have an adult, formed and determinate, for whom indeed the drama and
conflict of life is still only beginning, but who is, nevertheless, in
a very serious sense finished and made. The quaint, lovable, larval
human being has passed then into the full imago, before whom there is
no further change in kind save age and decay.

This development of the sexual being, of personal dreams, and the adult
imagination is already commencing in the early teens. It goes on
through all the later phases of the educational process, and it ends,
or, rather, it is transformed by insensible degrees into the personal
realities of adult life.

Now this second birth within the body of the first differs in many
fundamental aspects from that first. The first birth and the body
abound in inevitable things; for example, features, gestures aptitudes,
complexions, and colours, are inherited beyond any power of perversion;
but the second birth is the unfolding not of shaped and settled things
but of possibilities, of extraordinarily plastic mental faculties. No
doubt there are in each developing individual dispositions towards this
or that--tendencies, a bias in the texture this way or that--but the
form of it all is extraordinarily a matter of suggestion and the
influence of deliberate and accidental moulding forces. The universal
Will to live is there, peeping out at first in little curiosities,
inquiries, sudden disgusts, sudden fancies, the stumbling, slow
realization that for this in a mysteriously predominant way we live,
and growing stronger, growing presently, in the great multitude of
cases, to passionate preferences and powerful desires. This flow of sex
comes like a great river athwart the plain of our personal and egoistic
schemes, a great river with its rapids, with its deep and silent
places, a river of uncertain droughts, a river of overwhelming floods,