ng and
directing the hunger instinct for food. If we now turn to man we find
the same domination of sex-needs, but under different conditions of
expression.[97] Man not only loves, but he knows that he loves; a new
factor is added, and sex itself is lifted to a plane of clear
self-consciousness. Pathways are opened up to great heights, but also
to great depths.

We must not, therefore, expect to take up our study of primitive human
sexual and familial associations at the point where those of the
mammals and birds leave off.[98] We have with man to some extent to
begin again, so that it may appear, on a superficial view, that the
first steps now taken in love's evolution were in a backward
direction. But the fact is that the increased powers of recollection
and heightened complexity of nervous organisation among men, led to
different habits and social customs, separating man radically in his
love from the animals. Man's instincts are very vague when compared,
for instance, with the beautiful love-habits of birds; he is
necessarily guided by conflicting forces, inborn and acquired. Thus
precisely by means of his added qualities he took a new and personal,
rather than an instinctive, interest in sex; and this after a time,
even if not at first, aroused a state of consciousness in love which
made sex uninterruptedly interesting in contrast with the fixed
pairing season among animals. Hence arose also a human and different
need for sexual variety, much stronger than can ever have been
experienced by the animals, which resulted in a constant tendency
towards sexual licence, of a more or less pronounced promiscuity, in
group marriage and other forms of sexual association which developed
from it.

This is so essential to our understanding of human love, that I wish I
could follow it further. All the elaborate phenomena of sex in the
animal kingdom have for their end the reproduction of the species. But
in the case of man there is another purpose, often transcending this
end--the independent significance of sex emotion, both on the physical
and psychical side, to the individual. It seems to me that women have
special need to-day to remember this personal end of human passion.
This is not, however, the place to enter upon this question.

I have now to attempt to trace as clearly as I can the history of
primitive human love. To do this it will be necessary to refer to
comparative ethnography.[99] We must investigate the sex cu