The individual
factor, as we saw, is but one of many factors which constitute beauty. In
the study of sexual selection that individual factor was passed over very
lightly. We now see that it is often a factor of great importance, for in
it are rooted all these outgrowths--normal in their germs, highly abnormal
in their more extreme developments--which make up erotic symbolism.
Erotic symbolism is therefore concerned with all that is least generic,
least specific, all that is most intimately personal and individual, in
sexual selection. It is the final point in which the decreasing circle of
sexual attractiveness is fixed. In the widest and most abstract form
sexual selection in man is merely human, and we are attracted to that
which bears most fully the marks of humanity; in a less abstract form it
is sexual, and we are attracted to that which most vigorously presents the
secondary sexual characteristics; still narrowing, it is the type of our
own nation and people that appeals most strongly to us in matters of love;
and still further concentrating we are affected by the ideal--in
civilization most often the somewhat exotic ideal--of our own day, the
fashion of our own city. But the individual factor still remains, and amid
the infinite possibilities of erotic symbolism the individual may evolve
an ideal which is often, as far as he knows and perhaps in actuality, an
absolutely unique event in the history of the human soul.
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