Bernard Simon Talmey

“ Sweet inexpressable emotions of wonder, awe, and amazement disturb the thoughts and actions of the awakening consciousness. Mysterious sensations, foretastes and impulses fill the heart of the ripening individual. For the man it is the beginning of the period of “storm and stress.” It is the time when the elemental cosmic fire of love is bestowed upon the eyes of youth, and an infinite yearning is implanted into his soul by an invisible power. At the approach of this time, a tender fledgeling of longing is implanted into the heart of the girl. ”

“ Men will then try to bury their unsatisfied longing for true affection in the exaggerated occupation with business or to drown their vehement unrequited love-yearnings in drink and other narcotics. The fate of the woman is even more tragic. Woman’s idea of happiness is a sort of ecstatic bliss. She is looking for perennial joy and beauty, for a joy as only the angels know. Hence when she learns to know the illusory nature of the heart’s greatest desire, when she makes the discovery of the futility of this desire, the wine of life grows sour. She becomes self-centered and selfish. ”

“ Curiously enough, while man takes great pains in the education of the young to prepare them for the gratification of hunger, the much tabooed question of sex has been excluded, in our present civilization, from every discussion.
Yet love lies at the foundation of society, it permeates unconsciously the thoughts, aspirations and hopes of mankind. Love is glorified as the source of the most admirable productions of art, of the sublime creations of poetry and music; it is accepted as the mightiest factor in human civilization, as the basis of the family and state. ”

“ Here the individual is merely an insignificant little wheel in the huge war-machine. Here the individual counts for nothing, the nation for everything, the individual must perish that the nation may flourish ever after. Now, what is the modern nation, but an idea, what is the monarch in western countries or the flag, but a symbol? Men live as happy, as content, as free in London, Brussels, Paris, or Berlin. ”

“ Their teachings are to obey the impulse of love with a fanaticism that disregards all bounds and barriers, codes and warnings of the sages. All obstacles, such as duty, modesty, honor, respect for the family and the rights of fellow men, that weave around everyone of us a firm and massy weft, all of them are treated like cobwebs that love tears away and treads upon to gain its end. ”

“ She is ever desirous to fascinate and bewitch him. She feels herself to be a powerful centre of love and attraction around which everything ought to revolve. The woman, says Kant, has from early girlhood the confidence in her ability to please; the youth, the fear to displease. He is, therefore, shy in the presence of women. His desire is to be governed—before marriage—hence the chivalry of youth, while the woman’s desire is to rule. She wants man to surround her with an insatiable desire. She wishes to be loved and yearns to evoke man’s admiration for her by all her womanly qualities. ”

“ The lessons of history teach just the contrary. The artificial breeding of the Spartan warrior led to the sterility of every progress of culture, science, art or commerce, while the chaotic panmixia of Athens did not prevent this town of only thirty thousand inhabitants, two-thirds of them slaves, to become the spiritual centre of Greece and the teacher of untold future generations in art and science. But for Athens and its panmixia, Sparta’s history would have remained unwritten and its people buried in oblivion, like many another nation that is known by name only. ”

“ The sermon of the enmity of the sexes thus destroys not only true love, but the entire conception of the family and serves to blight the brightest and sweetest flowers, springing in the garden of the human heart. No wonder that the girl who has been influenced by such ideas has been made unfit for true love. Her judgment has become confused by overestimating her own worth and valuing the man solely for his capacity to supply the luxuries of life and to satisfy sensual desires. She has little love even for the man of her choice, and is not reluctant to show it on every occasion. ”

“ Nature’s sole solicitation is the race. The supreme law of organic nature is the preservation of the kind. Her sole aim is the perpetuation of the species, hence the abundance of the germ-plasm in plant and animal. Nature takes no chances. She secures the continuance of the kind by the extravagant production of material and the ruthless destruction of all that is superfluous. Nature preserves the individual until it has brought forth its offspring, after the message is delivered, the messenger is discharged. Nature has no regard for the individual. ”

“ The only true index of genuine love lies, therefore, in the sacrifice of one’s own happiness for another’s sake. Pure love is always ready to lose its own life in an effort to save another’s. The sentimental lover is, indeed, not less overjoyed to have his affection returned; but if it is not reciprocated, his love is, unlike sensual love that turns into resentment, none the less affectionate. He never slakes his thirst with the blood of his beloved, even if he is rejected. ”

“ For the last two years she associated these masochistic ideas with the male sex. Previously she only thought of a severe school-mistress or simply a hand. Now she wishes to be the slave of a man she loved. She would kiss his feet, if he would only whip her. She imagines herself lying before the man of her fancy; he puts one foot on her neck, while she kisses the other. In the meantime she revels in the idea of being whipped by him. She takes the blows as so many tokens of love. She fancies him first as being extremely kind and tender and then, in excess of his love, he beats her. ”

“ If life means anything at all, none of man’s expressions of life can be an end in itself. If the only divinity is the god of work, then the triviality of life, whether of the life of the high or of that of the low, of the king or of the beggar, is evident. What profit will accrue to humanity even if it consisted of kings and princes only? If the future of man is only a material well-being, there is no profit in struggling and suffering for an aimless future. ”

“ It has created that diseased imagination, depraved beyond all hope, which can find any prurient gratification in the cold, chaste nakedness of ancient marble. The mere nude arms or legs of a small school girl, the furnishings of a public bath-house, the naked limbs of a Tirolian peasant, or the grandest works of art awaken in them lascivious thoughts. Individuals with such traits are accustomed to interject their own diseased imagination, guilty conscience and obscene sentiments into the purest artistic creations, be they sculptured, painted, written or spoken. ”

“ There is no greater scourge devastating every nation to-day than the two venereal diseases. No other disease has such a murderous influence upon the offspring as syphilis, and no other disease is so destructive to the health and reproductive function of woman as gonorrhoea.
Thus the dangers of venereal diseases beset not only the individual but through the individual the whole race. Both venereal diseases respect no social position and recoil before no virtue. They ramify through every class and rank of society. ”

“ In modern times law and ethics do not know of any double standard of sex-morality. In no civilized country do the laws punish any voluntary sexual misconduct but adultery, and in the latter the prohibition is for men and women alike. Ethics, on the other hand, allows sexual relations in marriage only, and then mostly for the purpose of propagation. Even such a radical as Zola says: “Si l’enfant n’est pas au bout, l’amour n’est qu’une saleté inutile.” But as far as custom is concerned there is no question of the existence of a double standard of sex-morality. ”

“ The exact destiny of the individuals of the future generation is a much higher and worthier end than the extravagant and transient bubbles of the enamored. The beauty or the ugliness of the mate has nothing to do with the gratification itself, so far as it is a sensual pleasure depending upon a pressing necessity of the individual. Yet beauty is a matter of great consideration, because it represents the will of the species. Every lover finds himself deceived after the accomplished great work. For the delusion has vanished by which the individual was deceived by the species. ”

“ Then you have made a long stride forward toward the perfect man. If you do not do it to him he will do it to you. Only the stronger has a right to survive, so that a perfect aristocracy may arise. But while this doctrine of the survival of the strongest was with Nietzsche only a philosophical dream, the prototype of the Superman, which is “Push forward; overcome obstacles; take wherever you can find; grasp and do not let go; live your own life fully, it is all you have; let others look out for themselves,” has always been in existence since time immemorial. ”

“ The young man has further to learn that every union of bodies without the harmony of the souls is humiliating and immoral. That does not mean that the idea should be imparted to our youth that the sexual impulse is something low and bestial, as some moralists would like us to believe. On the contrary, we must teach our youth that a healthy and natural exercise of the human organism is a precious blessing that must not be squandered and recklessly defiled. We must teach the young man that for the future offspring’s sake the monogamic marriage is the only one which the ideal man will resort to. ”

“ The beloved person outside is only the key that understands to unlock the treasure. The key is not able to create the wealth. Whoever is poor and desolate within, for him no key can unlock the treasure of love.
Schopenhauer sees in amorousness an individualized sexual impulse. The growing affection of the two lovers is, in reality, already the will for life of the new individual, which they could and might beget. The species has a prior, nearer and greater claim upon the individual than the frail individuality itself. ”

“ The girl has first to ask her oracle. She plucks the petals of her marguerite, lisping: “He loves me, he loves me not.” The man, more concerned about his own love, wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. The woman, having first to discover the man’s love, will try to conceal her own emotion in the innermost recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings prematurely. The woman is, therefore, a comma, in love affairs, the man a full stop ”

“ But if we look at love in the light of evolution, when we find how cell-division developed into sexuality, conjugation, permanent mating, sensual love and, finally, into sentimental love, there is reason for hope that the still rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the race have been privileged to gather, will some day, when humanity has reached the state of Nietzsche’s Superman, become the universal food of the human race. ”

“ There must be something behind this will to live, something behind this tenacity not only of the individual’s life, but of the life of future generations. If the only end in life are joys that know no bounds, whence comes the emotion that causes men to die for an abstract principle, such as honor, truth, liberty, justice, etc.? Who has implanted in man this spirituality, this will to work for a future he knows not? ”

“ It is especially hard to understand how any medical men could recommend to a young man to resort to illicit relations for health and to jeopardize his own health and that of his future family. If it is justified to recommend illicit relations to a young man, as a cure for masturbation and its resulting neurasthenia, instead of explaining to him that a healthy hygiene and the exercise of his will-power will make easy the control of the desire without any loss of health, then why not recommend the same remedy to young women. Continence is no more injurious to the man than to the woman. ”

“ Joy and sorrow, exultation and depression alternate like dawn and dusk. All the complex subtleties of the feminine heart give rein to a single emotion. She lives in the realm of romance, her soul keeps soaring in the land of glamor. Hence the least disturbance will be fatal to the development of a clear and distinct image of the ideal.
Such disturbances are ever present in our advanced civilization. ”

“ The bosom represents the woman’s language and her poetry, her history and her music, her purity and her longing, her policy and her religion, her worship and her art, her secret and her convention, her character and her pride, her consciousness, her magic mirror and her mystery. The bosom is the central organ of all female ideas, desires and humors. ”

“ All law, custom, and ethics, the three spontaneous regulators of the species378 “man,” are claimed by this philosophy to exist for the sole purpose to plane the road that leads to happiness.
But if this be true, if the value of life be only hedonic, if the sole and only meaning of life is to enjoy and die, then man’s existence is mere vanity. Then the community, nation, race and humanity have no positive value. Civilization is a failure, progress is worthless, and all our virtues are only the aberrations of the spirit. ”

“ They never accost the object of their love and do not even feel the need to approach the divine hearth, whence the spark started that inflamed their hearts. It is a pure immaterial fire that feeds on itself. ”

“ This new ethics is a mixture of self-deception, arrogance, sensuality and irresponsibility. In their works these realists reveal their cold, absolutely surfeited, caring for nothing. They measure a man’s strength not by the power to subdue but by the weakness of being subdued by passion. They preach that there is no merit in self-control, sex-repression, generosity, service, and proclaim that man’s unpardonable sin is that of denying his nature, his greatest crime against life is the rigid repression of the blood. ”