turns with a
feeling of displeasure from all the lower sexual manifestations, and
even finds them absurd. The elimination of personality of eroticism, the
charm of which is felt by even the most highly differentiated man, has
always been foreign to woman--she lacks the duality of erotic emotion
which man is slowly and laboriously striving to overcome--a still
further proof of the unbroken, synthetic emotion of woman.

CONCLUSION

THE PSYCHOGENETIC LAW

_The Individual as an Epitome of the Human Race_

The biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel teaches us that the human embryo
passes through all the stages of development traversed by its ancestors
in their evolution from the lower forms of the animal world. Although
each successive stage completely replaces the preceding one, the latter
is there as its organic supposition. Man is not born as a human being
until he has travelled over the principal portions of the road to
evolution. This law, which establishes the natural connection of the
individual with the whole chain of organisms, is continued in a
psychogenetic law, not founded on the heredity of the blood but on the
heredity of culture (and therefore quite independent of the doctrine of
the origin of species). In the course of his development the individual
repeats the psycho-spiritual stages through which the species has
passed. But while the human body cannot sustain life until it is
perfectly developed, the degrees of psychic perfection vary very
considerably; not every individual reaches perfection; most men attain
to some degree, but there are others who do not even acquire the
rudiments.

It would be an attractive and grateful task to point out the
halting-places of the human race in the life of the individual; to fix
the moment when for the first time in his life the child says "I"--a
moment which usually occurs in his second year, and represents the
humanisation of the race, the great intuition, when primitive man,
divining his spiritual nature, severed himself from the external world;
to perceive the child--like its primitive ancestors in their
day--treating all weaker creatures which fall into its hands with almost
bestial cruelty; to watch the boyish games reflecting the period when
the nations lived on war and the chase, their eagerness to draw up rules
and regulations and create gradations of rank and marks of distinction.
I am not able to carry out such a task in detail and, moreover, as I am
de