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

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.