This sense has here suffered between the
lower senses of touch and smell, on the one hand, with their vague and
massive appeal, and the higher sense, vision, on the other hand, with its
exceedingly specialized appeal. The position of touch as the primary and
fundamental sense is assured. Smell, though in normal persons it has no
decisive influence on sexual attraction, acts by virtue of its emotional
sympathies and antipathies, while, by virtue of the fact that among man's
ancestors it was the fundamental channel of sexual sensibility, it
furnishes a latent reservoir of impressions to which nervously abnormal
persons, and even normal persons under the influence of excitement or of
fatigue, are always liable to become sensitive. Hearing, as a sense for
receiving distant perceptions has a wider field than is in man possessed
by either touch or smell. But here it comes into competition with vision,
and vision is, in man, the supreme and dominant sense.[129] We are always
more affected by what we see than by what we hear. Men and women seldom
hear each other without speedily seeing each other, and then the chief
focus of interest is at once transferred to the visual centre.[130] In
human sexual selection, therefore, hearing plays a part which is nearly
always subordinated to that of vision.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] Nietzsche has even suggested that among primitive men delicacy of
hearing and the evolution of music can only have been produced under
conditions which made it difficult for vision to come into play: "The ear,
the organ of fear, could only have developed, as it has, in the night and
in the twilight of dark woods and caves.... In the brightness the ear is
less necessary. Hence the character of music as an art of night and
twilight." (_Morgenroethe_, p. 230.)

[130] At a concert most people are instinctively anxious to _see_ the
performers, thus distracting the purely musical impression, and the
reasonable suggestion of Goethe that the performers should be invisible is
still seldom carried into practice.

VISION

I.

Primacy of Vision in Man--Beauty as a Sexual Allurement--The Objective
Element in Beauty--Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Various Parts of the
World--Savage Women sometimes Beautiful from European Point of
View--Savages often Admire European Beauty--The Appeal of Beauty to some
Extent Common even to Animals and Man.

Vision is the main channel by which man receives his impressions. To a
larg