Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXthe supreme sense. The love-thoughts of men have alwaysbeen a perpetualmeditation on beauty.The origin of our ideas o beauty is a question whichbelongs to esthetics, not to sexual psychology,and it is aquestion on which estheticians are not altogether in agreement.We need not here be concerned to make any def-whether our ideals ofinite assertion on the questionsexual beauty have developed under the influence ofmore general and fundamental laws, or whether sexualideals themselves underlie our more general conceptionsof beauty. Practically, so far as man and his immediateancestors are concerned, the sexual and the extra-sexualfactors of beauty have been interwoven from the first.The sexually beautiful object must have appealed to fundamentalphysiological aptitudes of reaction; the generallybeautiful object must have shared in the thrill whichthe specifically sexual object imparted. There has been aninevitable action and reaction throughout. Just as we findthat the sexual and non-sexual influences of agreeableodors throughout nature are inextricably mingled, so itis with the motives that make an object beautiful to oureyes. In elaborate descriptions of beautiful individuals itis the visible elements that are in most cases emphasized.The richly laden word beautyis a synthesis of compleximpressions obtained through a single sense.If we survey broadly the ideal of feminine beauty setdown by the peoples of comparatively uncivilized lands,it is interesting to note that they all contain many featureswhich appeal to our civilized esthetic taste,and many ofthem, indeed, contain no features which obviously clasheven be said that thewith our canons of taste. It mayideals of some savages affect us more sympathetically thansome of the ideals of our own medieval ancestors. Thisfact, that the modern European, whose culture may be