LOVE’S SELECTION
In the foregoing chapter it was insisted that love’s freedom in the
procreation of new life must have a downward limit, in that this
freedom can only be allowed to those who have attained the age of
sexual maturity. But it ought also to have an upward limit, since a
great difference in age between father and mother—like the advanced
age of one of them—offers unfavourable conditions for the health,
strength, and upbringing of the children. And as, for reasons given in
the last chapter, the lawful age of marriage for both sexes must be put
at twenty-one, a difference in age of twenty-five years should be the
highest the law ought to allow in one or the other case.
No one who sees the meaning of life in its advance towards higher forms
would dispute nowadays the obvious duty of not transmitting serious
diseases the hereditariness of which is already ascertained by science.
But as this has only been ascertained in a few cases, legal hindrances
as regards the many doubtful cases would be not only a—perhaps
meaningless—interference with the life of the individual, but also an
unfavourable circumstance for continued research in the most important
branch of biology.
What ought to be insisted upon even now is that each party before
marriage should possess full knowledge of its possible dangers,
but that the choice should thereupon be left to their own sense of
responsibility. No one—at least not yet—can ask the individual
to sacrifice his happiness for contested possibilities; but in the
interests of the individual, as of that of the race, we can, on the
other hand, demand that no one shall make his choice in love in
ignorance. And the more the sense of racial community approaches its
renaissance under the influence of evolutionism, the more natural will
all safeguards appear with which that choice may be surrounded to the
advantage of posterity. Even now it is considered quite natural that
a medical examination should precede life insurance. In the future it
may be equally obvious that before marriage the woman should ascertain
from a female doctor and the man from a male doctor whether they are
capable of fulfilling their duty to the race. And it is not only a
question of insuring the new lives, but also of assuring the couple
themselves that they have no organic defects which in some instances
might make marriage impossible, which in others are easily avoidable,
but ignorance regarding which would in each case entail unnecessary
suffering.
In most cases it is the anxiety of one’s self contracting or
transmitting diseases to the other party and to the children that the
physician has to confirm or dispel. It is beyond all question that
healthy selfishness, which desires to preserve its own individuality,
as well as the growing appreciation of a worthy offspring, will
then hinder many an unsuitable marriage. In other cases love might
triumph over these considerations for its own part, the married couple
abstaining, however, from parentage. In those cases, again, where
the law would definitely forbid marriage, this would doubtless be no
hindrance to diseased people having offspring outside wedlock. But
the same is true, of course, of all legal enactments: the best people
do not require them, the worst do not obey them, but through them the
ideas of justice of the majority are cultivated.
Only those who are ignorant of the laws of psychological transformation
doubt the possibility of the simultaneous enhancement of the feeling
of love and the racial sense. Century after century the emotion of
love has been growing, while at the same time men have nevertheless
sacrificed it to religious prejudices, superficial ideas of duty,
tyrannical parental authority, and empty forms. Now, when the sacrifice
is called for on behalf of the highest of possible gains—the conquest
of disease by health, the ennobling of the human body itself—now,
of all times, it is asserted that mankind would be incapable of
this sacrifice—because in the course of time the power of love has
increased.
On the contrary, it is through the greatness of their feeling for
each other that two married people can bear the loss of children,
when—knowing that neither of them thus deprives the race of a
material asset—they enter upon their union with the resolve not to
become parents. Through the same greatness in their love, the party on
whose side the danger lies may gain strength to sacrifice individual
happiness in order that the other may gain a happiness more significant
to himself and to the race with some one else. Such sacrifices occur
even now more frequently than is supposed.
But above all it is the extension of the instinct of love through
the racial sense which will secure the ennobling of the race without
sacrificing individual happiness.
The point of view of racial ennobling found expression even in the
Mosaic marriage law. In ancient Greece also this ennobling was a
conscious factor. But Christianity’s insistence on the importance of
the individual and of humanity weakened the feeling of the individual
for the race, as did likewise the doctrine of souls supplied to the
bodies from heaven and returning thither. It was only through the
enhancement of man’s spiritual force, by the mortification of his
sinful body, that Christianity raised the quality of the race.
The doctrine of hereditary sin was its only—half-rational and
half-irrational—insistence on our connection with our ancestors. Since
Christianity regarded the human species as once for all determined
by God—though bungled by Adam—restoration, not new creation, was,
as already stated, its fundamental idea. In the very conditions of
the renewal of life Christianity saw the root and origin of sin in
the world. This way of viewing things must be entirely overcome; and
fortunately the church has of necessity lost—and will continue to
lose—in every conflict with love. But in this way the advance takes
place by a turning-aside from the direct line of development: the
enhancement of the race. At the present time many symptoms show that
love and the racial sense are beginning to approach one another.
Whenever abstract, logical thought confronts real life with a problem
that admits of only two solutions, the latter asserts its proud
determination not to allow itself to be confined within definitions or
ruled by deductions. Life is movement, movement implies variability,
transformation, in other words, development in an upward or downward
direction. Never will the upward curve assume a more pronounced
elevation than when the desire of procreation has reached the point at
which it is directed by the selection of personal love, this selection
again being directed by a clear-sighted instinct tending to the
ennobling of the race.
That the choice of personal love at present appears often either to
lack or to oppose this instinct, is no proof that it will always lack
or oppose it. Love’s selection has already in certain cases—such
as those of near blood-relations, different races, and certain
diseases—become an instinct, since law and custom have influenced
selection sufficiently long for this to have influenced feeling and
instinct. At the present time brother and sister—since they are
aware of their relationship—seldom have to suppress a mutual erotic
feeling, as such a thing does not arise. No prohibition, but only all
the impulses of her blood, hinder the American woman from marrying a
negro or a Chinese. The woman who is known to have epilepsy is excluded
from marriage less by the law, in this case easily circumvented, than
by the fact that no man wants her as his wife. On the other hand, it is
known that under conditions favourable to the cultivation of the beauty
and strength of the human body, this has in a great degree influenced
the erotic selection of either sex—so far as they otherwise possessed
freedom of choice. The law of inheritance, which makes it easy for
the degenerate to contract marriage, and women’s need of maintenance
have, on the other hand, falsified the instinct of the latter in this
direction. The prevailing customs and ideas of morality have as a rule
deprived future mothers of their full freedom of choice and thus to a
great extent neutralised the importance of womanly love’s selection
for the spiritual and bodily improvement of the race. To this must be
added that the Christian doctrine of fraternity, the eighteenth-century
doctrine of equality, the transference of economical power to the
third estate—in a word, the whole democratisation of society—have
broken down the laws and customs which prevented the mixing of blood
between different classes and races. This has certainly favoured the
selection of personal love, but at the same time, to a greater extent
than formerly, it has favoured a selection governed by pecuniary
considerations. In the marriages which were formerly a matter of family
arrangement, many other advantages, besides those of money, were taken
into consideration. But in this case also, as in that of the marriage
of near relations, it was less and less a clear-sighted solicitude
to preserve noble blood, more and more an empty pride of birth, a
narrow race-prejudice, that raised obstacles to marriage. It was thus
necessary for love’s selection to conquer these obstructions, which
in addition, even from the point of view of racial enhancement, were
often of doubtful value. But all the more must we deplore the influence
of money in determining matrimonial selection, above all when this
influence makes itself felt at the cost of the inclination which love
shows, in spite of everything, of making its choice by preference among
equals; an inclination which—besides other easily explicable causes—
may also imply an instinct developed in the course of generations,
tending to the preservation of the best peculiarities in a class or a
race.
Since Christianity and the civilisation influenced by it
modestly veiled the natural mission of love and obscured it by
transcendentalism, mankind began to be ashamed even of self-examination
or self-confession in this relation. We ought again to pay attention
to family history, though not to such as used to be recorded in old
family Bibles, with the dates of birth, marriage, and death, but such
a history as should include the circumstances which determined birth
and death. We must resume the casting of horoscopes, but not so much
according to the signs in the heavens—although perhaps these will
regain something of their former importance—as according to those
on earth; and not only from the signs at birth but from those long
previous to it. Just as alchemy became chemistry and astrology led to
astronomy, it is possible that such a reading of signs might prepare
the way for what we may call—while waiting for a word of more extended
meaning than Galton’s eugenics or Haeckel’s ontogony—erotoplastics:
the doctrine of love as a consciously formative art, instead of a blind
instinct of procreation. It would be of infinitely greater significance
for humanity if the majority of the women, who now translate their
experiences into half-candid and wholly inartistic fiction, were to
write down for the benefit of science entirely true family chronicles
and perfectly frank confessions.
It is certain even now that the customs and ways of thought, the
artistic and emotional tendencies, which make up the atmosphere of
love, unconsciously operate upon its selection to the advantage of the
race. This also involves the possibility of such influence becoming
conscious, when once it is clearly seen in what direction it ought to
go, which are the spiritual and bodily properties that it is desired
to eradicate or to enhance, and by what means the properties of the
new generation may depend upon the choice of parents. But above all,
racial considerations will operate indirectly in the same direction,
so that love will be less and less likely to arise under conditions
unfavourable to the race. Man is not inwardly a logical creature: _les
entrailles ne raisonnent pas, elles ne sont pas faites pour ça_ (George
Sand). But by degrees our nature becomes unconsciously transformed
through reciprocal influences: the body together with the soul, the
soul together with the body; the desires through the thoughts, the
thoughts through the desires. It is true that love’s selection will
always remain a mystery—from this among many other causes, equally
or more important. But the individual and universal qualities which
in the main act as an attraction will gradually be more clearly
perceived, more sought after by both sexes, and will have more weight
in determining their choice.
We have already seen that a displacement of motives, a division of
motive power, has during a certain period altered the character of
love. Thus, as pointed out above, the influence of the spirit of
the age was able during the age of chivalry, and again during the
eighteenth century, to separate love both from marriage and from the
mission of the race. By the same psychic process a new spirit of
the age—full of the aspirations of evolution and determined by the
religion of life—may restore this connection and make it closer than
ever before. Then will mankind look for a new Blake to glorify the
feeling of devotion which fills hearts and souls at the coinciding
selection of personal love and of the racial sense, a coincidence which
alone gives the certainty that
I am for you, and you are for me,
Not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes,
Envelop’d in you deep greater heroes and bards,
They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.[3]
Religion, poetry, art, and social custom have collaborated to elevate
the racial feeling into love. They ought now to collaborate again to
make the racial feeling conscious in love. The altars that the ancients
raised to the divinities of procreation must be rebuilt. Not for men
and women to assemble around them in frenzied orgies, in the red
glow of sunset, but in the golden light of the morning and the joy of
creative day.
Family feeling, ancestor-worship, pride of pure blood will regain, in a
new sense, their decisive power over emotions and actions.
Thus will love’s freedom be limited—but not through idealistic
philosophy’s abstract conceptions of citizenship and duty, nor yet
through the hard-and-fast breeding rules of a Spartan evolutionism.
_Freedom for love’s selection, under conditions favourable to the race;
limitation of the freedom, not of love, but of procreation, when the
conditions are unfavourable to the race_—this is the line of life.
Love, like every other emotion, has its ebb and flow. Thus, even in the
greatest souls, it is not always at the same height. But the greater
the soul that the wave of erotic emotion inundates, the more surely
does this wave quiver at its highest with the longing of eternity. The
child is the only true answer to this longing.
This does not mean that lovers in the moments of rapture divide their
consciousness between the present and the future, between their own
bliss and the possible child. The life of the soul does not work
so awkwardly as this. But the conscious conditions of the soul are
determined by emotions—reduced for the moment to unconsciousness;
and motives, which are forgotten in the hour of fulfilment, have not
therefore been less decisive. The athlete in the moment of victory
does not remember the training which preceded his race, but it was
nevertheless that which decided the fate of that moment. The artist in
the hour of creation does not remember the toil of his student years,
but that nevertheless determines the perfection of his creation. The
will to ennoble the race need not be conscious in a pair of lovers,
who in each other forget time and existence, but without the emotions,
which, consciously or unconsciously, have been influenced by that will,
they would not be united in an ecstasy of the soul and the senses.
Young men are becoming increasingly conscious that the thought of the
child influenced them in their choice of love; women are increasingly
aware that never was their longing for a child stronger than in the
embrace of the man to whom they have been attracted by a great love.
More and more often do mothers search the features and souls of their
children for evidence of their love. More and more often does one hear
the unmarried woman confess the hungry longing for motherhood, which a
few decades ago she concealed as a shame.
Every awakened soul perceives that the consciousness of the time
comprehends the mission of the race with a new intensity, although
centuries must pass before it can be proved what influence love’s free
selection has had upon the production of beings above the present
standard of humanity.
Even from believers in the religion of life warnings are still heard
against the love which is a matter of personal choice, which excludes
all else, and which dissolves all former ties. Evolutionists thus admit
that this emotion certainly produces in the individual the highest
possible development of force, the fullest richness of life, and that
this indirectly and in many ways is to the good of the whole. But
at the same time they assert that love itself often consumes these
enhanced powers; that it ought therefore only to occupy a brief period
of human life and should not be allowed any decisive importance in
shaping the course of life, since this would be to the detriment of
the new generation. Their special objection to love is, that just
as monastic life and the celibacy of the clergy during the Middle
Ages and down to the present day have deprived the race of excellent
qualities—since the most gifted often choose the calm of the cloister
or the call of the priesthood—so now many of the best men and women
are kept from marriage by the dream or by the loss of a great love’s
happiness.
Finally, from the point of view of evolutionary ethics, not only
the desire of great love, excluding all else, but monogamy itself
has been attacked. This purely scientific line of thought has at
present no conscious part in the utterances of what is called the “new
immorality,” all the less as the scientific reasoning lays stress upon
the point that _if_ mankind is to abandon monogamy, which has possessed
such enormous advantages, then this must be done with a conscious
purpose, to further the development of the whole race, not the passions
of individuals.
But if this evolutionistic reasoning be conceded, then it will result
in a transformation of society’s view of love’s freedom of choice,
both in the direction of extension and of limitation. Much of what is
now called the “new immorality” may then appear as the unconscious
self-protection of the race against a degeneration forced upon it by
the customs and arrangements of society.
Against the future claims of evolutionism, however, the conviction
asserts itself that personal love, the great creation of culture,
will not disappear; and thereby the danger of polygamy is removed. It
must therefore continue to be love’s selection which will occasion
the ethical “adulteries” just alluded to, but it will be a love
determined by the point of view of the ennobling of the race. At
present the claims of evolution in this respect have scarcely begun
to be perceived, still less have they succeeded in exercising a
transforming influence on moral opinion, which will perhaps one day
apply in this connection Plato’s saying: that what is useful is fit,
and what is hurtful is shameful. Where good reasons exist for not
outwardly dissolving the marriage, the right may perhaps be admitted
which even now a man or woman has here and there appropriated: that of
becoming a father by another woman, or a mother by another man, since
they themselves have a passionate longing for a child and are eminently
suited for parentage, but have been deprived of its joys because the
wife or husband has been wanting in these possibilities.
Even now people begin to perceive the psychological justification of
the oft-repeated experience that a man—sometimes also a woman—can
at the same time and in a different way love more than one, since
the great love, the love which is one and indivisible and pervades
their whole being for ever, has not been given to them. Even now such
conflicts are solved in a new way—there are examples of it known
throughout Europe—not as Luther solved it for Philip of Hesse, who
kept the wife that had just borne him a ninth child, while secretly
wedding a new one, but as Goethe first intended to bring about the
solution in _Stella_: that the wife, without any open rupture, should
step aside; that the devotion, the tenderness of memories, which united
her and her husband, should still render possible their meeting now and
then as friends, in a common care for their children, although the
husband had contracted a new matrimonial relation to another woman.
From the children’s point of view such a solution may come to be looked
upon in the future as more desirable—and more worthy of respect—than
it seems now.
The new sexual morality—where the light, as in Correggio’s _Night_,
will radiate from the child—may, however, continue to uphold single
love as the ideal for the highest happiness and development both of the
lovers and of the children. It has already been contended that this is
the direction in which the evolution of love is moving. But we must
likewise admit—and always for the well-being of the race as well as
of the individual—that love may take lower as well as higher forms
without our being obliged to regard the former as immoral. When the
point of view of the ennobling of the race has penetrated the ethical
ideas of mankind, the following may be described as immoral, with a
force at present unsuspected:
_All parentage without love;_
_All irresponsible parentage;_
_All parentage of immature or degenerate persons;_
_All voluntary sterility of married people fitted for the mission of the
race_; and finally
_All such manifestations of sexual life as involve violence or
seduction, and entail unwillingness or incapacity to fulfil the mission
of the race._
But, on the other hand, society will admit, with a freedom wholly
different from that now existing, the union of people, not only in
their best years, but also in their best feelings; it will perceive the
present hindrances to be an injustice which falls not only upon the
individuals but upon society itself—since connubial unhappiness not
only interferes with the highest development of many people’s powers
for the good of all, but it also deprives society of the children to
whom life might have been given by a new happiness.
It is through its view of the social importance of love’s selection
that the new morality will be a transforming force.
That a pioneer of reform who puts his ideas into practice may be a
dangerous example is certain. It is possible to be fully convinced
of the future of, for instance, the art of flying, without therefore
denying the dangers of experiment or encouraging people to jump off
church-towers with nothing but a pair of goose-wings on their shoulders.
No thorough reshaping of emotions and customs takes place according to
dogmas and programmes; this one least of all. But no other motive power
exists which will finally induce all—the small and the great, the
weak and the strong— to follow the line of development, except the
increased freedom of choice of personal love, with a correspondingly
increased certainty as regards the influence of that choice upon the
welfare of the race. For unless love continued to be the condition of
morality, the cause of selection, the new humanity would gradually
lose advantages already gained. Neither the “breeding institute” nor
“freedom of pairing” is capable of enhancing the spiritual and bodily
resources of mankind in a universal, permanent, and organic way. Love
alone can do this.
It is true that it has yet to be proved that love—other conditions
being equal—produces the best children. But this will one day be
proved.
This knowledge is for the present only intuition. But so are all
truths in the beginning. Moreover, possibilities of indirect proof
are not wanting even now. First and foremost this, that love has not
its origin in human life, and is not a product of civilisation, but
shows itself already in the animal world. Among animals it is capable
of resulting in death from sorrow at the loss of a mate, as also in
other emotional phenomena of human life. It may even lead to monogamy,
although with animals as with human beings monogamy is neither a
necessary result of love nor an indispensable condition of development.
For many of the higher species of animals are polygamous, while others,
below them in the scale, are monogamous. If love did not involve any
great advantage, it might doubtless have arisen, but would not have
persisted, in the face of the hindrances which its personal selection
appears to put in the way of the maintenance of the race. Mankind has
thus already brought the emotion of love from its primitive animal stem
and grafted it upon the tree of civilisation. It has gradually been
ennobled and exalted into one of the highest powers of human life. And
how would this growing importance of love be possible, if it enhanced
only the happiness of the individual, and not also the life of the race?
The evolution of human love has shown itself partly in an increasingly
definite individualisation in selection, partly in a more complete
admission and enhancement of individual qualities.
In other words: personal characteristics have tended more and more
to inspire love, and love has more and more developed personal
characteristics. This again—as already admitted—has resulted in
more and more individuals failing to perform their duty to the race,
either because their feeling, although reciprocated, could not lead
to marriage, or because the feeling in some respect or other has been
disappointed. This passionate selection of a single one among the
many by whom—from an objective point of view—the duty to the race
might equally well have been performed, has thus in a sense become
anti-social.
But such lives, wasted as they are from the immediate point of view
of the ennobling of the race, have yet been able to serve the same end
indirectly. Many of these persons, childless in an ordinary sense, have
left immortal offspring. Others have shed upon the battle-field, in
winning victories for humanity, the blood which they never saw flowing
in the fine network of veins on a child’s temples. By the greatness of
their own ideals they have enlarged the hearts of their fellow-men; and
their courage has not had to sink before the possibility of their own
failure to realise their ideals being cast in their teeth. They have
bought their prophetic power at the highest possible price: that of
never having had a happiness to lose; and they bear without bitterness
the poverty which has made them richer in faith.
That many lives—and worthy lives—are wasted through love is only one
manifestation of life’s impenetrable tendency to universal prodigality.
It is one with the great necessity, whose hand smites and wounds us so
long as we curse it, but caresses and supports as soon as we bless it.
We must not look at the victims—even if we ourselves are among
them—if we would see the meaning of life in life itself. We must fix
our eyes upwards. And then it is certain—since love continually and in
spite of all is extending its power—that individual love, with all its
victims and all its mistakes, nevertheless in the long run assists the
elevation of the race.
The great Western prophet of pessimism argued that love was nothing but
a task imposed in this fashion upon the individual by _der Genius der
Gattung_; that only contradictions attract one another and that the
offspring inherits the complementary qualities that each has sought in
the other. These contradictions—through the hostility of which the
parents afterwards make each other unhappy—coalesce and neutralise
each other in the child, so that the latter, at the expense of its
parents, becomes a well-equipped, rich, or harmonious personality.
Carried to an extreme, this saying of Schopenhauer’s, like many other
such pregnant thoughts, becomes an absurdity. But every one who has
observed love must have found—long before he knows, or without ever
knowing, that this experience is exalted into pessimism—that all
powerful love arises between opposed natures. The harmony that results
from similarity is monotonous, poor, and moreover dangerous to the
development of the individual, as well as that of the race. But what is
contrary is certainly not always conflicting, although it may prove so
if the contrariness extends to views of life and its purpose, its value
and conduct. Conflicting natures are—in spite of Schopenhauer—not
unfrequently equally unfavourable for the child’s disposition and for
its bringing-up, and the will of the race often fails of its purpose
through their very compulsion to unite in a love which is soon turned
to hatred. Again, contrary natures often become conflicting, owing to
their turning the wrong side of their qualities to each other after
marriage, while in the early period of love they had shown each other
the right side of these qualities. That such a marriage is unhappy is
no evidence against love’s selection, but a great one for mankind’s
lack of culture for marriage. That every sympathetic dissimilarity
between persons has a limit, the overstepping of which leads further
and further towards antipathetic dissimilarities, is a psychological
lesson which is deeply inculcated by marriage.
The more, however, the art of living is developed, the more will human
beings be able to minimise their own loss of happiness through this
selection of love to the advantage of the race; for married people will
come more and more to delight in and preserve each other’s differences;
to restrain the antipathetic contradictions in themselves; to make
more conscious use of the sympathetic dissimilarities in the other
for the completion of their own one-sidedness; to cease from the
endeavour, so hostile to happiness, of reforming the other according
to their own nature. Even now, moreover, the need of sympathy in
love is so awakened, so sensitive, that the blind passion aroused
by external contradictions is less and less able to overmaster it.
The need of sympathy is now quickly warned when it encounters the
irreconcilable contradictions which show that each is on a different
plane of existence; that each belongs to a different psychological
period or continent or race. This perception even now checks the
development of love in many cases, where the contradiction really is a
conflicting incompatibility, and not the elective affinity determined
by nature into which enter both primary dissimilarities and secondary
similarities. The latter results in the lovers’ contradictions
forming a rich harmony, both in their own life together and in the
personalities of their children. When this attraction of contradictions
has once missed its mark, one still often sees that it is one and the
same type that a person will love a second or third time, or even
oftener, with a persistence of selection which makes it true in a way
that the object of love has all the time been the same woman or man.
The relentless force of nature’s uniting will shows itself not only
in the way love brings together contradictions in marriage, but also
in the rupture of marriage. A good wife, married to a good husband,
loving and loved, is thus seized by a passion, incomprehensible to
herself, for another man. Without reflection she gives herself up
to her passion, to return again to the husband she has not ceased
to love, but who never inspired in her the overmastering emotion
whose purpose—according to the will of nature and of the woman
herself—ought to have been a child. The same will of nature manifests
itself in a number of phenomena, incomprehensible to others. An
intellectual man or woman is seized by a passion for a person far
inferior. How often has not a “good-looking fellow” vanquished the
most high-souled man in the affections of such a woman; how often
have not thoughtless beauty and empty gaiety won from a superior man
what the personality of an exceptional woman could not secure! The
whole secret was nature’s will to counterbalance cerebral and nervous
genius by healthy, sensuous strength, to the advantage of the race.
As sexual love has its origin in the fact that the sexual characters,
which biologically are favourable to the race, are the most attractive,
this general attraction constantly operates side by side with the
individual; and it operates most strongly precisely in that kind of
love which is rightly called “blind passion,” the kind which thus
brings together to their misfortune conflicting contradictions.
But there is no reason to doubt that love’s selection in this case
will be able to retain its instinctive sureness, although love is
continually widening its instincts of psychical sympathy also. The
consequence of this is that the number of contradictions which may
attract will become less, but on the other hand the fewer possibilities
will be more finely adapted; that the selection among contradictions
will thus become more and more difficult but at the same time more
and more valuable. Love’s selection now not infrequently has for
its result that, of two contradictions, irresistibly united by the
affinity of souls, one or both does not offer the best physical
conditions for children. But to make up for this the selection may
turn out excellently for the enhancement of a particular disposition,
the formation of a harmonious temperament, or the fostering of a great
spiritual quality. It is not only by avoirdupois and yard-measure that
the advance of the race must be tested.
Such a race-enhancing selection may, for example, take place through
the tendency of young women of the present day to feel or retain love
less and less for a man who is erotically divided, while, on the other
hand, the men who have preserved unity in their love have more and
more prospect of being attractive to women. Thus, generation after
generation, erotic unity may become more and more natural with men, as
in the same way it has become so with women. Man’s desire for woman’s
purity has determined his choice, and this choice has then through
heredity further advanced the feelings of the next generation, until
these have become the strongest in his erotic instincts. The clearest
consciousness of the injustice of the different moral demands on man
and woman; the most “liberal” view of woman’s right to the same freedom
as man, are in this case unable to vanquish his instincts. When a man
learns that the woman he loves has given herself to another before
him, or that he shares her with another, his feeling often becomes
diseased at its root: the will of sole possession that has grown up in
him through the love-selection of thousands of years, and has now been
further heightened by the desire for unity of individual love.
These indications may be enough to show the superficiality of the
conclusions about love’s selection which are confined exclusively to
physical improvement, although naturally this also is of great value.
But that a pair of lovers can have a feeble-bodied child ought in
itself to be no more used as evidence against love’s selection than
would be the physically excellent children of an unhappy couple.
Even if the erotic attraction of dissimilarities is thus the strongest
proof of the probability of love’s influence from the point of view of
the enhancement of the race, it is nevertheless far from being the only
one. Another is the astonishing excess of first-born or only children
among distinguished personalities in different departments. A third
is the proverbial ability of so-called “love-children.” A fourth,
the result, often favourable to the disposition of the children, of
marriages between people of different nationalities. In the first two
cases we may suppose that the parents’ happiness in love—or at least
their sensual passion—was at the height of its freshness and strength
at the conception of the child. In the case of “love-children” it
is not unfrequently a healthy woman of the people who with genuine
devotion encounters the sensual desire of a man intellectually her
superior. In the last case, again, it is usually a powerful love which
has conquered the obstructions raised by patriotism and traditions
against the attraction by means of which the national contradictions
are to be blended in the child into a happy unity.
Observation in this connection is misled by innumerable side
influences, counteractions, and contradictions as yet unsolved. So
long as any wreck of humanity is allowed by “the right of love” to
reproduce the species, the lines of conclusion in this subject will
continue to intersect one another in all directions. _Not until cases
arise where the conditions are comparable in every other respect, shall
we begin to approach an objective demonstration in the question of
children’s decreasing physico-psychical vitality when they are born
in unwillingness or indifference, and, on the other hand, of their
increasing vitality when they are born in love._ And it is not in the
tender years of childhood, but when they have lived their life, that
the question can first be finally answered.
That the development of children’s inherited dispositions, their
childhood’s happiness, and the future tenor of their life are
determined to a great extent by their being brought up in a home bright
with happiness, by parents who co-operate in sympathetic understanding,
this need not be dwelt upon. Everyone knows how children from such
homes have received the gift of a faith in life and a feeling of
security, a courage and a joy in life which no subsequent sufferings
can wholly destroy. They have laid up enough warmth of sunshine to
prevent their being frozen through even in the most severe winter.
Those, on the other hand, who began with winter, sometimes freeze even
under the summer sun.
It is no more true with regard to love’s selection than in any
other respect that passion is opposed to duty otherwise than in the
intermediary stage of development. In the state of innocence there is
no division, since no other duty exists but blindly to follow instinct.
When development is completed and “the second innocence” attained, duty
will be abolished, since it will have become one with instinct.
It will then be seen that they were wrong who now think that—while God
walked in Paradise and founded marriage—the devil went about in the
wilderness and instituted love. Dualism will be vanquished by monism
when the circular course of development has brought the starting-point
near to the goal; when the natural instinct of the race meets the will
to ennoble the race, born of culture; when the golden ring from either
side encircles the gem with the sacred sign of life: the child. But
the treasure which is now regarded as the most precious, monogamy,
is perhaps destined not to be encircled by the golden ring until
after many new spiral turns. _It will be so when love’s selection has
finally made every man and woman well fitted to reproduce the race._
Not till then can the desired ideal—one man for one woman, one woman
for one man—universally include the best vital conditions, for the
individual and for the race. And when we have come so far, the will of
erotic choice may also be so delicately and firmly entwined with every
fibre of the personality’s physico-psychical material, that a man will
only be able to find, win, and keep a single woman, a woman a single
man. Then it may be that many human beings will experience through
love’s selection what is even now the fortune of a few: the highest
enhancement of their individual personality, their highest form of life
as members of the race, and their highest perception of eternal life.