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As in many other of these Studies, and perhaps more than in most, thetask attempted in the present volume is mainly of a tentative andpreliminary character. There is here little scope yet for the presentationof definite scientific results. However it may be in the physicaluniverse, in the cosmos of science our knowledge must be nebulous beforeit constellates into definitely measurable shapes, and nothing is gainedby attempting to anticipate the evolutionary process. Thus it is thathere, for the most part, we have to content ourselves at present with thetask of mapping out the field in broad and general outlines, bringingtogether the facts and considerations which indicate the direction inwhich more extended and precise results will in the future be probablyfound.
In his famous Descent of Man, wherein he first set forth the doctrine ofsexual selection, Darwin injured an essentially sound principle byintroducing into it a psychological confusion whereby the physiologicalsensory stimuli through which sexual selection operates were regarded asequivalent to æsthetic preferences. This confusion misled many, and it isonly within recent years (as has been set forth in the "Analysis of theSexual Impulse" in the previous volume of these Studies) that theinvestigations and criticisms of numerous workers have placed the doctrineof sexual selection on a firm basis by eliminating its hazardous æstheticelement. Love springs up as a response to a number of stimuli totumescence, the object that most adequately arouses tumescence being thatwhich evokes love; the question of æsthetic beauty, although it developson this basis, is not itself fundamental and need not even be consciouslypresent at all. When we look at these phenomena in their broadestbiological aspects, love is only to a limited extent a response to beauty;to a greater extent beauty is simply a name for the complexus of stimuliwhich most adequately arouses love. If we analyze these stimuli totumescence as they proceed from a person of the opposite sex we find thatthey are all appeals which must come through the channels of four senses:touch, smell, hearing, and, above all, vision. When a man or a womanexperiences sexual love for one particular person from among the multitudeby which he or she is surrounded, this is due to the influences of a groupof stimuli coming through the channels of one or more of these senses.There has been a sexual selection conditioned by sensory stimuli. This istrue even of the finer and more spiritual influences that proceed from oneperson to another, although, in order to grasp the phenomena adequately,it is best to insist on the more fundamental and less complex forms whichthey assume. In this sense sexual selection is no longer a hypothesisconcerning the truth of which it is possible to dispute; it is aself-evident fact. The difficulty is not as to its existence, but as tothe methods by which it may be most precisely measured. It isfundamentally a psychological process, and should be approached from thepsychological side. This is the reason for dealing with it here. Obscure