constant quality, so that the most masculine man would stand just as far removed from his complement (who in this case would lie nearly midway between masculinity and femininity) as the most feminine man would be removed from his complement who would be near the extreme of femininity. Although, as I have said, this is conceivable, it is not borne out by experience. Recognising that we have to do here with an empirical law, and trying to observe a wise scientific restraint, we shall do well to avoid speaking as if there were any “force” pulling the two individuals together as if they were puppets; the law is no more than the statement that an identical relation can be made out in each case of maximum sexual attraction. We are dealing, in fact, with what Ostwald termed an “invariant” and Avenarius a “multiponible”; and this is the constant sum formed by the total masculinity and the total femininity in all cases where a pair of living beings come together with the maximum sexual attraction.
In this matter we may neglect altogether the so-called æsthetic factor, the stimulus of beauty. For does it not frequently happen that one man is completely captivated by a particular woman and raves about her beauty, whilst another, who is not the sexual complement of the woman in question, cannot imagine what his friend sees in her to admire. Without discussing the laws of æsthetics or attempting to gather together examples of relative values, it may readily be admitted that a man may consider a woman beautiful who, from the æsthetic standpoint, is not merely indifferent but actually ugly, that in fact pure æsthetics deal not with absolute beauty, but merely with conceptions of beauty from which the sexual factor has been eliminated.
I have myself worked out the law in, at the lowest, many hundred cases, and I have found that the exceptions were only apparent. Almost every couple one meets in the street furnishes a new proof. The exceptions were specially instructive, as they not only suggested but led to the investigation of other laws of sexuality. I myself made special investigations in the following way. I obtained a set of photographs of æsthetically beautiful women of blameless character, each of which was a good example of some definite proportion of femininity, and I asked a number of my friends to inspect these and select the most beautiful. The selection made was invariably that which I had predicted. With other male friends, who knew on what I was engaged, I set about in another fashion. They provided me with photographs from amongst which I was to choose the one I should expect them to think most beautiful. Here, too, I was uniformly successful. With others, I was able to describe most accurately their ideal of the opposite sex, independently of any suggestions unconsciously given by them, often in minuter detail than they had realised. Sometimes, too, I was able to point out to them, for the first time, the qualities that repelled them in individuals of the opposite sex, although for the most part men realise more readily the characters that repel them than the characters that attract them.
I believe that with a little practice any one could readily acquire and exercise this art on any circle of friends. A knowledge of other laws of sexual affinity would be of great importance. A number of special constants might be taken as tests of the existence of complementary individuals. For instance, the law might be caricatured so as to require that the sum of the length of the hairs of any two perfect lovers should always be the same. But, as I have already shown in chapter ii., this result is not to be expected, because all the organs of the same body do not necessarily possess the same degree of maleness or femaleness. Such heuristic rules would soon multiply and bring the whole subject into ridicule, and I shall therefore abstain from further suggestions of the kind.
I do not deny that my exposition of the law is somewhat dogmatical and lacks confirmation by exact detail. But I am not so anxious to claim finished results as to incite others to the study, the more so as the means for scientific investigations are lacking in my own case. But even if much remains theoretical, I hope that I shall have firmly riveted the chief beams in my edifice of theory by showing how it explains much that hitherto has found no explanation, and so shall have, in a fashion, proved it retrospectively by showing how much it would explain if it were true.
A most remarkable confirmation of my law may be found in the vegetable kingdom, in a group of facts hitherto regarded as isolated and to be so strange as to have no parallel. Every botanist must have guessed already that I have in mind the phenomena of heterostylism, first discovered by Persoon, then described by Darwin and named by Hildebrand. Many Dicotyledons, and a few Monocotyledons, for instance, species of Primulaceæ and Geraneaceæ and many Rubiaceæ, phanerogams in the flowers of which both the pollen and the stigma are functional, although only in cross-fertilisation, so that the flowers are hermaphrodite in structure but unisexual physiologically, display the peculiarity that in different individuals the stamens and the stigma have different lengths. The individuals, all the flowers of which have long styles and therefore high stigmas and short anthers, are, in my judgment, the more female, whilst the individuals with short styles and long anthers are more male. In addition to such dimorphic plants, there are also trimorphic plants, such as Lythrum salicaria, in which the sexual organs display three forms differing in length. There are not only long-styled and short-styled forms, but flowers with styles of a medium length.
Although only dimorphism and trimorphism have been recognised in the books, these conditions do not exhaust the actual complexities of structure. Darwin himself pointed out that if small differences were taken into account, no less than five different situations of the anthers could be distinguished. Alongside such plain cases of discontinuity, of the separation of the different degrees of maleness and femaleness in plainly distinct individuals, there are also cases in which the different degrees grade into each other without breaks in the series. There are analogous cases of discontinuity in the animal kingdom, although they have always been thought of as unique and isolated phenomena, as the parallel
