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this experience only towards one human being at a time, and that one must be of the opposite sex. But through that one,
"Earth's crammed full of Heaven
And every common bush ablaze with God."
To almost every mortal it is granted once in his life to go up into the Mount of Transfiguration. He comes down with his face shining, and of the things he saw on the Mount he may not speak. But through that revelation he is suddenly humbled before all the rest of the world whom he cannot thus utterly love.
To resume: Sex, we have found, is a splendid and vital instinct with a singular power of inter-penetrating and reinforcing other energies. But it is an instinct that has for its attendant characteristics, among primitive peoples, pugnacity, in later civilisation, intense egotism. Always and everywhere it tends to be exclusive and individualistic. This exclusiveness of sex seems permanently and inexorably imposed by ineluctable nature. Now, if the object of life were the reproduction, the handing on of life, we should say, and rightly say, to woman: "Be womanly: be wife and mother." And we should say to man: "Be manly: be husband and father." So best would our purpose be served. But the problem before us is more difficult, more complex. We want to live life, and human life, for woman as for man, is lived to the full only in and through the "herd,"—is social. We want, in a word, for the sake of this fulness of life, to co-ordinate our individualistic instincts of which sex seems to be the strongest and most exclusive, with our altruistic herd-instincts.
