led consideration of the facts of sexual life. That is, however,
unnecessary. It is enough to point out certain considerations which alone
suffice to invalidate this view. In the first place, it must be remarked
that the trifling amount of fluid emitted in sexual intercourse is
altogether out of proportion to the emotions aroused by the act and to its
after-effect on the organism; the ancient dictum _omne animal post coitum
triste_ may not be exact, but it is certain that the effect of coitus on
the organism is far more profound than that produced by the far more
extensive evacuation of the bladder or bowels. Again, this definition
leaves unexplained all those elaborate preliminaries which, both in man
and the lower animals, precede the sexual act, preliminaries which in
civilized human beings sometimes themselves constitute a partial
satisfaction to the sexual impulse. It must also be observed that, unlike
the ordinary excretions, this discharge of the sexual glands is not
always, or in every person, necessary at all. Moreover, the theory of
evacuation at once becomes hopelessly inadequate when we apply it to
women; no one will venture to claim that an adequate psychological
explanation of the sexual impulse in a woman is to be found in the desire
to expel a little bland mucus from the minute glands of the genital tract.
We must undoubtedly reject this view of the sexual impulse. It has a
certain element of truth and it permits an instructive and helpful
analogy; but that is all. The sexual act presents many characters which
are absent in an ordinary act of evacuation, and, on the other hand, it
lacks the special characteristic of the evacuation proper, the
elimination of waste material; the seminal fluid is not a waste material,
and its retention is, to some extent perhaps, rather an advantage than a
disadvantage to the organism.

Eduard von Hartmann long since remarked that the satisfaction of what we
call the sexual instinct through an act carried out with a person of the
opposite sex is a very wonderful phenomenon. It cannot be said, however,
that the conception of the sexual act as a simple process of evacuation
does anything to explain the wonder. We are, at most, in the same position
as regards the stilling of normal sexual desire as we should be as regards
the emptying of the bladder, supposing it were very difficult for either
sex to effect this satisfactorily without the aid of a portion of the body
of a perso