In an essay on “The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life,” Edward Carpenter, though in somewhat Platonic phraseology, thus well states the matter:  “The youth sees the girl; it may be a chance face, a chance outline, amid the most banal surroundings.  But it gives the cue.  There is a memory, a confused reminiscence.  The mortal figure without penetrates to the immortal figure within, and there rises into consciousness a shining form, glorious, not belonging to this world, but vibrating with the agelong life of humanity, and the memory of a thousand love-dreams.  The waking of this vision intoxicates the man; it glows and burns within him; a goddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the sacred place of his temple; a sense of awe-struck splendor fills him, and the world is changed.”  “He sees something” (the same writer continues in a subsequent essay, “Beauty and Duty”) “which, in a sense, is more real than the figures in the street, for he sees something that has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the heart of the race; something which has been one of the great formative influences of his own life, and which has done as much to create those very figures in the street as qualities in the circulation of the blood may do to form a finger or other limb.  He comes into touch with a very real Presence or Power—­one of those organic centers of growth in the life of humanity—­and feels this larger life within himself, subjective, if you like, and yet intensely objective.  And more.  For is it not also evident that the woman, the mortal woman who excites his Vision, has some closest relation to it, and is, indeed, far more than a mere mask or empty formula which reminds him of it?  For she indeed has within her, just as much as the man has, deep subconscious Powers working; and the ideal which has dawned so entrancingly on the man is in all probability closely related to that which has been working most powerfully in the heredity of the woman, and which has most contributed to mold her form and outline.  No wonder, then, that her form should remind him of it.  Indeed, when he looks into her eyes he sees through to a far deeper life even than she herself may be aware of, and yet which is truly hers—­a life perennial and wonderful.  The more than mortal in him beholds the more than mortal in her; and the gods descend to meet.”  (Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation, pp. 137, 186.)

It is this mighty force which lies behind and beneath the aberrations we have been concerned with, a great reservoir from which they draw the life-blood that vivifies even their most fantastic shapes.  Fetichism and the other forms of erotic symbolism are but the development and the isolation of the crystallizations which normally arise on the basis of sexual selection.  Normal in their basis, in their extreme forms they present the utmost pathological aberrations of the sexual instinct which can be attained or conceived.