This world-wide, ever-
returning antagonism has filled the world in every age with hermits
and lamas, recluses and teachers, devoted and segregated lives. It
is a perpetual effort to get above the simplicity of barbarism.
Whenever men have emerged from the primitive barbarism of the farm
and the tribe, then straightway there has emerged this conception of
a specialized life a little lifted off the earth; often, for the
sake of freedom, celibate, usually disciplined, sometimes directed,
having a generalized aim, beyond personal successes and bodily
desires. So it is that the philosopher, the scientifically
concentrated man, has appeared, often, I admit, quite ridiculously
at first, setting out upon the long journey that will end only when
the philosopher is king. . . .
"At first I called my Second Limitation, Sex. But from the outset I
meant more than mere sexual desire, lust and lustful imaginings,
more than personal reactions to beauty and spirited living, more
even than what is called love. On the one hand I had in mind many
appetites that are not sexual yet turn to bodily pleasure, and on
the other there are elements of pride arising out of sex and passing
into other regions, all the elements of rivalry for example, that
have strained my first definition to the utmost.
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