To most of us, a bird’s a feathered songWhich for our pleasure gives a voice to spring.We make a symbol of its airy wingBright with the liberty for which we long.Or we discover them with love more strongAs each a separate, individual thingWhich only learns to act, or move, or singIn ways that wholly to itself belong.But some with deeper and more inward sightSee them a part of that one Life which streamsSlow on, towards more mind—a part more lightThen we; unburdened with regrets, or dreams,Or thought. A winged emotion of the sky,The birds through an eternal Present fly.Oxford,April 1923.
To most of us, a bird’s a feathered songWhich for our pleasure gives a voice to spring.We make a symbol of its airy wingBright with the liberty for which we long.Or we discover them with love more strongAs each a separate, individual thingWhich only learns to act, or move, or singIn ways that wholly to itself belong.But some with deeper and more inward sightSee them a part of that one Life which streamsSlow on, towards more mind—a part more lightThen we; unburdened with regrets, or dreams,Or thought. A winged emotion of the sky,The birds through an eternal Present fly.Oxford,April 1923.
To most of us, a bird’s a feathered songWhich for our pleasure gives a voice to spring.We make a symbol of its airy wingBright with the liberty for which we long.
To most of us, a bird’s a feathered song
Which for our pleasure gives a voice to spring.
We make a symbol of its airy wing
Bright with the liberty for which we long.
Or we discover them with love more strongAs each a separate, individual thingWhich only learns to act, or move, or singIn ways that wholly to itself belong.
Or we discover them with love more strong
As each a separate, individual thing
Which only learns to act, or move, or sing
In ways that wholly to itself belong.
But some with deeper and more inward sightSee them a part of that one Life which streamsSlow on, towards more mind—a part more lightThen we; unburdened with regrets, or dreams,Or thought. A winged emotion of the sky,The birds through an eternal Present fly.
But some with deeper and more inward sight
See them a part of that one Life which streams
Slow on, towards more mind—a part more light
Then we; unburdened with regrets, or dreams,
Or thought. A winged emotion of the sky,
The birds through an eternal Present fly.
Oxford,April 1923.
Oxford,April 1923.
ILS N’ONT QUE DE L’ÂME:AN ESSAY ON BIRD-MIND
“O Nightingale, thou surely artA creature of a fiery heart.”—W. Wordsworth.
“O Nightingale, thou surely artA creature of a fiery heart.”—W. Wordsworth.
“O Nightingale, thou surely artA creature of a fiery heart.”—W. Wordsworth.
“O Nightingale, thou surely art
A creature of a fiery heart.”
—W. Wordsworth.
“The inferior animals, when the conditions of life are favourable, are subject to periodical fits of gladness, affecting them powerfully and standing out in vivid contrast to their ordinary temper.... Birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals, and ... as they are much freer than mammals, more buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious, and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows itself in a greater variety of ways, with more regular and beautiful motions, and with melody.”—W. H. Hudson.
“The inferior animals, when the conditions of life are favourable, are subject to periodical fits of gladness, affecting them powerfully and standing out in vivid contrast to their ordinary temper.... Birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals, and ... as they are much freer than mammals, more buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious, and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows itself in a greater variety of ways, with more regular and beautiful motions, and with melody.”—W. H. Hudson.
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy wayIs an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”—Blake.
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy wayIs an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”—Blake.
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy wayIs an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”—Blake.
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
—Blake.
“Ils n’ont pas de cerveau—ils n’ont que de l’âme.” A dog was being described, with all his emotion, his apparent passion to make himself understood, his failure to reach comprehension; and that was how the French man of letters summed up the brute creation—“pas de cerveau—que de l’âme.”
Nor is it a paradox: it is a half-truth that is more than half true—more true at least than its converse, which many hold.
There is a large school to-day who assert thatanimals are “mere machines.” Machines they may be: it is the qualification which does not fit. I suppose that by saying “mere” machines it is meant to imply that they have the soulless, steely quality of a machine which goes when it is set going, stops when another lever is turned, acts only in obedience to outer stimuli, and is in fact unemotional—a bundle of operations without any quality meriting the name of a self.
It is true that the further we push our analysis of animal behaviour, the more we find it composed of a series of automatisms, the more we see it rigorously determined by combination of inner constitution and outer circumstance, the more we have cause to deny to animals the possession of anything deserving the name of reason, ideals, or abstract thought. The more, in fact, do they appear to us as mechanisms (which is a much better word than machines, since this latter carries with it definite connotations of metal or wood, electricity or steam). They are mechanisms, because their mode of operation is regular; but they differ from any other type of mechanism known to us in that their working is—to put it in the most non-committal way—accompanied by emotion. It is, to be sure, a combination of emotion with reason that we attribute to a soul; but none the less, in popular parlance at least, the emotional side is predominant, and pure reason is set over against the emotional content which gives soul its essence. Andthis emotional content we most definitely find running through the lives of higher animals.
The objection is easily and often raised that we have no direct knowledge of emotion in an animal, no direct proof of the existence of any purely mental process in its life. But this is as easily laid as raised. We have no direct knowledge of emotion or any other conscious process in the life of any human being save our individual selves; and yet we feel no hesitation in deducing it from others’ behaviour. Although it is an arguable point whether biological science may not for the moment be better served by confining the subject-matter and terms of analysis to behaviour alone, it is a very foolhardy “behaviorist” indeed who denies theexistenceof emotion and conscious process!
But the practical value of this method of thinking is, as I say, an arguable point; it is indeed clear that a great immediate advance, especially in non-human biology, has been and may still be made by translating the uncertain and often risky terms of subjective psychology into those based upon the objective description of directly observable behaviour. However, it is equally easy to maintain, and I for one maintain it, that to omit a whole category of phenomena from consideration is unscientific, and must in the long run lead to an unreal, because limited, view of things; and that, when great detail of analysis is not required, but only broad lines and general comparison, the psychological terminology, ofmemory, fear, anger, curiosity, affection, is the simpler and more direct tool, and should be used to supplement and make more real the cumbersome and less complete behavioristic terminology, of modification of behaviour, fright, aggression, and the rest.
It is at least abundantly clear that, if we are to believe in the principle of uniformity at all, we must ascribe emotion to animals as well as to men: the similarity of behaviour is so great that to assert the absence of a whole class of phenomena in one case, its presence in the other, is to make scientific reasoning a farce.
“Pas de cerveau—que de l’âme.” Those especially who have studied birds will subscribe to this. The variety of their emotions is greater, their intensity more striking, than in four-footed beasts, while their power of modifying behaviour by experience is less, the subjection to instinct more complete. Those who are interested in the details can see from experiments, such as those recorded by Mr. Eliot Howard in hisTerritory in Bird Life, how limited is a bird’s power of adjustment; but I will content myself with a single example, one of nature’s experiments, recorded by Mr. Chance last year by the aid of the cinematograph—the behaviour of small birds when the routine of their life is upset by the presence of a young Cuckoo in the nest.
When, after prodigious exertions, the unfledged Cuckoo has ejected its foster-brothers and sisters from their home, it sometimes happens that one ofthem is caught on or close to the rim of the nest. One such case was recorded by Mr. Chance’s camera. The unfortunate fledgling scrambled about on the branches below the nest; the parent Pipit flew back with food; the cries and open mouth of the ejected bird attracted attention, and it was fed; and the mother then settled down upon the nest as if all was in normal order. Meanwhile, the movements of the fledgling in the foreground grew feebler, and one could imagine its voice quavering off, fainter and fainter, as its vital warmth departed. At the next return of the parent with food the young one was dead.
It was the utter stupidity of the mother that was so impressive—its simple response to stimulus—of feeding to the stimulus of the young’s cry and open mouth, of brooding to that of the nest with something warm and feathery contained in it—its neglect of any steps whatsoever to restore the fallen nestling to safety. It was almost as pitiable an exhibition of unreason as the well-attested case of the wasp attendant on a wasp-grub, who, on being kept without food for some time, grew more and more restless, and eventually bit off the hind end of the grub and offered it to what was left!
Birds in general are stupid, in the sense of being little able to meet unforeseen emergencies; but their lives are often emotional, and their emotions are richly and finely expressed. I have for years been interested in observing the courtship and therelations of the sexes in birds, and have in my head a number of pictures of their notable and dramatic moments. These seem to me to illustrate so well the emotional furnishing of birds, and to provide such a number of windows into that strange thing we call a bird’s mind, that I shall simply set some of them down as they come to me.
First, then, the coastal plain of Louisiana; a pond, made and kept as a sanctuary by that public-spirited bird-lover Mr. E. A. McIlhenny, filled with noisy crowds of Egrets and little egret-like Herons. These, in great flocks, fly back across the “Mexique Bay” in the spring months from their winter quarters in South America. Arrived in Louisiana, they feed and roost in flocks for a time, but gradually split up into pairs. Each pair, detaching themselves from the flocks, choose a nesting-site (by joint deliberation) among the willows and maples of the breeding pond. And then follows a curious phenomenon. Instead of proceeding at once to biological business in the shape of nest-building and egg-laying, they indulge in what can only be styled a honeymoon. For three or four days both members of the pair are always on the chosen spot, save for the necessary visits which they alternately pay to the distant feeding grounds. When both are there, they will spend hours at a time sitting quite still, just touching one another. Generally the hen sits on a lower branch, resting her head against the cock bird’s flanks; they look for all the world like one of those inarticulatebut happy couples upon a bench in the park in spring. Now and again, however, this passivity of sentiment gives place to wild excitement. Upon some unascertainable cause the two birds raise their necks and wings, and, with loud cries, intertwine their necks. This is so remarkable a sight that the first time I witnessed it I did not fully credit it, and only after it had happened before my eyes on three or four separate occasions was I forced to admit it as a regular occurrence in their lives. The long necks are so flexible that they can and do make a complete single turn round each other—a real true-lover’s-knot! This once accomplished, each bird then—most wonderful of all—runs its beak quickly and amorously through the just raised aigrettes of the other, again and again, nibbling and clappering them from base to tip. Of this I can only say that it seemed to bring such a pitch of emotion that I could have wished to be a Heron that I might experience it. This over, they would untwist their necks and subside once more into their usual quieter sentimentality.
This, alas! I never saw with the less common little White Egrets, but with the Louisiana Heron (which should, strictly speaking, be called an egret too); but since every other action of the two species is (in all save a few minor details) the same, I assume that the flashing white, as well as the slate and vinous and grey birds, behave thus.
The greeting ceremony when one bird of the pair, after having been away at the feeding grounds,rejoins its mate is also beautiful. Some little time before the human watcher notes the other’s approach, the waiting bird rises on its branch, arches and spreads its wings, lifts its aigrettes into a fan and its head-plumes into a crown, bristles up the feathers of its neck, and emits again and again a hoarse cry. The other approaches, settles in the branches near by, puts itself into a similar position, and advances towards its mate; and after a short excited space they settle down close together. This type of greeting is repeated every day until the young leave the nest; for after the eggs are laid both sexes brood, and there is a nest-relief four times in every twenty-four hours. Each time the same attitudes, the same cries, the same excitement; only now at the end of it all, one steps off the nest, the other on. One might suppose that this closed the performance. But no: the bird that has been relieved is still apparently animated by stores of unexpended emotion; it searches about for a twig, breaks it off or picks it up, and returns with it in beak to present to the other. During the presentation the greeting ceremony is again gone through; after each relief the whole business of presentation and greeting may be repeated two, or four, or up even to ten or eleven times before the free bird flies away.
When there are numerous repetitions of the ceremony, it is extremely interesting to watch the progressive extinction of excitement. During the last one or two presentations the twig-bringing bird mayscarcely raise his wings or plumes, and will often betray an absent air, turning his head in the direction in which he is proposing to fly off.
No one who has seen a pair of Egrets thus change places on the nest, bodies bowed forward, plumes a cloudy fan of lace, absolute whiteness of plumage relieved by gold of eye and lore and black of bill, and the whole scene animated by the repeated, excited cry, can ever forget it. But such unforgettable scenes are not confined to other countries. Here in England you can see as good; I have seen them on the reservoirs of Tring, and within full view of the road by Frensham Pond—the courtship forms and dances of the Crested Grebe.
The Crested Grebe is happily becoming more familiar to bird-lovers in England. Its brilliant white belly, protective grey-brown back, rippleless and effortless diving, long neck, and splendid ruff and ear-tufts of black, chestnut, and white, conspire to make it a marked bird. In the winter the crest is small, and even when fully grown in spring it is usually held close down against the head, so as to be not at all conspicuous. When it is spread, it is almost, without exception, in the service of courtship or love-making. Ten years ago I spent my spring holiday watching these birds on the Tring reservoirs. I soon found out that their courtship, like the Herons’, was mutual, not one-sidedly masculine as in Peacocks or fowls. It consisted most commonly in a little ceremony of head-shaking. The birds of a pair comeclose, face one another, raise their necks, and half-spread their ruffs. Then, with a little barking note, they shake their heads rapidly, following this by a slow swinging of them from side to side. This alternate shaking and swinging continues perhaps a dozen or twenty times; and the birds then lower their standards, become normal everyday creatures, and betake themselves to their fishing or resting or preening again. This is the commonest bit of love-making; but now and then the excitement evident even in these somewhat casual ceremonies is raised to greater heights and seems to reinforce itself. The little bouts of shaking are repeated again and again. I have seen over eighty succeed each other uninterruptedly. And at the close the birds do not relapse into ordinary life. Instead, they raise their ruffs still further, making them almost Elizabethan in shape. Then one bird dives; then the other: the seconds pass. At last, after perhaps half or three-quarters of a minute (half a minute is a long time when one is thus waiting for a bird’s reappearance!) one after the other they emerge. Both hold masses of dark brownish-green weed, torn from the bottom of the pond, in their beaks, and carry their heads down and back on their shoulders, so that either can scarcely see anything of the other confronting it save the concentric colours of the raised ruff. In this position they swim together. It is interesting to see the eager looks of the first-emerged, and its immediate start towards the second when it too reappears. They approach,rapidly, until the watcher wonders what will be done to avert a collision. The answer is simple: there is no averting of a collision! But the collision is executed in a remarkable way: the two birds, when close to each other, leap up from the water and meet breast to breast, almost vertical, suddenly revealing the whole flashing white under-surface. They keep themselves in this position by violent splashings of the feet, rocking a little from side to side as if dancing, and very gradually sinking down (always touching with their breasts) towards the horizontal.
Meanwhile, they exchange some of the weed they are carrying; or at least nibbling and quick movements of the head are going on. And so they settle down on to the water, shake their heads a few times more, and separate, changing back from these performers of an amazing age-old rite—age-old but ever fresh—into the feeding- and sleeping-machines of every day, but leaving a vision of strong emotion, canalized into the particular forms of this dive and dance. The whole performance impresses the watcher not only with its strength, but as being apparently of very little direct (though possibly much indirect) biological advantage, the action being self-exhausting, not stimulating to further sexual relations, and carried out, it would seem, for its own sake.
Further acquaintance with the Grebe only deepened the interest and made clearer the emotional tinge underlying all the relations of the sexes. This bird, too, has its “greeting ceremony”; but since,unlike the colonial Herons and Egrets, it makes every effort to conceal its nest, this cannot take place at its most natural moment, that of nest-relief, but must be made to happen out on the open water where there are no secrets to betray. If the sitting bird wishes to leave the nest, and the other does not return, it flies off, after covering the eggs with weed, in search of its mate; it is common in the breeding season to see a Grebe in the “search-attitude,” with neck stretched up and slightly forward and ear-tufts erected, emitting a special and far-carrying call. When this call is recognized and answered, the two birds do nothing so simple as to fly or swim to each other, but a special and obviously exciting ceremony is gone through. The bird that has been searched for and found puts itself into a very beautiful attitude, with wings half-spread and set at right angles to the body, ruff erected circularly, and head drawn back upon the shoulders, so that nothing is visible but the brilliant rosette of the spread ruff in the centre of the screen of wings, each wing showing a broad bar of brilliant white on its dusk-grey surface. In this position it swings restlessly back and forth in small arcs, facing towards its mate. The discoverer meanwhile has dived; but, swimming immediately below the surface of the water, its progress can be traced by the arrowy ripple it raises. Now and again it lifts its head and neck above the water, periscope-wise, to assure itself of its direction, and resumes its subaqueous course. Nor does it rise just in front of the other bird; but swimsunder and just beyond, and, as its mate swings round to the new orientation, emerges in a really extraordinary attitude. At the last it must have dived a little deeper; for now it appears perpendicularly from the water, with a slowish motion, slightly spiral, the beak and head pressed down along the front of the neck. I compared it in my notes of ten years ago with “the ghost of a Penguin,” and that comparison is still the best I can think of to give some idea of the strange unreality of its appearance. It then settles down upon the water and the pair indulge in one of their never-failing bouts of head-shaking.
Two mated birds rejoin each other after a few hours’ separation. Simple enough in itself—but what elaboration of detail, what piling on of little excitements, what purveying of thrills!
Other emotions too can be well studied in this bird, notably jealousy. Several times I have seen little scenes like the following enacted. A pair is floating idly side by side, necks drawn right down so that the head rests on the centre of the back. One—generally, I must admit, it has been the cock, but I think the hen may do so too on occasion—rouses himself from the pleasant lethargy, swims up to his mate, places himself in front of her, and gives a definite, if repressed, shake of the head. It is an obvious sign of his desire to “have a bit of fun”—to go through with one of those bouts of display and head-shaking in which pleasurable emotion clearly reaches its highest level in the birds’ lives, as any one who haswatched their habits with any thoroughness would agree. It also acts, by a simple extension of function, as an informative symbol. The other bird knows what is meant; it raises its head from beneath its wing, gives a sleepy, barely discernible shake—and replaces the head. In so doing it puts back the possibility of the ceremony and the thrill into its slumbers; for it takes two to make love, for Grebe as for human. The cock swims off; but he has a restless air, and in a minute or so is back again, and the same series of events is run through. This may be repeated three or four times.
If now another hen bird, unaccompanied by a mate, reveals herself to the eye of the restless and disappointed cock, he will make for her and try the same insinuating informative head-shake on her; and, in the cases that I have seen, she has responded, and a bout of shaking has begun. Flirtation—illicit love, if you will; for the Grebe, during each breeding season at least, is strictly monogamous, and the whole economics of its family life, if I may use the expression, are based on the co-operation of male and female in incubation and the feeding and care of the young. On the other hand, how natural and how human! and how harmless—for there is no evidence that the pretty thrills of the head-shaking display ever lead on to anything more serious.
But now observe. Every time that I have seen such a flirtation start, it has always been interrupted. The mate, so sleepy before, yet must have had oneeye open all the time. She is at once aroused to action: she dives, and attacks the strange hen after the fashion of Grebes, from below, with an underwater thrust of the sharp beak in the belly. Whether the thrust ever goes home I do not know. Generally, I think, the offending bird becomes aware of the danger just in time, and, squawking, hastily flaps off. The rightful mate emerges. What does she do now? Peck the erring husband? Leave him in chilly disgrace? Not a bit of it! She approaches with an eager note, and in a moment the two are hard at it, shaking their heads; and, indeed, on such occasions you may see more vigour and excitement thrown into the ceremony than at any other time.
Again we exclaim, how human! And again we see to what a pitch of complexity the bird’s emotional life is tuned.
It will have been observed that in the Grebe, whose chief skill lies in its wonderful powers of diving, these powers have been utilized as the raw material of several of the courtship ceremonies. This pressing of the everyday faculties of the bird into the service of emotion, the elevation and conversion of its useful powers of diving and underwater swimming into ceremonials of passion, is from an evolutionary point of view natural enough, and has its counterparts elsewhere. So in the Divers, not too distant relatives of the Grebes, swimming and diving have their rôle in courtship. Here too the thrilling, vertical emergence close to the mate takes place; and there is a strangeceremony in which two or three birds plough their way through the water with body set obliquely—hinder parts submerged, breast raised, and neck stretched forward and head downward with that strange look of rigidity or tension often seen in the courtship actions of birds.
Or, again, I once saw (strangely enough from the windows of the Headmaster’s house at Radley!) the aerial powers of the Kestrel converted to the uses of courtship. The hen bird was sitting in a large bush beyond the lawn. A strong wind was blowing, and the cock again and again beat his way up against it, to turn when nearly at the house and bear down upon the bush in an extremity of speed. Just when it seemed inevitable that he would knock his mate off her perch and dash himself and her into the branches, he changed the angle of his wings to shoot vertically up the face of the bush; then turned and repeated the play. Sometimes he came so near to her that she would start back, flapping her wings, as if really fearing a collision. The wind was so strong—and blowing away from me—that I could not hear what cries may have accompanied the display.
A friend of mine who knows the Welsh mountains and is a watcher of birds as well, tells me that he has there seen the Peregrine Falcons do the same thing: the same thing—except that the speed was perhaps twice as great, and the background a savage rock precipice instead of a Berkshire garden.
Not only the activities of everyday life, but alsothose of nest-building, are taken and used to build up the ceremonies of courtship; but whereas in the former case the actions are simply those which are most natural to and best performed by the bird, in the latter there is, no doubt, actual association between the cerebral centres concerned with nest-building and with sexual emotion in general. Thus we almost invariably find the seizing of nest-material in the beak as a part of courtship, and this is often extended to a presentation of the material to the mate. This we see in the Grebes, with the dank weeds of which their sodden nest is built; the Divers use moss in the construction of theirs, and the mated birds repair to moss banks, where they nervously pluck the moss, only to drop it again or throw it over their shoulder. Among the Warblers, the males pluck or pick up a leaf or twig, and with this in their beak hop and display before the hens; and the Peewit plucks frenziedly at grass and straws. The Adelie Penguins, so well described by Dr. Levick, make their nests of stones, and use stones in their courtship.
A curious, unnatural transference of object may sometimes be seen in these Penguins. The normal course of things is for this brave but comic creature, having picked up a stone in its beak, to come up before another of opposite sex, and, with stiff bow and absurdly outstretched flippers, to deposit it at the other’s feet. When, however, there are men near the rookery, the birds will sometimes in all solemnity come up to them with their stone offering and layit at the feet of the embarrassed or amused human being.
The Adelies do not nest by their natural element the sea, but some way away from it on stony slopes and rock patches; thus they cannot employ their brilliant dives and feats of swimming in courtship, but content themselves, apart from this presentation of household material, with what Dr. Levick describes as “going into ecstasy”—spreading their flippers sideways, raising their head quite straight upwards, and emitting a low humming sound. This a bird may do when alone, or the two birds of a pair may make a duet of it. In any case, the term applied to it by its observer well indicates the state of emotion which it suggests and no doubt expresses.
The depositing of courtship offerings before men by the Penguins shows us that there must be a certain freedom of mental connection in birds. Here an act, properly belonging to courtship, is performed as the outlet, as it were, of another and unusual emotion. The same is seen in many song-birds, who, like the Sedge Warbler, sing loudly for anger when disturbed near their nest; or in the Divers, who, when an enemy is close to the nest, express the violence of their emotion by short sharp dives which flip a fountain of spray into the air—a type of dive also used as a sign of general excitement in courtship.
Or, again, the actions may be performed for their own sake, as we may say: because their performance,when the bird is full of energy and outer conditions are favourable, gives pleasure. The best-known example is the song of song-birds. This, as Eliot Howard has abundantly shown, is in its origin and essential function a symbol of possession, of a nesting territory occupied by a male—to other males a notice that “trespassers will be prosecuted,” to females an invitation to settle, pair, and nest. But in all song-birds, practically without exception, the song is by no means confined to the short period during which it actually performs these functions, but is continued until the young are hatched, often to be taken up again when they have flown, or after the moult, or even, as in the Song Thrush, on almost any sunny or warm day the year round.
And finally this leads on to what is perhaps the most interesting category of birds’ actions—those which are not merely sometimes performed for their own sake, although they possess other and utilitarian function, but actually have no other origin orraison d’êtrethan to be performed for their own sake. They represent, in fact, true play or sport among ourselves; and seem better developed among birds than among mammals, or at least than among mammals below the monkey. True that the cat plays with the mouse, and many young mammals, like kittens, lambs, and kids, are full of play; but the playing with the mouse is more like the singing of birds outside the mating season, a transference of a normal activity to the plane of play; and the play of young animals, asGroos successfully exerted himself to show, is of undoubted use. To be sure, the impulse to play must befeltby the young creature as an exuberance of emotion and spirits demanding expression; but a similar impulse must be felt for all instinctive actions. Psychologically and individually, if you like, the action is performed for its own sake; but from the standpoint of evolution and of the race it has been originated, or at least perfected, as a practice ground for immature limbs and a training and keeping ready of faculties that in the future will be needed in earnest.
We shall best see the difference between mammals’ and birds’ behaviour by giving some examples. A very strange one I saw in a pond near the Egret rookery in Louisiana. Here, among other interesting birds, were the Darters or Water Turkeys, curious-looking relatives of the Cormorants, with long, thin, flexible neck, tiny head, and sharp beak, who often swim with all the body submerged, showing nothing but the snake-like neck above water. One of these was sitting on a branch of swamp-cedar, solitary and apparently tranquil. But this tranquillity must have been the cloak of boredom. For suddenly the bird, looking restlessly about her (it was a hen), began to pluck at the little green twigs near by. She pulled one off in her beak, and then, tossing her head up, threw it into the air, and with dexterous twist caught it again in her beak as it descended. After five or six successful catches she missed thetwig. A comic sideways and downward glance at the twig, falling and fallen, in meditative immobility; and then another twig was broken off, and the same game repeated. She was very clever at catching; the only bird that I have seen come up to her was a Toucan in the Zoo which could catch grapes thrown at apparently any speed. But then the Toucan had been specially trained—and had the advantage of a huge capacity of bill!
Here again it might, of course, be said that the catching of twigs is a practice for beak and eye, and helps keep the bird in training for the serious business of catching fish. This is no doubt true; but, as regards the evolution of the habit, I incline strongly to the belief that it must be quite secondary—that the bird, desirous of occupying its restless self in a satisfying way, fell back upon a modification of its everyday activities, just as these are drawn upon in other birds to provide much of the raw material of courtship. There is no evidence that young Darters play at catching twigs as preparation for their fishing, and until there is evidence of this it is simpler to think that the play habit here, instead of being rooted by the utilitarian dictates of natural selection in the behaviour of the species, as with kids or kittens, is a secondary outcome of leisure and restlessness combining to operate with natural aptitude—in other words, true sport, of however simple a kind.
The commonest form of play in birds is flying play. Any one who has kept his eyes open at the seasidewill have seen the Herring Gulls congregate in soaring intersecting spirals where the cliff sends the wind upwards. But such flights are nothing compared with those of other birds. Even the staid black-coated Raven may sometimes be seen to go through a curious performance. One I remember, all alone, flying along the side of a mountain near Oban; but instead of progressing in the conventional way, he flew diagonally upwards for a short distance, then giving a special croak with something of gusto in it, turned almost completely over on to his back, and descended a corresponding diagonal in this position. Then with a strong flap of the wings he righted himself, and so continued until he disappeared round the shoulder of the hill half a mile on. It reminded me of a child who has learnt some new little trick of step or dance-rhythm, and tries it out happily all the way home along the road. Mr. Harold Massingham has seen the Ravens’ games too, and set them down more vividly than I can.[26]He also is clear that they play for the love of playing, and even believes that their love of sport has helped their downfall to rarity by rendering them too easy targets for the gunner.
Or again, at the Egret rookery in Louisiana, at evening when the birds returned in great numbers, they came back with steady wing-beats along an aerial stratum about two hundred feet up. Arrived over their nesting pond, they simply let themselves drop. Their plumes flew up behind like a comet’stail; they screamed aloud with excitement; and, not far above the level of the trees, spread the wings so that they caught the air again, and as result skidded and side-slipped in the wildest and most exciting-looking curves before recovering themselves with a brief upward glide and settling carefully on the branches. This certainly had no significance for courtship; and I never saw it done save over the pond at the birds’ return. It seemed to be simply an entertaining bit of sport grafted on to the dull necessity of descending a couple of hundred feet.
Examples could be multiplied: Rooks and Crows, our solemn English Heron, Curlew, Swifts, Snipe—these and many others have their own peculiar flying sports. What is clear to the watcher is the emotional basis of these sports—a joy in controlled performance, and excitement in rapidity of motion, in all essentials like the pleasure to us of a well-hit ball at golf, or the thrill of a rapid descent on sledge skis.
For any one to whom the evolution theory is one of the master-keys to animate nature, there must be an unusual interest in tracing out the development of lines of life that, like the birds’, have diverged comparatively early from the line which eventually and through many vicissitudes led to Man.
In the birds as in the mammals, and quite separately in the two groups, we see the evolution not only of certain structural characters such as division of heart, compactness of skeleton, increase of brain-size, not only of physiological characters like warm-bloodednessor efficiency of circulation, but also of various psychical characters. The power of profiting by experience becomes greater, as does that of distinguishing between objects; and there is most markedly an increase in the intensity of emotion. It has somehow been of advantage, direct or indirect, to birds to acquire a greater capacity for affection, for jealousy, for joy, for fear, for curiosity. In birds the advance on the intellectual side has been less, on the emotional side greater: so that we can study in them a part of the single stream of life where emotion, untrammelled by much reason, has the upper hand.
Chance, E., ’22. “The Cuckoo’s Secret.” London, 1922.Darwin, C., ’71. “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.” London, 1871.Groos, K., ’98. “The Play of Animals.” New York, 1898.Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.Hudson, W. H., ’12. “The Naturalist in La Plata” (5th Ed.). London, 1912.Huxley, J. S., ’14 and ’23. (Courtship in Birds) Proc. Zool. Soc., 1914, and Proc. Linn. Soc., 1923.Kirkman, F. B. (ed.), ’10. “British Bird Book.” London, 1910.Levick, G. M., ’14. “Antarctic Penguins.” London, 1914.Massingham, H. J., ’23. “The Ravens.”Nation and Athenæum.London, 21st April, 1923.Selous, E., ’01. “Bird Watching.” London, 1901.Selous, E., ’05. “Bird Life Glimpses.” London, 1905.
Chance, E., ’22. “The Cuckoo’s Secret.” London, 1922.
Darwin, C., ’71. “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.” London, 1871.
Groos, K., ’98. “The Play of Animals.” New York, 1898.
Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.
Hudson, W. H., ’12. “The Naturalist in La Plata” (5th Ed.). London, 1912.
Huxley, J. S., ’14 and ’23. (Courtship in Birds) Proc. Zool. Soc., 1914, and Proc. Linn. Soc., 1923.
Kirkman, F. B. (ed.), ’10. “British Bird Book.” London, 1910.
Levick, G. M., ’14. “Antarctic Penguins.” London, 1914.
Massingham, H. J., ’23. “The Ravens.”Nation and Athenæum.London, 21st April, 1923.
Selous, E., ’01. “Bird Watching.” London, 1901.
Selous, E., ’05. “Bird Life Glimpses.” London, 1905.
[26]Massingham, ’23.
SEX: THREE WAYS
That body has for soul an air-balloonWhich drifts with every spiritual blast,Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at lastThough overmuch aspiring toward the moon.This other soul, below the animal,Bloating and coating body’s baser partsWith the manure of its desires and arts,Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.I pray that I may still inhabit earth,Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;Yet shall I lead my body on to dwellIn the eternal land of second birth,If, nought contemned, each part of being’s wholeIs taken up in my transmuting soul.
That body has for soul an air-balloonWhich drifts with every spiritual blast,Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at lastThough overmuch aspiring toward the moon.This other soul, below the animal,Bloating and coating body’s baser partsWith the manure of its desires and arts,Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.I pray that I may still inhabit earth,Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;Yet shall I lead my body on to dwellIn the eternal land of second birth,If, nought contemned, each part of being’s wholeIs taken up in my transmuting soul.
That body has for soul an air-balloonWhich drifts with every spiritual blast,Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at lastThough overmuch aspiring toward the moon.
That body has for soul an air-balloon
Which drifts with every spiritual blast,
Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at last
Though overmuch aspiring toward the moon.
This other soul, below the animal,Bloating and coating body’s baser partsWith the manure of its desires and arts,Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.
This other soul, below the animal,
Bloating and coating body’s baser parts
With the manure of its desires and arts,
Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.
I pray that I may still inhabit earth,Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;Yet shall I lead my body on to dwellIn the eternal land of second birth,If, nought contemned, each part of being’s wholeIs taken up in my transmuting soul.
I pray that I may still inhabit earth,
Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;
Yet shall I lead my body on to dwell
In the eternal land of second birth,
If, nought contemned, each part of being’s whole
Is taken up in my transmuting soul.
“And now I see with eye sereneThe very pulse of the machine.”—W. Wordsworth.
“And now I see with eye sereneThe very pulse of the machine.”—W. Wordsworth.
“And now I see with eye sereneThe very pulse of the machine.”—W. Wordsworth.
“And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.”
—W. Wordsworth.
“There is reason to believe that the processes which underlie all great work in art, literature, or science take place unconsciously, or at least unwittingly. It is an interesting question to ask whence comes the energy of which this work is the expression. There are two chief possibilities: one, that it is derived from the instinctive tendencies which, through the action of controlling forces, fail to find their natural outlet; the other, that the energy so arising is increased in amount through the conflict between controlled and controlling forces.”—W. H. Rivers.
“There is reason to believe that the processes which underlie all great work in art, literature, or science take place unconsciously, or at least unwittingly. It is an interesting question to ask whence comes the energy of which this work is the expression. There are two chief possibilities: one, that it is derived from the instinctive tendencies which, through the action of controlling forces, fail to find their natural outlet; the other, that the energy so arising is increased in amount through the conflict between controlled and controlling forces.”—W. H. Rivers.
The biology of sex is a vast subject. Not only are there questions of sex-determination, but the whole sexual selection problem has to be considered, together with the evolutionary function of sex, and its first origin. I can only attempt, in the short space at my disposal, to deal with one or two of the chief points, and only in so far as they bear on questions of human sex psychology.
In the first place, then, we have to consider the evolutionary history of sex. Of its origin we can say only that it is veiled in complete obscurity. Oncepresent, however, it appears to have a definite function by making possible, through sexual reproduction, all the various combinations of any heritable variations that may arise in different individuals of a species, and so conferring greater evolutionary plasticity on the species as a whole.[28]
Primarily, sex implies only the fusion of nuclei from two separate individuals; there is no need for sex differences to exist at all. Sex differences, however, are almost universal in sexually-reproducing organisms, and represent a division of labour between the active male cell and the passive female cell, the former taking over the task of uniting the two, the latter storing up nutriment for the new individual that will result from that union.
The subsequent history of sex is, roughly speaking, the history of its invasion of more and more of the organization of its possessors. First the male as a whole, and not merely its reproductive cells, tends to become organized for finding the female. The female’s whole type of metabolism is altered to produce the most efficient storage of reserve material in her ova, and later she almost invariably protects and nourishes the young during the first part of their development, either within or without her own body. Appropriate instincts are of course developed in both male and female.
At the outset there is enormous waste incurred in the liberation of sperms and ova into the water, thereto unite as best they may. Congress of the sexes eliminates the major part of this waste, and is universal above a certain level. This is in itself the basis for other changes. As the mind, or shall we say the psycho-neural organization, becomes more complex, the sexual instinct becomes more interwoven with the general emotional state; and a large number of animals appear not to mate unless their emotional state has been raised to a certain level. The result of this is that special actions, associated generally with bright colours or striking structures, with song or with scent, come into being.
The exact mechanism of the appearance of these courtship-displays is a much-vexed point; but it is undoubted that they only occur in animals with congress of the sexes and with minds above a certain level of complexity, and that they are employed in ceremonies between the two sexes at mating-time. There can subsist no reasonable doubt that there exists some causal connection between the associated facts.
An important point, which has been commonly overlooked, is that such characters and actions may be either developed in one sex only, or in both. In a large number of birds, such as egrets, grebes, cranes, and many others, the courtship-displays are mutual, and the characters used in them developed to a similar extent in both sexes. Such characters are therefore often not secondary sexual differences, and we had best use Poulton’s termepigamicfor them,whether they are developed in one or in both sexes.[29]
The human species, in accordance with its complexity and flexibility of brain, has epigamic characters of both kinds. Some, like voice and moustache, are different in the two sexes, others, such as colour of eyes and lips, the hairlessness of the body and grace of limbs and carriage, are common to both.
In the vertebrate stock, two main lines of evolution as regards sexual relationships may be traced. The first is predominant in mammals: here, in most species, the female will not receive the male except at fixed times, which are determined by a purely physiological mechanism, the internal secretion of the gonad (reproductive organ). Here we consequently find that the rule is for the males to fight for the possession of the females, not to display before them. In the monkeys, presumably as a result of a lessened dependence of mental upon physiological processes, bright colours and special adornments of various parts of the body are frequently developed.[30]
In the birds, on the other hand, although here too the internal secretion of the gonad delimits a period in which alone congress of the sexes can occur, it does not act for such a sharply-limited time as in the mammal, nor is it so intense as completely to override other components of the mind. As a result, general emotional stimulus may play an important part in inducing readiness to pair, and we accordinglyfind display of some sort, either by the male alone or by both sexes, present in the great majority of species. It is at least partly in correlation with this that beauty of voice and brilliant appearance is far commoner in birds than in mammals.
The monkeys represent in some way a transitional stage towards that seen in man, in whom the conditions have come to resemble those found in birds, with consequent great development of epigamic characters and actions of one sort and another, both physical and mental. Thus we see that sex, after invading and altering the conformation of the body, finally invades and alters the conformation of the mind.
As regards the other great biological question, of the determination of sex, a very few words will suffice. In the first place I have no time to consider plants or lower animals. In almost all higher animals that have been investigated, however, there has been found some hereditary mechanism for ensuring a rough constancy of sex-ratio. This mechanism resides in the so-calledchromosomesof the nucleus. These exist for the most part in similar pairs in both sexes: but one pair is dissimilar in one sex. In mammals and man this sex is the male. Man possesses one chromosome less than woman. He possesses only one member of this pair of special sex-chromosomes, whereas she possesses two. All her ova are alike in possessing one, whereas half his sperms possess one, half possess none. Therefore, when the former kind of sperms fertilize an ovum, two sex-chromosomesare present in the fertilized egg and a female results; when the latter, only one, and the offspring is male.[31]
Putting the matter in the broadest terms, we can say that there is a different balance of hereditary factors in male and female, and that this difference of balance dates from the moment of fertilization, and normally determines sex.
Various agencies may alter the balance. The chromosomes themselves may vary in what we must vaguely call their potency; or external agencies may affect it. As a result, we sometimes obtain strange abnormal individuals, in which the balance has been upset; in them development results sometimes in organisms permanently intermediate between male and female, sometimes in a change of sex at some period of development.
In insects the chromosomes appear to be predominant throughout life. In vertebrates, however, they seem to play their chief rôle in early development, ending by building up either a male or a female gonad in the early embryo. This, once produced, takes over what remains of the task of sex-determination. It secretes a specific internal secretion which in a male acts so as to encourage the growth of male organs and instincts, to suppress those of females; and vice versa in a female.
As a result of this difference we find that castration in insects, even followed by engrafting of a gonad of opposite sex, produces no effect upon other sexualcharacters; whereas it exerts a profound effect upon mammals or birds.
As a second result, we find that in vertebrates the gonads form part of what has been called the chemical directorate of the body—the interlocking system of endocrine glands, each of which is exerting an effect upon the rest. The importance of this is seen in the experiments of Steinach, Sand, Voronoff, and others, who have been able to obtain a rejuvenating effect in senile mammals by increasing, by various methods, the amount of secreting reproductive organ in the body.[32]
To what then has our rapid survey led us? The actual origin of sex is lost to us in the mists of a time inconceivably remote. Its preservation once in existence, and its present all-but-universal distribution seem to be definitely associated with the biological advantage of the plasticity which it confers. Later, the primary difference between male and female—their power of producing different sorts of reproductive cells—leads on to secondary differences. These differences may be biologically speaking non-significant, mere accidents of the primary difference. Or they may be in the nature of a division of labour between the sexes, this division of labour usually concerning the protection of the embryo or the care of the young, or more rarely the preservation of the individual itself. Or, finally, they may concern the more efficient union of the gametes; such differencesmay merely affect the ducts and apertures of the reproductive system, and be more or less mechanical; or they may concern the use of these systems, in the form of still mechanical instincts, or they may be concerned in some way or other with the emotional side of the animals, and consist in characters and actions which stimulate the emotions of the other sex, characters which we have termed epigamic.
It is only in higher groups that these emotion-stimulating sexual characters arise, for only in them has mind reached a sufficient degree of perfection. But even though detailed study reveals in a bird or a mammal a mental life of a complexity far more considerable than the average man would imagine, yet on the whole it is straightforward and its currents run fairly direct from stimulus to fulfilment.
When we reach man, however, the whole aspect of the matter changes. The change is most marked, naturally, in his mental organization. Through his powers of rapid and unlimited association, any one part of his experience can be combined with any other; through his powers of generalizing and of giving names to things, his experience is far more highly organized than that of any animal; through speech and writing he is inheritor of a continuous tradition which enormously enlarges his range of experience. Again, he can frame a purpose and thus put the objective of his actions far further into the future than can lower organisms.
There are, however, also changes of considerablebiological importance on the physical side. Man brings with him from his animal ancestors the endocrine secretory mechanism of the reproductive organs: but his life is not subordinated to it in such an iron-bound way. To start with he has gradually lost all semblance of a breeding-season. Traces of it survive in some primitive races, but in civilized communities all one can say is that the number of births may show a slight seasonal variation; and the reproductive organs are capable of function in all twelve months of the year—a state of affairs known, I believe, in no other vertebrate, or at least in no wild species.[33]
In the second place, there has been in the female a further emancipation of the sexual life. In all other mammals the female will only receive the male at certain well-defined periods, which in their turn depend on cyclical changes in the ovaries. In man this restriction has been overcome, and, in spite of the survival of a certain degree of cyclical change in feeling, neither sex is restricted any longer to certain physically-determined periods for the consummation of its sexual life. This is, we may say, a triumph of mind over matter in the human organism, of the mental elements of the sexual life over the purely physical elements.
This is not to deny that the sexual life of man is dependent upon the reproductive hormones. It is apparently necessary for proper activation of thesexual centres in the brain that there should occur a continuous liberation of secretion from the reproductive organs into the blood. Again, the mental activities of man are so much more important than those of other forms that even the cessation of activity of the reproductive organs, for instance in the female at the change of life, or even their total removal, need not prevent the continuation, albeit in a modified form, of the sexual life in its varied indirect manifestations.
Before attempting to probe the intricacies of the mental side of the subject, we had better see what we can learn of the physical. Let us first remind ourselves of one or two facts gained from animal experimentation. In the first place, in mammals the activation of the sexual instincts of one or the other sex appears to be completely or almost completely under the control of the internal secretions of the reproductive organs. Steinach and others have taken new-born male guinea-pigs and have removed their testes and grafted ovaries in their place. The result has been an animal almost completely feminized both as regards body and mind. In some of the animals milk was secreted, and when this occurred they would act as foster-mothers to new-born guinea-pigs of other parents. The reverse operation, the masculinization of females, was equally successful, the animals growing large and showing all the instincts of a normal male and none of those of a normal female.
A similar dependence of behaviour on gonad isseen in fowls. Here nature makes a number of experiments, which have recently been studied by Dr. Crew of Edinburgh. When the ovaries of a hen are affected by a certain type of tumour, the bird stops laying, her comb and wattles enlarge to the size of a cock’s, her spurs grow, she begins to crow, her plumage changes at the moult and becomes cock-like, and finally she becomes indistinguishable from a male. Indistinguishable, even in behaviour: her years of feminine routine in laying and brooding are forgotten: the secretion of the altered ovary now apparently resembles that of a testis and stimulates centres of the brain which would otherwise have remained permanently dormant. She struts and crows, fights and mates, and the memory of the previous part of her life is for all practical purposes lost, since the centres for female activity are no longer stimulated at all.
Various workers have even experimentally produced a state of hermaphroditism in mammals by simultaneous grafting of portions of testes and ovary: the behaviour here oscillates between male and female.[34]
It is quite clear from these and other facts that in higher vertebrates there are present in every individual of either sex the nervous connections which give the possibility of either male or female behaviour; but that normally only one of these two possibilities is realized, since for the potentiality of action given by the nervous connections to becomeactual as behaviour it is necessary for the nervous system to be activated by the secretion of one or other of the reproductive organs. Castrated animals fail to realize either possibility of normal sex-behaviour, although their nervous machinery is untouched.
There are, further, some facts of observation which, even if they have not yet been fully analysed by experiment, still throw light on the matter. Although many of the most familiar birds—fowls, pheasant, peacock, duck, finches, and so forth—have bright-coloured males and drab females, with marked difference of behaviour between the sexes, there are, as we have seen, many others, such as herons, divers, swans, grebes, moorhens, and auks, in which the sexes are alike in plumage and furthermore show what may be called a “mutual” courtship in which both male and female play similar rôles. In this latter class it seems clear that the secretions of the male and female reproductive organs must be more alike than in the markedly dimorphic species: and this is borne out by some strange facts regarding not merely the courtship but the actions concerned with pairing itself. In the crested grebe and the little grebe, for example, close observation has shown that either member of the pair may assume the passive “female” attitude or the active “male” attitude in pairing: and in the moorhen we meet with the still more extraordinary phenomenon of double pairing, in which an act of pairing with male and female in normalposition is immediately followed by a second act in which the normal position is reversed.[35]It would appear in such cases that the similarity of male and female internal secretion is so great that quite slight changes in nervous or metabolic activity can cause the nervous centres for the opposite sex’s mode of behaviour to become activated.
In human beings we are confronted with various grades of sexual organization and behaviour besides the typically feminine and the typically masculine. In the first place it is matter of common knowledge that many women, who so far as their physical reproductive capacity goes are perfectly normal, show various mental traits which are more characteristic of men, and vice versa. What is more, the “masculinoid” woman (to use the current jargon) tends physically also to be less feminine, to have the feminine secondary sexual characteristics in stature, form of skeleton, distribution of fat, breasts, etc.—less strongly developed than normal, while the “feminoid” man shows the reverse tendency.[36]
In trying to analyse these facts further, we are brought up against new depths of complication. It is becoming ever clearer that the gonads do not operate as independent organs, but in conjunction with the whole of the rest of the endocrine system—thyroid, pituitary, adrenal, and the rest. In the first place, it seems to be established that thereproductive organs must be in some way activated by other ductless glands before they become normal, just as they in their turn must activate the sexual centres in the brain. This phase of the matter is being investigated by many workers to-day; provisionally we may say that pituitary and adrenal cortex are especially concerned. In the second place the gonads, once activated and in normal working order, react upon the other ductless glands. It thus comes about that the relative proportion or relative activity of the parts of the whole ductless gland system is different in male and female. Blair Bell is the protagonist of this view. A woman is a woman, he says, not merely because of her ovaries, but because of all her internal secretions, of her endocrine balance as a whole.
It cannot be said that we have any certainty on the details of this subject. It is clear, however, that some such fundamental difference does exist, and it is therefore further probable that if a woman has a thyroid, say, or an adrenal which for some reason (and there are many possible reasons) is producing an amount of secretion abnormal for a woman but more like that which is produced by a man, she will, in spite of her ovaries, be more masculine in tendency.
I will content myself with one example. The cortex of the adrenal gland, if active beyond a certain measure, assists the development of male, prevents the development of female, characters. Womenwith adrenal tumours frequently develop moustache and beard and other appanages of the male. One presumes that a slight preponderance of the adrenal cortex in the normal endocrine make-up will lead to a less feminine type of woman than normal. I repeat that we are but on the verge of the matter and that premature speculation is certainly risky and probably fallacious. But all the same, there is very little doubt that we are on the right track, and that we shall have to search for the finer shades of temperamental difference between man and woman not so much in differences in the quality of the secretion of testis or ovary as in differences of balance in what the Americans call the “endocrine make-up.”[37]
There is, however, also the possibility of difference in the quality of gonad secretion, and of recent years Steinach and his followers have been claiming that this may be at the bottom of many cases of so-called “perversion of sexual instinct.” The latest claim of this school is that homosexual men may be rendered heterosexual in instinct by removal of their testes and implantation of a testis from a sexually normal person—from a man, for example, who is being operated on for cryptorchidism. It is frankly impossible as yet to say whether their conclusions are well founded: a very much larger series of cases will be necessary, and the possibility of suggestion’s action must be eliminated. It is well to remember, however, that there is no theoretical objection to thepossibility. We know that in various lower animals, such as moths and flies, the balance between the male- and female-determining factors in the chromosomes may be altered in certain crosses, and that this altered balance in the constitution is reflected in some cases in a state permanently intermediate between male and female, in others by a reversal of sex at some point during development. For various reasons we should not usually expect reversal in mammals; but if such abnormal balance should exist in the constitution, as it well might, we should expect a gonad secreting an abnormal, intermediate secretion. This we might also expect as the result of certain accidents of embryonic life, as actually happens in the abnormal female cattle known to farmers as free-martins. These animals are always born co-twin to a male, and their abnormality is due to the blood-systems of the embryonic membranes of the twins having fused, so that the secretion of the developing male’s gonad acts upon the developing female.
Further light on abnormally-directed sex-instinct is thrown by recent analysis of abnormal domestic animals by Crew.[38]In both goats and swine he finds that by far the commonest form of sexual abnormality is one in which the external appearance, at least in youth, is so nearly female as to raise no question in the mind of the casual observer; about the time of maturity, however, male secondary sexcharacters begin to develop, including male instincts; and dissection reveals the presence of a double set of ducts—the female uterus and vagina, the male epididymis and vas deferens, but only a single uniform reproductive organ, and that always a testis. The simplest explanation (although it is admittedly tentative) appears to be that the testis has not been activated during embryonic and juvenile life, and that therefore until puberty the animal, though really male, has been physiologically in a neutral state, which permits the growth of the internal apparatus proper to both sexes. Externally, the “neutral” condition approximates more closely to the female type, and the animal is thus first classed as a female. Some other gland is then responsible for the second activation at puberty, and this occurs in a normal manner.
This is of considerable interest, since it appears that in man too the largest class of sexually abnormal individuals are those whose external appearance is almost or quite feminine, but who possess male instincts. It is at least probable that examination will show that they, too, or many of them, will be of the type described above—males with delayed activation of testis, a consequent classification as female at birth, and a girl’s upbringing, with male instincts arising in the unhappy creature at puberty.
It is the fashion nowadays to write down abnormal sexual psychology wholly to the account of the mind, to an abnormal development with causes entirelypsychological. It is clear, however, that if some abnormal individuals can be cured by implantation, and others are abnormal owing to an early failure of activation, this conception falls to the ground, and the Freudian is robbed of some of his most cherished examples.
In any case, the work on animals definitely shows that, unless the mechanism of activation of instinct by gonad secretion has altered between animal and man more than we have any right to postulate a priori, the quality of gonad secretion and the balance of all the endocrines has to be taken into account far more than is done by the average psycho-analyst.
This, however, is not to say that the genesis of our attitude towards sex, our sexual behaviour, and our general mental organization in so far as modified by sex, is not normally determined for the most part by purely psychological causes. If there is a physical abnormality, this will react upon the mental; but in the vast majority of cases the physical variation will not take the individual beyond the limits of normality, and when the normal physical limits are not exceeded, the wide range of mental variation still observable is to be ascribed to psychological causes. In other words, abnormal sexual behaviour and instinct may be due either to physiological or psychological abnormality, and the latter is probably the commoner cause.
I am not competent to attempt to treat of the vast and complex psychological aspect of the sex-problemwhich the analytical psychologists have opened up to such an extent within the last few years; I can only deal with it in the broadest way, and content myself rather with stating than with solving problems.
As regards the place of sex in our mental organization, there are two contradictory extremes possible. Either all ideas connected with the physical side of sex may be repressed with great vehemence, and the sexual contribution to various emotions ignored or dismissed, while a constant attempt is made at sublimation; or else there is little or no repression beyond that necessitated by convention and custom, sexual matters are taken at their physical face value, and sublimation is not consciously attempted and exists only to a negligible amount.
There is no doubt that the first alternative represents one of the commonest neuroses of modern life, and one in which an interpretation on principles made familiar by psycho-analysis is the most satisfactory. Repression, through whatever cause initiated (and psychologists, I understand, are coming more and more to recognize that chronic misuse of the mind as well as single violent shocks may be effective), leads to a more or less complete dissociation of two parts of the mind, of which one only is in the main connected with the conscious personal life. As a result, curious phenomena are met with. There is, it is true, a constant effort necessary to keep life a-going with the aid of an incompletemental organization; but when satisfaction is attained, its very rarity brings with it a certain glow, an irradiation of peculiarly pleasurable nature. Furthermore, dissociation in most cases is not complete; now and again, and especially when there is successful sublimation—in some people when in love, in others with religious ecstasy, in others again with some form of art—now and again re-association of the parts occurs, and there is an extraordinary sense of the irruption of some vast beneficent force, some great extra-personal flood of soul, into the meagre stream of everyday life. The lives of a certain number of saints and ascetics, mystics and poets, abound with phenomena of this sort; and apparently the sense of value attaching to the occasional complete attainment of such satisfactory states of the soul, combined with the conscious daily quest for sublimation which is inevitable when the most important part of the primitive emotions are repressed, is such a vivid experience that it satisfies the mind and enables such persons to carry on, and to do work sometimes of the highest value.
On the other hand, men and women with this type of mental development naturally tend to be unstable; they cannot be sure of their capacity, whether for routine work or creative thought or spiritual experience, from day to day. Their mental life has a tendency to wear thin, their sense of effort and struggle to increase and lead to breakdown. It is in the long run an unsatisfactory way of organizing thepsyche, because the conscious mind has less than it ought to have upon which to fall back.
The opposite extreme is equally unsatisfactory. If individuals of the first type are trying to build high without adequate foundations, those of the second are mistaking the foundations for a complete building. A dissociation of a different type occurs in them—a dissociation due to lack of use, to a mere failure to connect up that part of the mind concerned with sexual emotion with a great many of the mind’s other activities. Thus the sexual side has few and lower values associated with it than it might, and other possibilities of thought and feeling and action remain as mere possibilities, never realized in actuality. The result is a definitely incomplete personality of a more or less arrested or rudimentary type.
Those are the extremes: of course there are all intermediates between them. They may crop up with apparent spontaneity, determined more by the hereditary constitution of the man or woman than by external happenings: or they may be mainly or at least largely determined by the accidents of the environment during the period before maturity. One of the most potent factors in the environment will be the attitude of the parents towards sexual matters. On the one hand they may adopt the common, horror-stricken attitude towards sex, hushing it up, making it clear to the sensitive mind of childhood that there is something thoroughly bad aboutit, and so laying the best possible foundations for future repression. Or, on the other hand, they may openly adopt the psycho-analytic view as to the rôle of sex in the development of mind, may further believe that the fullest analysis and self-knowledge is always desirable, and may accordingly be pointing out to the child interpretations of its actions and sayings in terms of sex, familiarizing it with sex from the outset, not merely not discouraging but actually encouraging reference to sexual matters. This will tend,ceteris paribus, to the development of a mind in which many of the more complex mental operations will not usually persist because the subject will be continually unbuilding them into their constituent parts, of which sex will be the most unvarying and important.