The Will and the Instinct of Sex

Abstract

THE organic life is more deeply rooted than the special senses. The vague pleasure-pain characteristics of the organic processes under' the control-of the autonomic nervous system belong to the older and deeper strata of our psychophysical life. The higher senses, described as distance-ceptors, are a part of a projection system which adjusts the central organic life to distant stimuli. The higher projection system of the brain with its special senses and its imagery is an instrument for mediating between distant stimuli from the external world and the inner organic and emotional life under the control of the autonomic nervous system. Special senses like vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste and temperature, come and go, but the older organic levels of life are constant. Hunger, sex, fear, anger, gregariousness, may confer a wholly new life on sensations and images and ideas. The loss that comes from injury to sight or hearing consists in the fact that it narrows the range of our life's central processes, or blocks their free expression. The loss of these distance-ceptors may, however, deepen and enrich the inner nucleus of personality. We are coming to see that the brain with its distanceceptors or sensations and its images is an organ of projection; that older and deeper than this projection system is the inner organic life itself under the control of the autonomic nervous system. It is these continuous rhythmic organic processes in whose service the projection system functions. It is because we are hungry or cold or fearful or angry, because we are predisposed to manipulate, or to experience sexual desire, that we have need of a projection system of vision and hearing and smell and taste and touch. It is these organic systems that make possible our long-range activities like the growing and storing of food, the accumu-