Towards moral bankruptcy / by Paul Bureau.

  • Paul Bureau
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Towards moral bankruptcy / by Paul Bureau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    fearful rush. As in our modern society the sexual act is completely separated, for such as will it so, Irom the consequences which nature has attached to it, the great majority of young people and of adults, at least of the male sex, consider themselves at liberty to consider no¬ thing but the personal gratification they receive, and one understands how there is, henceforth, no limit placed on the frequency of their experiences, or the eagerness of their desires. As I am engaged on an inquiry exclusively sociological, I do not need to seek for the physiological and psycho¬ logical causes which oive the sexual emotion a character sui generis, the eagerness of which troubles the senses and infatuates the reason. 1 It is enough for me to note that in a period when the pursuit of happiness, even of mere pleasure, holds so vast a place in individual lives and has become the sole guiding principle of an immense multitude, it was inevitable that this particular pleasure should be ardently sought and eminently appreciated. It must be so all the more since, as the philosophers observed long ago, there exists an intimate relation between sexual activity and the imagination. In some manner which we would fain explain, it is certain that even after dissociating from the sexual act the rough sum total of the sensations which attend it, it leaves in 1 Everyone agrees that “ if one sets out to analyse this pleasure in definite terms, one only discovers a content of the very poorest kind.” But assuredly our analysis is too brief, and the reality something in¬ finitely deeper. “Have we said everything as to the sexual emotion,” writes M. Ruyssen, “when we have traced the eddy which it excites on the surface of our consciousness ? Have we not, on the contrary, the deep impression that something else is stirring far below, that our inmost self is moved by a force at once close to us and yet stretching infinitely beyond us? Is it, as Schopenhauer thought, some mysterious and imperious will to live which, by our individuality, tries to realize itself under the form of knowledge? Is it our nature which, according to the picturesque phrase of M. André Cresson, summons her servant to work to perpetuate her being? Is it, on the part of one sex, incomplete as it is by definition, an unconscious aspiration towards self-realization in the most intimate of unions? Is it, as Malebranche (before Renan) would have it, the soul that seeks God by obscure paths ? We do not pretend to solve this enigma.” (Révue de Métaphysique et de Morale) 1913, p. 825. The two articles of my eminent colleague have been published together in one pamphlet, to the pages of which I shall henceforth refer).
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