feriority had been lulled for a time into lethargy and his ego had a real outlet. Expression itself was not at all necessary. In both men and women this element of vanity and pride intensifies sex desire. In some lives the moment sex is legalized by marriage and made a commonplace, it looses its power to bring balm to the individual whose feelings have a neurotic taint of inferiority.

Although it is sometimes assumed that loneliness is sexual, actually it belongs to the herd instinct. We were born to be with our fellows and normal men are as gregarious as a school of herring. Loneliness is an ache which comes to the human spirit when the herd instinct is not satisfied. It is sexual only when the desire intimately to solace loneliness enters as a motivating attribute. There is perhaps nothing that more completely brings balm to the urging herd instinct than the complete companionship which sex implies.

A third aspect which affects what has too long been thought a single consuming emotion, is the urge for adventure. Without this primary incentive there might have been little for history to rehearse. Primitive men and women might still be sitting in the doorway of their caves, going out only for necessary food. Adventure is one of the greatest channels through which the human spirit realizes itself. To be the first to fly far above the earth and water gives a lift to the mind. To map out some tangled jungle, hazard some new form of drama, discover a distant planet or invent a visionphone; these are but a few of the currents of the dynamic urge that is in man. Only the timorous and

pigeon-hearted would contradict the statement that the experience of sex may also be a great adventure. Indeed the romances of history would be deprived of half their charm if the element of adventure were taken out of the sex impulse.

Even more than the impetus for adventure and the impulses for excitement and play, is a deep rebellion in the heart of man against limitation, dullness and pressure. We love this life only because we have no better one of which we are sure, but there are thousands of aspects of it which are almost abhorrent to the human spirit. Thus sex may serve as an anesthetic, a solace for all the dissatisfactions which life brings, serving only as a negative charm. A narcotic for the troubles of life is not a drive which motivates human action. It is possibly one of the great means of retreat from the world but inversely it cannot be at the same time the most compelling of human activities.

That the unconscious urge for parentalism is even stronger than any of the other motives that enter into sex, there will be few to deny. But true parentalism is non-sexual. The impulse is here for the child and the building up of the family, for the making of a home and the generations that will carry on one's heritage and identity. There is an enormous sense of self-importance in thinking of all the little Smiths and Joneses who will carry on the traits and qualities which Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones failed satisfactorily to achieve. Indeed this drive of parentalism has motivated much in human history. It is one of the elements of sex, but only one, and in its essential

nature the intention or purpose merely uses sex as a means but does not belong to it as an end.

29

After all these factors in sex expression have been allocated one might ask, "If so many of its impulses are non-sexual, what then is left of sex itself?" This leads us to the deepest quality in sex expression: the aspect of love. There is a consuming tendency in the human spirit to seek for and give some form of devotion to another, and this is only done in its completeness where the relation is masculine and feminine. But love, like sex, does not express itself merely on one level and in one degree. It functions as a dynamic urge upon every plane of human response from the physical up to the psychical. The materialistic man is capable only of love of a carnal type. His nervous system is inadequate for refinement or response above the sensory level. A higher type of A higher type of man may find joy through delight in coöperation, responding to the sense of mutual volition, and delight in that he wills in the way his companion wills. A still more subjecA still more subjective form of love is found in the emotional response, the kindred sympathy and interchange of feeling. Beyond this comes intellectual love, that merging of two minds whose thoughts and purposes are

one.

Deeper yet is the union of impulse that belongs to the plane of goodness where both individuals are swept by those feelings of kindness that would nurture and protect one another. Again there is an even more profound manifestation where all of the emotional and intellectual has passed beyond the plane of mere

goodness into that sense of creative idealism where two individualities are one in their pursuit of beauty, are together in their awe at the vastness of truth and the majesty of creation. It was on this plane that the love of the Brownings found expression. Indeed wherever great creative minds have loved, it has been in this way. This does not mean however that they have not needed and been capable of other aspects of love.

Lastly comes what we might call that sense of psychic merging which brings the completeness of love, that quality of spiritual union which has made great seers and poets dream, since time was, of two individuals as but half of one complete whole, the masculine and feminine as two parts of the single human individuality. This highest aspect holds in its breast the consuming flame for complete spiritual union, that greatest delight of losing identity in becoming one with another.

219

The true sex impulse may express itself in any one or in all of these planes of human emotion. Where it exists in its fullness, however, it requires a complete merging upon every level of life from the most physical to the most psychic. From this point of view, sex is a glorification of the human spirit and far from the purely animal impulse which the mean minds of a censorious philosophy have made it. It is the anathema of lust and the opposite pole from that low plane on which the little-souled Puritans placed it in their incapacity to conceive the lift and reach and flame of the human spirit.

Understood in this way, sex becomes a personal and almost nonsocial impulse, a means by which mankind pulls away from general life and finds his own intimate individuality and experience. Sex enhances and enriches life when it takes its proper place and does not interfere with human activities. When it becomes an over-dominant interest it is evidence of emotional maladjustment, leading to a blockage of usefulness and creating nervous and physical disorders. When an individual transfers to sex those forces of his being which properly belong to life accomplishment, he has become neurotic and has allowed an intimate expression to distort his will to achieve. As he becomes emotionally ingrowing, his development ceases. And this is no less true of a people than of an individual. Scientifically the modern bogy is easy to define: the mass mind of the present decade has sex neurasthenia. The hope for the future with regard to this frenzy is first to understand that in itself sex is not a force but a means of expression. It is one of the ways by which we release ourselves. More truly we might say that sex has no drive. Man makes a drive for it, just as he does for food, for comfort, for pleasure. In all of these he finds satisfaction, and in this he is not unlike any mammal. Students of animal psychology have found that a rat will face death for sex, just as he will for food, for protection and security for himself and his young. His imHis impulse follows his lure for life. This is true also in man. The power then is not in sex, but may express itself through sex. Blockage of other

expression may create an exaggerated tendency to follow the sexual channel. Appetite becomes centered upon sexual satisfaction and directs hunger to this means of consummation. But the power itself lies in the hunger, the drive for expansion, the impulse for a conquest of the earth, the urge for self-expression. In other words, when the powers of personality are not allowed to manifest themselves satisfactorily through social ways, man seeks the obvious solace of sex.

As individuals, opportunity for full self-expression may have been ours from childhood. But few will maintain that society has as yet learned to adjust human nature to life. The average man suffers a more or less conscious congestion of his personality. Such blockage, in a hypercivilized world is on the increase. Ignorance in the past of man's real attributes wove our social fabric without the least regard to its fitness for men's natures. Hence we are but beginning to learn how environment may be adapted to character and self forces given normal expression. Until this is done hypersexuality must be a conspicuous phenomenon.

Our thesis then is that the drive of human nature is for self-expansion and from this has come all the drama and mystery of man's civilization. Because of it man turns his thought to world accomplishment. But if many of his channels become blocked he personalizes the flame of his interest into passionalism. Thus sex is central in the individual consciousness only when it has been forced into a conspicuous position by the congestion of other impulses.

We might say that when thought and feeling are liberated normally and exerted outwardly in satisfactory achievement, self-expansion is found as the central drive of human nature. When, however, mental and emotional expression is thwarted so that no compensation is felt from effort, thought turns selfward and in this state of personalism sex becomes a centralized interest. In normal minds it can never take the place of accomplishment. It is to achievement, what sleep is to waking.

Such a philosophy makes clear the inventive drive of an Edison, the musical genius of a Wagner, or the impulse of a Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. Every normal ambition from the conquest of the jungle and the spanning of ancient rivers, to the discovery of radio and the invention of an aëroplane or the baking of a new kind of biscuit, is part of this process of self-expansion. Beyond all longings the urge to

release our own personalities is omnipotent and omnipresent. If sex were the central impulse of men's souls their feats of achievement would be unintelligible.

We shall not cure the sex frenzy of our age until we understand this law of self-expansion. We have seen sex inhibition fail. It only bottled man's carnality in his heart or else made him abnormal and neurotic. We have seen theories of chastity break ineffectually against the basic nature of man and have sensed the confusion of an ill-adjusted civilization. And in conflict with the modern reaction we hear pointless tirades of those who are seeking to stem the tide. We shall not meet the issue until we learn that life must be shaped to man's nature—not man's nature to an artificial pattern of life. It will not disappear until we learn to give constructive release to the energies of man's spirit. A sex bogy and normal self-expansion cannot exist in the same world.

W reply to

YE WERE contraband, so didn't reply to the deep blasts of the liner's fog-horn. Instead I ordered the helmsman to throw the Frieda three points off her course, hoping the vessel ahead would clear us without even seeing us. After all she might be a destroyer, and not a liner. Her repeated threats of danger to all who lay in her path told me she was bearing down upon us.

I wasn't caring a damn about myself, though the British had put a price on my head, but Collins was in dire need of the guns we had on board. Precious machine-guns, rifles, pistols and ammunition that would help to free Ireland.

Thick clammy fog drifted in dense clouds over the Channel waters and added to the blackness of the night. Standing on the bridge of the Frieda, I had been straining my eyes to catch a glimpse of Eddystone Light; knew that we were thereabouts, but had nothing to tell us where the land lay. We had slipped out from behind Bolt Head, where we had been hiding, and I had ordered the man at the wheel to keep her nose pointed southwest, hoping to clear the Lizards, then make for the open sea. Our destination was the West Coast of Irelandanywhere on the West Coast that we could effect a landing.

The liner ahead kept booming its threatening warning. Water trickled

off my sou'wester and bleared my eyes, the fog was thick almost to the point of rain. The steward brought me a cup of hot tea with a shot of rum in it. I had been on the bridge for several hours and was chilled to the bone. Raising the cup to drink, I stopped, shoved the cup back into the hand of the steward and grabbed the megaphone.

"All hands on deck!" I yelled, and the crew scrambled out, as the black hulk of the liner pitched out of the fog not a hundred feet away.

The crash seemed certain. In the darkness it looked as though she would hit us amidships. Grabbing the wheel I threw the Frieda over to port and saw the liner turning also. The double movement threw us parallel and heading in opposite directions. Our sides scraped and I could hear the Frieda's plates being torn away as the liner ripped along. We keeled over until our starboard bulwarks sank below the water and part of the deck was awash. Thank all my lucky stars there was hardly any sea at all.

"Who are you?" yelled a voice from the liner's bridge.

"Frieda, merchantman out of Hull, bound for Cardiff!" I replied.

"Lay to!" he called, "and I'll take you into Plymouth!"

"Plymouth hell!" I said, and ordered full steam ahead.