began a mind and memory that
dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the
stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex,
are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these
elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied,
but all these things have to be left behind.'

'But Love,' said Kahn.

'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is
what you mean, Kahn.'

Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb the
tree,' he said....

'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love story,
is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature
and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost
altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have
all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life
lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets
who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There
are endless years yet for you--and all full of learning.... We carry an
excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free
ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a
thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the
old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like
a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life. You
poets, you young people want to turn it to delight. Turn it to delight.
That may be one way out. In a little while, if you have any brains worth
thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to
the greater things. The old religions and their new offsets want still,
I see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they can
suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you here at last
to the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power.'

'But incidentally,' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have half of
humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for--for this love
and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.'

'Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,' said Karenin.

'But the women carry the heavier burden.'

'Not in their imaginations,' said Edwards.

'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you s