6.—“_The ecstasy of earnest souls_ ...”
“Without recognising the possibilities of individual and of racial
evolution, we are shut up to the conventional view that the poet and his
heroine alike are exceptional creations, hopelessly beyond the everyday
average of the race. Whereas, admitting the theory of evolution, we are
not only entitled to the hope, but logically compelled to the assurance
that these rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of
love, which only the forerunners of the race have been privileged to
gather, or, it may be, to see from distant heights, are yet the
realities of a daily life towards which we and ours may journey.”—Geddes
and Thomson (“Evolution of Sex,” p. 267).
_Id._... “What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated
faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists
that best kind of equality, similarity of powers, and capacities with
reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the pleasure of
looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of
leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt
to describe. To those who can conceive it there is no need; to those who
cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with
the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of
marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour
any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations
connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they
may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral
regeneration of mankind will only really commence when the most
fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal
justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest
sympathy with an equal in rights and cultivation.”—J. S. Mill (“The
Subjection of Women,” p. 177).