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A sound instinct made Freud keep the term “sublimation,” with its age-old religious and poetical connotations. Sublimation is the use made of bodily energy by a soul which sets itself apart from the body; it is a “lifting up of the soul or its Faculties above Matter” (Swift's definition of religious enthusiasm). 1 “Writing poetry,” says Spender, “is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the balance of body and mind.” 2 “Mathematics,” says Bertrand Russell, “rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without any appeal to our weaker nature… The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.” 3 And, like the doctrine of a soul distinct from the body, sublimation, as an attempt to be more than man, aims at immortality. “I shall not altogether die,” says Horace: “my sublimations will exalt me to the stars (sublimi feriam sidera vertice).”
Sublimation thus rests upon mind-body dualism, not as a philosophical doctrine but as a psychic fact implicit in the behavior of sublimators, no matter what their conscious philosophy may be. Hence Plato remains the truest philosopher, since he defined philosophy as sublimation and correctly articulated as its goal the elevation of Spirit