[175] But, as a matter of fact,
our famous English beauties are not very fair; probably our
handsomest men are not very fair, and the abstract sexual ideals
of both our men and our women thus go out toward the dark.
The formation of a sexual ideal, while it furnishes a predisposition to be
attracted in a certain direction, and undoubtedly has a certain weight in
sexual choice, is not by any means the whole of sexual selection. It is
not even the whole of the psychic element in sexual selection. Let us
take, for instance, the question of stature. There would seem to be a
general tendency for both men and women, apart from and before experience,
to desire sexually large persons of the opposite sex. It may even be that
this is part of a wider zooelogical tendency. In the human species it shows
itself also on the spiritual plane, in the desire for the infinite, in the
deep and unreasoning feeling that it is impossible to have too much of a
good thing. But it not infrequently happens that a man in whose youthful
dreams of love the heroine has always been large, has not been able to
calculate what are the special nervous and other characteristics most
likely to be met in large women, nor how far these correlated
characteristics would suit his own instinctive demands.
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