and intimate relation between the individual man and woman. And if in the
present disco-ordinate transitional stage of our social growth it is found
necessary to allow of readjustment by means of divorce, it will not be
because such readjustments will be regarded lightly, but rather, as when,
in a complex and delicate mechanism moved by a central spring, we allow in
the structure for the readjustment and regulation of that spring, because
on its absolute perfection of action depends the movement of the whole
mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express what seems to
me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as humanity and human
societies pass on slowly from their present barbarous and semi-savage
condition in matters of sex into a higher, it will be found increasingly,
that over and above its function in producing and sending onward the
physical stream of life (a function which humanity shares with the most
lowly animal and vegetable forms of life, and which even by some noted
thinkers of the present day seems to be regarded as its only possible
function,) that sex and the sexual relation between man and woman have
distinct aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual functions and ends, apart
entirely from physical reproduction. That noble as is the function of the
physical reproduction of humanity by the union of man and woman, rightly
viewed, that union has in it latent, other, and even higher forms, of
creative energy and life-dispensing power, and that its history on earth
has only begun. As the first wild rose when it hung from its stem with its
centre of stamens and pistils and its single whorl of pale petals, had only
begun its course, and was destined, as the ages passed, to develop stamen
upon stamen and petal upon petal, till it assumed a hundred forms of joy
and beauty.

And, it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higher
development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead in
other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very sexual