involuntary and unconscious effort. Then we may have conflict, which, when
it works happily, exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
character, when more unhappily a disturbing influence which may even lead
to conditions of definite nervous disorder.

The process by which this fundamental sexual energy is elevated from
elementary and primitive forms into complex and developed forms is termed
sublimation, a term, originally used for the process of raising by heat a
solid substance to the state of vapour, which was applied even by such
early writers as Drayton and Davies in a metaphorical and spiritual
sense.[7] In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because
it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to
it must intimately affect our conception of morality. The element of
athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found
even--indeed often in a high degree--among savages, has its main moral
justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts
by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from
its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and
social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual
activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.
Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our
best judgment may approve.

[7] We may gather the history of the term from the _Oxford Dictionary_.
Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by sublimation strange,"
and Ben Jonson in _Cynthia's Revels_ spoke of a being "sublimated and
refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century,
referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a
little later, to "subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury,