Psychology of sex : a manual for students / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychology of sex : a manual for students / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Lessing understood that philosopher’s doctrine of katharsis as “a conversion of passion or emotion in general into virtuous dispositions.” But that seems scarcely correct, for it was simply the alleviation brought by emotional dis¬ charges of pity or fear which Aristotle seems to have had in mind, and, as Garnett rightly points out, the mere “ draining off ” of emotion is not sublimation. It is not until the coming of Christianity that the idea of sublimation, even as a concrete image, begins to take definite shapes. It is traced back to an early Father of the Egyptian Desert, Abba Macarius the Great, sometimes regarded as “ the first scientific mystic of Christendom ” ; and Evelyn Underhill in The Mystic Way expounds his psychological view of a gradual transformation in the sub¬ stance of the soul (which he did not regard as absolutely immaterial) into an ever less dense and more pure spirituality under the influence of the Divine Fire. “ Like metals,” he said, “ which, cast into the fire, lose their natural hardness, and the longer they remain in the furnace are more and more softened by the flame.” The painful fire becomes heavenly light, and for Macarius light and life are identical. Here we have, as definitely as possible, our modem concep¬ tion of sublimation. Macarius was the friend of St. Basil, who was in the main stream of Christian tradition, and this idea constantly recurs in the later Christian mystics and is the foundation of St. Catharine of Genoa’s doctrine of Purgatory—the fire of purgatory burning away the rust of sin. Later it appears, apart from any religious doctrine, under the definite name of “ sublimation,” in the poets and still later in the moralists. To sublimate is to bring a substance by heat from what we usually regard as its grosser, more “ material ” and sordid form, to a state of vapour which we usually regard as more exalted and refined. The poets seized on this process as symbolizing what takes place in the human spirit, and they frequently used the idea in the early seventeenth century. Thus Davies in his Immortality of the Soul sang of turning “ Bodies to spirits by sublimation strange.” Prose writers, religious and other, seized on the