the
years of twenty and forty. We may even consider this period as the
most advantageous for the procreation of strong and healthy offspring
and that the procreator is at his best before the age of thirty.

The ontogenetic development of the sexual appetite and love generally
produces in man a peculiar phenomenon. While habitual gratification
and education of the sexual appetite tends to make it more and more
calculating and cynical, love, on the contrary, becomes more elevated
and refined with age and less egoistical than in youth. Owing to
general mental development, the education of sentiments progresses and
becomes refined, while the sexual appetite diminishes in intensity and
becomes more imperious and more coarse. We are only speaking here of
normal cases.

In youth, the intoxication of love combined with intense sexual
appetite triumphs; when the appetite is once satisfied the unbridled
and egoistic passions of this age come to the surface and are often
antagonistic to love. At a more advanced age, on the contrary, love
becomes more constant and more tranquil. The mistake that is so often
made is the confusion of love with sexual appetite. The novelists who
speculate on the eroticism of the public are no doubt more interested
in describing sexual passion and amorous intoxication, with all the
catastrophes and conflicts which arise from them, than the tranquil
and regular love of a couple more advanced in age, the greatest
happiness of which consists in harmony of sentiment and thought, as
well as the mutual regard and devotion of the couple for each other.

Sexual appetite and sexual power in man become extinguished between
the ages of sixty and eighty; old men of eighty are sometimes still
capable, but they are no longer fecund. As a rule sexual power
diminishes before sexual appetite, and this sometimes leads old men to
use artificial means to revive their power, or to satisfy their sexual
desires. This explains why the egoists who have never known true love
often become so base in their sexual manifestations when they grow
old. Their experience of sexual life makes them experts in the art of
seduction. If this fact appears to be antagonistic to the law that
true love is refined with advancing age, we must bear in mind that the
ontogenetic development of the sexual appetite is not the same as that
of love; that in some respects it develops in a contrary direction;
and that the result may consequently become