psycho-sexual constitution if we regard the motive power behind it as a
dynamic energy, produced and maintained by a complex mechanism at certain
inner foci of the body, and realise that whatever periodic explosive
manifestations may take place at the surface, the primary motive source
lies in the intimate recesses of the organism, while the outcome is the
whole physical and spiritual energy of our being under those aspects which
are most forcible and most aspiring and even most ethereal.

This conception, we find, is now receiving an admirable and beautifully
adequate physical basis in the researches of distinguished physiologists
in various lands concerning the parts played by the ductless glands of the
body, in sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring out into the
system stimulating and inhibiting hormones, which not only confer on the
man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but
at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of
masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before
Brown-Séquard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to
search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the
medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same
dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute
London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of
sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton,
whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had
definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly
proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the
personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[5] It
was the wish to group together all the far-flung manifestations of the
inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own
conception of _auto-erotism_, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which
arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to