Nowadays physicians have fully confirmed the belief of Sanchez. It is well recognized that women in whom, from whatever cause, acute sexual excitement occurs with frequency without being followed by the due natural relief of orgasm are liable to various nervous and congestive symptoms which diminish their vital effectiveness, and very possibly lead to a breakdown in health. Kisch has described, as a cardiac neurosis of sexual origin, a pathological tachycardia which is an exaggeration of the physiological quick heart of sexual excitement. J. Inglis Parsons (British Medical Journal, Oct. 22, 1904, p. 1062) refers to the ovarian pain produced by strong unsatisfied sexual excitement, often in vigorous unmarried women, and sometimes a cause of great distress. An experienced Austrian gynaecologist told Hirth (Wege zur Heimat, p. 613) that of every hundred women who come to him with uterine troubles seventy suffered from congestion of the womb, which he regarded as due to incomplete coitus.

It is frequently stated that the evil of incomplete gratification and absence of orgasm in women is chiefly due to male withdrawal, that is to say coitus interruptus, in which the penis is hastily withdrawn as soon as involuntary ejaculation is impending; and it is sometimes said that the same widely prevalent practice is also productive of slight or serious results in the male (see, e.g., L.B. Bangs, Transactions New York Academy of Medicine, vol. ix, 1893; D.S. Booth, "Coitus Interruptus and Coitus Reservatus as Causes of Profound Neurosis and Psychosis," Alienist and Neurologist, Nov., 1906; also, Alienist and Neurologist, Oct., 1897, p. 588).

It is undoubtedly true that coitus interruptus, since it involves sudden withdrawal on the part of the man without reference to the stage of sexual excitation which his partner may have reached, cannot fail to produce frequently an injurious nervous effect on the woman, though the injurious effect on the man, who obtains ejaculation, is little or none. But the practice is so widespread that it cannot be regarded as necessarily involving this evil result. There can, I am assured, be no doubt whatever that Blumreich is justified in his statement (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, p. 783) that "interrupted coitus is injurious to the genital system of those women only who are disturbed in their sensation of delight by this form of cohabitation, in whom the orgasm is not produced, and who continue for hours subsequently to be tormented by feelings of an unsatisfied desire." Equally injurious effects follow in normal coitus when the man's orgasm occurs too soon. "These phenomena, therefore," he concludes, "are not characteristic of interrupted coitus, but consequences of an imperfectly concluded sexual cohabitation as such." Kisch, likewise, in his elaborate and authoritative work on The Sexual Life of Woman, also states that the question of the evil results of coitus interruptus in women is simply a question of whether or not they receive sexual satisfaction. (Cf. also Fuerbringer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, pp. 232 et seq.) This is clearly the most reasonable view to take concerning what is the simplest, the most widespread, and certainly the most ancient of the methods of preventing conception. In the Book of Genesis we find it practiced by Onan, and to come down to modern times, in the sixteenth century it seems to have been familiar to French ladies, who, according to Brantome, enjoined it on their lovers.

Coitus reservatus,—in which intercourse is maintained even for very long periods, during which the woman may have orgasm several times while the man succeeds in holding back orgasm,—so far from being injurious to the woman, is probably the form of coitus which gives her the maximum of gratification and relief. For most men, however, it seems probable that this self-control over the processes leading to the involuntary act of detumescence is difficult to acquire, while in weak, nervous, and erethic persons it is impossible. It is, however, a desirable condition for completely adequate coitus, and in the East this is fully recognized, and the aptitude carefully cultivated. Thus W.D. Sutherland states ("Einiges ueber das Alltagsleben und die Volksmedizin unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," Muenchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, No. 12, 1906) that the Hindu smokes and talks during intercourse in order to delay orgasm, and sometimes applies an opium paste to the glans of the penis for the same purpose. (See also vol. iii of these Studies, "The Sexual Impulse in Women.") Some authorities have, indeed, stated that the prolongation of the act of coitus is injurious in its effect on the male. Thus R.W. Taylor (Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders, third ed., p. 121) states that it tends to cause atonic impotence, and Loewenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, p. 74) thinks that the swift and unimpeded culmination of the sexual act is necessary in order to preserve the vigor of the reflex reactions. This is probably true of extreme and often repeated cases of indefinite prolongation of pronounced erection without detumescence, but it is not true within fairly wide limits in the case of healthy persons. Prolonged coitus reservatus was a practice of the complex marriage system of the Oneida community, and I was assured by the late Noyes Miller, who had spent the greater part of his life in the community, that the practice had no sort of evil result. Coitus reservatus was erected into a principle in the Oneida community. Every man in the community was theoretically the husband of every woman, but every man was not free to have children with every woman. Sexual initiation took place soon after puberty in the case of boys, some years later in the case of girls, by a much older person of the opposite sex. In intercourse the male inserted his penis into the vagina and retained it there for even an hour without emission, though orgasm took place in the woman. There was usually no emission in the case of the man, even after withdrawal, and he felt no need of emission. The social feeling of the community was a force on the side of this practice, the careless, unskilful men being avoided by women, while the general romantic sentiment of affection for all the women in the community was also a force. Masturbation was unknown, and no irregular relations took place with persons outside the community. The practice was maintained for thirty years, and was finally abandoned, not on its demerits, but in deference to the opinions of the outside world. Mr. Miller admitted that the practice became more difficult in ordinary marriage, which favors a more mechanical habit of intercourse. The information received from Mr. Miller is supplemented in a pamphlet entitled Male Continence (the name given to coitus reservatus in the community), written in 1872 by the founder, John Humphrey Noyes. The practice is based, he says, on the fact that sexual intercourse consists of two acts, a social and a propagative, and that if propagation is to be scientific there must be no confusion of these two acts, and procreation must never be involuntary. It was in 1844, he states, that this idea occurred to him as a result of a resolve to abstain from sexual intercourse in consequence of his wife's delicate health and inability to bear healthy children, and in his own case he found the practice "a great deliverance. It made a happy household." He points out that the chief members of the Oneida community "belonged to the most respectable families in Vermont, had been educated in the best schools of New England morality and refinement, and were, by the ordinary standards, irreproachable in their conduct so far as sexual matters are concerned, till they deliberately commenced, in 1846, the experiment of a new state of society, on principles which they had been long maturing and were prepared to defend before the World." In relation to male continence, therefore, Noyes thought the community might fairly be considered "the Committee of Providence to test its value in actual life." He states that a careful medical comparison of the statistics of the community had shown that the rate of nervous disease in the community was considerably below the average outside, and that only two cases of nervous disorder had occurred which could be traced with any probability to a misuse of male continence. This has been confirmed by Van de Warker, who studied forty-two women of the community without finding any undue prevalence of reproductive diseases, nor could he find any diseased condition attributable to the sexual habits of the community (cf. C. Reed, Text-Book of Gynecology, 1901, p. 9).

Noyes believed that "male continence" had never previously been a definitely recognized practice based on theory, though there might have been occasional approximation to it. This is probably true if the coitus is reservatus in the full sense, with complete absence of emission. Prolonged coitus, however, permitting the woman to have orgasm more than once, while the man has none, has long been recognized. Thus in the seventeenth century Zacchia discussed whether such a practice is legitimate (Zacchiae Quaestionum Opus, ed. of 1688, lib. vii, tit. iii, quaest. VI). In modern times it is occasionally practiced, without any theory, and is always appreciated by the woman, while it appears to have no bad effect on the man. In such a case it will happen that the act of coitus may last for an hour and a quarter or even longer, the maximum of the woman's pleasure not being reached until three-quarters of an hour have passed; during this period the woman will experience orgasm some four or five times, the man only at the end. It may occasionally happen that a little later the woman again experiences desire, and intercourse begins afresh in the same way. But after that she is satisfied, and there is no recurrence of desire.

It may be desirable at this point to refer briefly to the chief variations in the method of effecting coitus in their relationship to the art of love and the attainment of adequate and satisfying detumescence.

The primary and essential characteristic of the specifically human method of coitus is the fact that it takes place face to face. The fact that in what is usually considered the typically normal method of coitus the woman lies supine and the man above her is secondary. Psychically, this front-to-front attitude represents a great advance over the quadrupedal method. The two partners reveal to each other the most important, the most beautiful, the most expressive sides of themselves, and thus multiply the mutual pleasure and harmony of the intimate act of union. Moreover, this face-to-face attitude possesses a great significance, in the fact that it is the outward sign that the human couple has outgrown the animal sexual attitude of the hunter seizing his prey in the act of flight, and content to enjoy it in that attitude, from behind. The human male may be said to retain the same attitude, but the female has turned round; she has faced her partner and approached him, and so symbolizes her deliberate consent to the act of union.

The human variations in the exercise of coitus, both individual and national, are, however, extremely numerous. "To be quite frank," says Fuerbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 213), "I can hardly think of any combination which does not figure among my case-notes as having been practiced by my patients." We must not too hastily conclude that such variations are due to vicious training. That is far from being the case. They often occur naturally and spontaneously. Freud has properly pointed out (in the second series of his Beitraege zur Neurosenlehre, "Bruchstueck" etc.) that we must not be too shocked even when the idea of fellatio spontaneously presents itself to a woman, for that idea has a harmless origin in the resemblance between the penis and the nipple. Similarly, it may be added, the desire for cunnilinctus, which seems to be much more often latently present in women than is the desire for its performance in men, has a natural analogy in the pleasure of suckling, a pleasure which is itself indeed often erotically tinged (see vol. iv of these Studies, "Sexual Selection in Man," Touch, Sect. III).

Every variation in this matter, remarks Remy de Gourmont (Physique de l'Amour, p. 264) partakes of the sin of luxury, and some of the theologians have indeed considered any position in coitus but that which is usually called normal in Europe as a mortal sin. Other theologians, however, regarded such variations as only venial sins, provided ejaculation took place in the vagina, just as some theologians would permit irrumatio as a preliminary to coitus, provided there was no ejaculation. Aquinas took a serious view of the deviations from normal intercourse; Sanchez was more indulgent, especially in view of his doctrine, derived from the Greek and Arabic natural philosophers, that the womb can attract the sperm, so that the natural end may be attained even in unusual positions.

Whatever difference of opinion there may have been among ancient theologians, it is well recognized by modern physicians that variations from the ordinary method of coitus are desirable in special cases. Thus Kisch points out (Sterilitaet des Weibes, p. 107) that in some cases it is only possible for the woman to experience sexual excitement when coitus takes place in the lateral position, or in the a posteriori position, or when the usual position is reversed; and in his Sexual Life of Woman, also, Kisch recommends several variations of position for coitus. Adler points out (op. cit., pp. 151, 186) the value of the same positions in some cases, and remarks that such variations often call forth latent sexual feelings as by a charm. Such cases are indeed, by no means infrequent, the advantage of the unusual position being due either to physical or psychic causes, and the discovery of the right variation is sometimes found in a merely playful attempt. It has occasionally happened, also, that when intercourse has habitually taken place in an abnormal position, no satisfaction is experienced by the woman until the normal position is adopted. The only fairly common variation of coitus which meets with unqualified disapproval is that in the erect posture. (See e.g., Hammond, op. cit. pp. 257 et seq.)

Lucretius specially recommended the quadrupedal variation of coitus (Bk. iv, 1258), and Ovid describes (end of Bk. iii of the Ars Amatoria) what he regards as agreeable variations, giving the preference, as the easiest and simplest method, to that in which the woman lies half supine on her side. Perhaps, however, the variation which is nearest to the normal attitude and which has most often and most completely commended itself is that apparently known to Arabic erotic writers as dok el arz, in which the man is seated and his partner is astride his thighs, embracing his body with her legs and his neck with her arms, while he embraces her waist; this is stated in the Arabic Perfumed Garden to be the method preferred by most women.

The other most usual variation is the inverse normal position in which the man is supine, and the woman adapts herself to this position, which permits of several modifications obviously advantageous, especially when the man is much larger than his partner. The Christian as well as the Mahommedan theologians appear, indeed, to have been generally opposed to this superior position of the female, apparently, it would seem, because they regarded the literal subjection of the male which it involves as symbolic of a moral subjection. The testimony of many people to-day, however, is decidedly in favor of this position, more especially as regards the woman, since it enables her to obtain a better adjustment and greater control of the process, and so frequently to secure sexual satisfaction which she may find difficult or impossible in the normal position.

The theologians seem to have been less unfavorably disposed to the position normal among quadrupeds, a posteriori, though the old Penitentials were inclined to treat it severely, the Penitential of Angers prescribing forty days penance, and Egbert's three years, if practiced habitually. (It is discussed by J. Petermann, "Venus Aversa," Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1909). There are good reasons why in many cases this position should be desirable, more especially from the point of view of women, who indeed not infrequently prefer it. It must be always remembered, as has already been pointed out, that in the progress from anthropoid to man it is the female, not the male, whose method of coitus has been revolutionized. While, however, the obverse human position represents a psychic advance, there has never been a complete physical readjustment of the female organs to the obverse method. More especially, in Adler's opinion (op. cit., pp. 117-119), the position of the clitoris is such that, as a rule, it is more easily excited by coitus from behind than from in front. A more recent writer, Klotz, in his book, Der Mensch ein Vierfuessler (1908), even takes the too extreme position that the quadrupedal method of coitus, being the only method that insures due contact with the clitoris, is the natural human method. It must, however, be admitted that the posterior mode of coitus is not only a widespread, but a very important variation, in either of its two most important forms: the Pompeiian method, in which the woman bends forwards and the man approaches behind, or the method described by Boccaccio, in which the man is supine and the woman astride.

Fellatio and cunnilinctus, while they are not strictly methods of coitus, in so far as they do not involve the penetration of the penis into the vagina, are very widespread as preliminaries, or as vicarious forms of coitus, alike among civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus, in India, I am told that fellatio is almost universal in households, and regarded as a natural duty towards the paterfamilias. As regards cunnilinctus Max Dessoir has stated (Allgemeine Zeitschrift fuer Psychiatrie, 1894, Heft 5) that the superior Berlin prostitutes say that about a quarter of their clients desire to exercise this, and that in France and Italy the proportion is higher; the number of women who find cunnilinctus agreeable is without doubt much greater. Intercourse per anum must also be regarded as a vicarious form of coitus. It appears to be not uncommon, especially among the lower social classes, and while most often due to the wish to avoid conception, it is also sometimes practiced as a sexual aberration, at the wish either of the man or the woman, the anus being to some extent an erogenous zone.

The ethnic variations in method of coitus were briefly discussed in volume v of these Studies, "The Mechanism of Detumescence," Section II. In all civilized countries, from the earliest times, writers on the erotic art have formally and systematically set forth the different positions for coitus. The earliest writing of this kind now extant seems to be an Egyptian papyrus preserved at Turin of the date B.C. 1300; in this, fourteen different positions are represented. The Indians, according to Iwan Bloch, recognize altogether forty-eight different positions; the Ananga Ranga describes thirty-two main forms. The Mohammedan Perfumed Garden describes forty forms, as well as six different kinds of movement during coitus. The Eastern books of this kind are, on the whole, superior to those that have been produced by the Western world, not only by their greater thoroughness, but by the higher spirit by which they have often been inspired.

The ancient Greek erotic writings, now all lost, in which the modes of coitus were described, were nearly all attributed to women. According to a legend recorded by Suidas, the earliest writer of this kind was Astyanassa, the maid of Helen of Troy. Elephantis, the poetess, is supposed to have enumerated nine different postures. Numerous women of later date wrote on these subjects, and one book is attributed to Polycrates, the sophist.

Aretino—who wrote after the influence of Christianity had degraded erotic matters perilously near to that region of pornography from which they are only to-day beginning to be rescued—in his Sonnetti Lussuriosi described twenty-six different methods of coitus, each one accompanied by an illustrative design by Giulio Romano, the chief among Raphael's pupils. Veniero, in his Puttana Errante, described thirty-two positions. More recently Forberg, the chief modern authority, has enumerated ninety positions, but, it is said, only forty-eight can, even on the most liberal estimate, be regarded as coming within the range of normal variation.

The disgrace which has overtaken the sexual act, and rendered it a deed of darkness, is doubtless largely responsible for the fact that the chief time for its consummation among modern civilized peoples is the darkness of the early night in stuffy bedrooms when the fatigue of the day's labors is struggling with the artificial stimulation produced by heavy meals and alcoholic drinks. This habit is partly responsible for the indifference or even disgust with which women sometimes view coitus.

Many more primitive peoples are wiser. The New Guinea Papuans of Astrolabe Bay, according to Vahness (Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1900, Heft 5, p. 414), though it must be remembered that the association of the sexual act with darkness is much older than Christianity, and connected with early religious notions (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days, Bk. II), always have sexual intercourse in the open air. The hard-working women of the Gebvuka and Buru Islands, again, are too tired for coitus at night; it is carried out in the day time under the trees, and the Serang Islanders also have coitus in the woods (Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Bk. i, Ch. XVII).

It is obviously impracticable to follow these examples in modern cities, even if avocation and climate permitted. It is also agreed that sexual intercourse should be followed by repose. There seems to be little doubt, however, that the early morning and the daylight are a more favorable time than the early night. Conception should take place in the light, said Michelet (L'Amour, p. 153); sexual intercourse in the darkness of night is an act committed with a mere female animal; in the day-time it is union with a loving and beloved individual person.

This has been widely recognized. The Greeks, as we gather from Aristophanes in the Archarnians, regarded sunrise as the appropriate time for coitus. The South Slavs also say that dawn is the time for coitus. Many modern authorities have urged the advantages of early morning coitus. Morning, said Roubaud (Traite de l'Impuissance, pp. 151-3) is the time for coitus, and even if desire is greater in the evening, pleasure is greater in the morning. Osiander also advised early morning coitus, and Venette, in an earlier century, discussing "at what hour a man should amorously embrace his wife" (La Generation de l'Homme, Part II, Ch. V), while thinking it is best to follow inclination, remarks that "a beautiful woman looks better by sunlight than by candlelight." A few authorities, like Burdach, have been content to accept the custom of night coitus, and Busch (Das Geschlechtsleben des Weibes, vol. i, p. 214) was inclined to think the darkness of night the most "natural" time, while Fuerbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 217) thinks that early morning is "occasionally" the best time.

To some, on the other hand, the exercise of sexual intercourse in the sunlight and the open air seems so important that they are inclined to elevate it to the rank of a religious exercise. I quote from a communication on this point received from Australia: "This shameful thing that must not be spoken of or done (except in the dark) will some day, I believe, become the one religious ceremony of the human race, in the spring. (Oh, what springs!) People will have become very sane, well-bred, aristocratic (all of them aristocrats), and on the whole opposed to rites and superstitions, for they will have a perfect knowledge of the past. The coition of lovers in the springtime will be the one religious ceremony they will allow themselves. I have a vision sometimes of the holy scene, but I am afraid it is too beautiful to describe. 'The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is ineffably beautiful, too fair to be remembered,' wrote the chaste Thoreau. Verily human beauty, joy, and love will reach their divinest height during those inaugural days of springtide coupling. When the world is one Paradise, the consummation of the lovers, the youngest and most beautiful, will take place in certain sacred valleys in sight of thousands assembled to witness it. For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun will rise on a dream of passionate voices, of clinging human forms, of flowers and waters, and the purple and gold of the sunrise are reflected on hills illumined with pansies. [I know not if the writer recalled George Chapman's "Enamelled pansies used at nuptials still"], and repeated on golden human flesh and human hair. In these sacred valleys the subtle perfume of the pansies will mingle with the divine fragrance of healthy naked young women and men in the spring coupling. You and I shall not see that, but we may help to make it possible." This rhapsody (an unconscious repetition of Saint-Lambert's at Mlle. Quinault's table in the eighteenth century) serves to illustrate the revolt which tends to take place against the unnatural and artificial degradation of the sexual act.

In some parts of the world it has seemed perfectly natural and reasonable that so great and significant an act as that of coitus should be consecrated to the divinity, and hence arose the custom of prayer before sexual intercourse. Thus Zoroaster ordained that a married couple should pray before coitus, and after the act they should say together: "O, Sapondomad, I trust this seed to thee, preserve it for me, for it is a man." In the Gorong Archipelago it is customary also for husband and wife to pray together before the sexual act (Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Bd. i, Ch. XVII). The civilized man, however, has come to regard his stomach as the most important of his organs, and he utters his conventional grace, not before love, but only before food. Even the degraded ritual vestiges of the religious recognition of coitus are difficult to find in Europe. We may perhaps detect it among the Spaniards, with their tenacious instinct for ritual, in the solemn etiquette with which, in the seventeenth century, it was customary, according to Madame d'Aulnoy, for the King to enter the bedchamber of the Queen: "He has on his slippers, his black mantle over his shoulder, his shield on one arm, a bottle hanging by a cord over the other arm (this bottle is not to drink from, but for a quite opposite purpose, which you will guess). With all this the King must also have his great sword in one hand and a dark lantern in the other. In this way he must enter, alone, the Queen's chamber" (Madame d'Aulnoy, Relation du Voyage d'Espagne, 1692, vol. iii, p. 221).

In discussing the art of love it is necessary to give a primary place to the central fact of coitus, on account of the ignorance that widely prevails concerning it, and the unfortunate prejudices which in their fungous broods flourish in the noisome obscurity around it. The traditions of the Christian Church, which overspread the whole of Europe, and set up for worship a Divine Virgin and her Divine Son, both of whom it elaborately disengaged from personal contact with sexuality effectually crushed any attempt to find a sacred and avowable ideal in married love. Even the Church's own efforts to elevate matrimony were negatived by its own ideals. That influence depresses our civilization even to-day. When Walt Whitman wrote his "Children of Adam" he was giving imperfect expression to conceptions of the religious nature of sexual love which have existed wholesomely and naturally in all parts of the world, but had not yet penetrated the darkness of Christendom where they still seemed strange and new, if not terrible. And the refusal to recognize the solemnity of sex had involved the placing of a pall of blackness and disrepute on the supreme sexual act itself. It was shut out from the sunshine and excluded from the sphere of worship.

The sexual act is important from the point of view of erotic art, not only from the ignorance and prejudices which surround it, but also because it has a real value even in regard to the psychic side of married life. "These organs," according to the oft-quoted saying of the old French physician, Ambrose Pare, "make peace in the household." How this comes about we see illustrated from time to time in Pepys's Diary. At the same time, it is scarcely necessary to say, after all that has gone before, that this ancient source of domestic peace tends to be indefinitely complicated by the infinite variety in erotic needs, which become ever more pronounced with the growth of civilization.[408]

The art of love is, indeed, only beginning with the establishment of sexual intercourse. In the adjustment of that relationship all the forces of nature are so strongly engaged that under completely favorable conditions—which indeed very rarely occur in our civilization—the knowledge of the art and a possible skill in its exercise come almost of themselves. The real test of the artist in love is in the skill to carry it beyond the period when the interests of nature, having been really or seemingly secured, begin to slacken. The whole art of love, it has been well said, lies in forever finding something new in the same person. The art of love is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it. Otherwise it tends to degenerate towards the Shakespearian lust,

"Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated,"

though it must be remembered that even from the most strictly natural point of view the transitions of passion are not normally towards repulsion but towards affection.[409]

The young man and woman who are brought into the complete unrestraint of marriage after a prolonged and unnatural separation, during which desire and the satisfactions of desire have been artificially disconnected, are certainly not under the best conditions for learning the art of love. They are tempted by reckless and promiscuous indulgence in the intimacies of marriage to fling carelessly aside all the reasons that make that art worth learning. "There are married people," as Ellen Key remarks, "who might have loved each other all their lives if they had not been compelled, every day and all the year, to direct their habits, wills, and inclinations towards each other."

All the tendencies of our civilized life are, in personal matters, towards individualism; they involve the specialization, and they ensure the sacredness, of personal habits and even peculiarities. This individualism cannot be broken down suddenly at the arbitrary dictation of a tradition, or even by the force of passion from which the restraints have been removed. Out of deference to the conventions and prejudices of their friends, or out of the reckless abandonment of young love, or merely out of a fear of hurting each other's feelings, young couples have often plunged prematurely into an unbroken intimacy which is even more disastrous to the permanency of marriage than the failure ever to reach a complete intimacy at all. That is one of the chief reasons why most writers on the moral hygiene of marriage nowadays recommend separate beds for the married couple, if possible separate bedrooms, and even sometimes, with Ellen Key, see no objection to their living in separate houses. Certainly the happiest marriages have often involved the closest and most unbroken intimacy, in persons peculiarly fitted for such intimacy. It is far from true that, as Bloch has affirmed, familiarity is fatal to love. It is deadly to a love that has no roots, but it is the nourishment of the deeply-rooted love. Yet it remains true that absence is needed to maintain the keen freshness and fine idealism of love. "Absence," as Landor said, "is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty." The married lovers who are only able to meet for comparatively brief periods between long absences have often experienced in these meetings a life-long succession of honeymoons.[410]

There can be no question that as presence has its risks for love, so also has absence. Absence like presence, in the end, if too prolonged, effaces the memory of love, and absence, further, by the multiplied points of contact with the world which it frequently involves, introduces the problem of jealousy, although, it must be added, it is difficult indeed to secure a degree of association which excludes jealousy or even the opportunities for motives of jealousy. The problem of jealousy is so fundamental in the art of love that it is necessary at this point to devote to it a brief discussion.

Jealousy is based on fundamental instincts which are visible at the beginning of animal life. Descartes defined jealousy as "a kind of fear related to a desire to preserve a possession." Every impulse of acquisition in the animal world is stimulated into greater activity by the presence of a rival who may snatch beforehand the coveted object. This seems to be a fundamental fact in the animal world; it has been a life-conserving tendency, for, it has been said, an animal that stood aside while its fellows were gorging themselves with food, and experienced nothing but pure satisfaction in the spectacle, would speedily perish. But in this fact we have the natural basis of jealousy.[411]

It is in reference to food that this impulse appears first and most conspicuously among animals. It is a well-known fact that association with other animals induces an animal to eat much more than when kept by himself. He ceases to eat from hunger but eats, as it has been put, in order to preserve his food from rivals in the only strong box he knows. The same feeling is transferred among animals to the field of sex. And further in the relations of dogs and other domesticated animals to their masters the emotion of jealousy is often very keenly marked.[412]

Jealousy is an emotion which is at its maximum among animals, among savages,[413] among children,[414] in the senile, in the degenerate, and very specially in chronic alcoholics.[415] It is worthy of note that the supreme artists and masters of the human heart who have most consummately represented the tragedy of jealousy clearly recognized that it is either atavistic or pathological; Shakespeare made his Othello a barbarian, and Tolstoy made the Pozdnischeff of his Kreutzer Sonata a lunatic. It is an anti-social emotion, though it has been maintained by some that it has been the cause of chastity and fidelity. Gesell, for instance, while admitting its anti-social character and accumulating quotations in evidence of the torture and disaster it occasions, seems to think that it still ought to be encouraged in order to foster sexual virtues. Very decided opinions have been expressed in the opposite sense. Jealousy, like other shadows, says Ellen Key, belongs only to the dawn and the setting of love, and a man should feel that it is a miracle, and not his right, if the sun stands still at the zenith.[416]

Even therefore if jealousy has been a beneficial influence at the beginning of civilization, as well as among animals,—as may probably be admitted, though on the whole it seems rather to be the by-product of a beneficial influence than such an influence itself,—it is still by no means clear that it therefore becomes a desirable emotion in more advanced stages of civilization. There are many primitive emotions, like anger and fear, which we do not think it desirable to encourage in complex civilized societies but rather seek to restrain and control, and even if we are inclined to attribute an original value to jealousy, it seems to be among these emotions that it ought to be placed.

Miss Clapperton, in discussing this problem (Scientific Meliorism, pp. 129-137), follows Darwin (Descent of Man, Part I, Ch. IV) in thinking that jealousy led to "the inculcation of female virtue," but she adds that it has also been a cause of woman's subjection, and now needs to be eliminated. "To rid ourselves as rapidly as may be of jealousy is essential; otherwise the great movement in favor of equality of sex will necessarily meet with checks and grave obstruction."

Ribot (La Logique des Sentiments, pp. 75 et seq.; Essai sur les Passions, pp. 91, 175), while stating that subjectively the estimate of jealousy must differ in accordance with the ideal of life held, considers that objectively we must incline to an unfavorable estimate "Even a brief passion is a rupture in the normal life; it is an abnormal, if not a pathological state, an excrescence, a parasitism."

Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, Ch. V) speaks very strongly in the same sense, and considers that it is necessary to eliminate jealousy by non-procreation of the jealous. Jealousy is, he declares, "the worst and unfortunately the most deeply-rooted of the 'irradiations,' or, better, the 'contrast-reactions,' of sexual love inherited from our animal ancestors. An old German saying, 'Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft die mit Eifer sucht was Leider schafft,' says by no means too much.... Jealousy is a heritage of animality and barbarism; I would recall this to those who, under the name of 'injured honor,' attempt to justify it and place it on a high pedestal. An unfaithful husband is ten times more to be wished for a woman than a jealous husband.... We often hear of 'justifiable jealousy.' I believe, however, that there is no justifiable jealousy; it is always atavistic or else pathological; at the best it is nothing more than a brutal animal stupidity. A man who, by nature, that is by his hereditary constitution, is jealous is certain to poison his own life and that of his wife. Such men ought on no account to marry. Both education and selection should work together to eliminate jealousy as far as possible from the human brain."

Eric Gillard in an article on "Jealousy" (Free Review, Sept., 1896), in opposition to those who believe that jealousy "makes the home," declares that, on the contrary, it is the chief force that unmakes the home. "So long as egotism waters it with the tears of sentiment and shields it from the cold blasts of scientific inquiry, so long will it thrive. But the time will come when it will be burned in the Garden of Love as a noxious weed. Its mephitic influence in society is too palpable to be overlooked. It turns homes that might be sanctuaries of love into hells of discord and hate; it causes suicides, and it drives thousands to drink, reckless excesses, and madness. Makes the home! One of your married men friends sees a probable seducer in every man who smiles at his wife; another is jealous of his wife's women acquaintances; a third is wounded because his wife shows so much attention to the children. Some of the women you know display jealousy of every other woman, of their husband's acquaintances, and some, of his very dog. You must be completely monopolized or you do not thoroughly love. You must admire no one but the person with whom you have immured yourself for life. Old friendships must be dissolved, new friendships must not be formed, for fear of invoking the beautiful emotion that 'makes the home.'"

Even if jealousy in matters of sex could be admitted to be an emotion working on the side of civilized progress, it must still be pointed out that it merely acts externally; it can have little or no real influence; the jealous person seldom makes himself more lovable by his jealousy and frequently much less lovable. The main effect of his jealousy is to increase, and not seldom to excite, the causes for jealousy, and at the same time to encourage hypocrisy.

All the circumstances, accompaniments, and results of domestic jealousy in their completely typical form, are well illustrated by a very serious episode in the history of the Pepys household, and have been fully and faithfully set down by the great diarist. The offence—an embrace of his wife's lady-help, as she might now be termed—was a slight one, but, as Pepys himself admits, quite inexcusable. He is writing, being in his thirty-sixth year, on the 25th of Oct., 1668 (Lord's Day). "After supper, to have my hair combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl.... I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girl also, and I endeavored to put it off, but my wife was struck mute and grew angry.... Heartily afflicted for this folly of mine.... So ends this month," he writes a few days later, "with some quiet to my mind, though not perfect, after the greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with the girl, that ever I had, and I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake. Sixth November. Up, and presently my wife up with me, which she professedly now do every day to dress me, that I may not see Willet [Deb], and do eye me, whether I cast my eye upon her, or no, and do keep me from going into the room where she is. Ninth November. Up, and I did, by a little note which I flung to Deb, advise her that I did continue to deny that ever I kissed her, and so she might govern herself. The truth is that I did adventure upon God's pardoning me this lie, knowing how heavy a thing it would be for me, to the ruin of the poor girl, and next knowing that if my wife should know all it would be impossible for her ever to be at peace with me again, and so our whole lives would be uncomfortable. The girl read, and as I bid her returned me the note, flinging it to me in passing by." Next day, however, he is "mightily troubled," for his wife has obtained a confession from the girl of the kissing. For some nights Mr. and Mrs. Pepys are both sleepless, with much weeping on either side. Deb gets another place, leaving on the 14th of November, and Pepys is never able to see her before she leaves the house, his wife keeping him always under her eye. It is evident that Pepys now feels strongly attracted to Deb, though there is no evidence of this before she became the subject of the quarrel. On the 13th of November, hearing she was to leave next day, he writes: "The truth is I have a good mind to have the maidenhead of this girl." He was, however, the "more troubled to see how my wife is by this means likely forever to have her hand over me, and that I shall forever be a slave to her—that is to say, only in matters of pleasure." At the same time his love for his wife was by no means diminished, nor hers for him. "I must here remark," he says, "that I have lain with my moher [i.e., muger, wife] as a husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe, twelve months before. And with more pleasure to her than in all the time of our marriage before." The next day was Sunday. On Monday Pepys at once begins to make inquiries which will put him on the track of Deb. On the 18th he finds her. She gets up into the coach with him, and he kisses her and takes liberties with her, at the same time advising her "to have a care of her honor and to fear God," allowing no one else to do what he has done; he also tells her how she can find him if she desires. Pepys now feels that everything is settled satisfactorily, and his heart is full of joy. But his joy is short-lived, for Mrs. Pepys discovers this interview with Deb on the following day. Pepys denies it at first, then confesses, and there is a more furious scene than ever. Pepys is now really alarmed, for his wife threatens to leave him; he definitely abandons Deb, and with prayers to God resolves never to do the like again. Mrs. Pepys is not satisfied, however, till she makes her husband write a letter to Deb, telling her that she is little better than a whore, and that he hates her, though Deb is spared this, not by any stratagem of Pepys, but by the considerateness of the friend to whom the letter was entrusted for delivery. Moreover, Mrs. Pepys arranges with her husband that, in future, whenever he goes abroad he shall be accompanied everywhere by his clerk. We see that Mrs. Pepys plays with what appears to be triumphant skill and success the part of the jealous and avenging wife, and digs her little French heels remorselessly into her prostrate husband and her rival. Unfortunately, we do not know what the final outcome was, for a little later, owing to trouble with his eyesight, Pepys was compelled to bring his Diary to an end. It is evident, however, when we survey the whole of this perhaps typical episode, that neither husband nor wife were in the slightest degree prepared for the commonplace position into which they were thrown; that each of them appears in a painful, undignified, and humiliating light; that as a result of it the husband acquires almost a genuine and strong affection for the girl who is the cause of the quarrel; and finally that, even though he is compelled, for the time at all events, to yield to his wife, he remains at the end exactly what he was at the beginning. Nor had husband or wife the very slightest wish to leave each other; the bond of marriage remained firm, but it had been degraded by insincerity on one side and the jealous endeavor on the other to secure fidelity by compulsion.

Apart altogether, however, from the question of its effectiveness, or even of the misery that it causes to all concerned, it is evident that jealousy is incompatible with all the tendencies of civilization. We have seen that a certain degree of variation is involved in the sexual relationship, as in all other relationships, and unless we are to continue to perpetuate many evils and injustices, that fact has to be faced and recognized. We have also seen that the line of our advance involves a constant increase in moral responsibility and self-government, and that, in its turn, implies not only a high degree of sincerity but also the recognition that no person has any right, or indeed any power, to control the emotions and actions of another person. If our sun of love stands still at midday, according to Ellen Key's phrase, that is a miracle to be greeted with awe and gratitude, and by no means a right to be demanded. The claim of jealousy falls with the claim of conjugal rights.

It is quite possible, Bloch remarks (The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. X), to love more than one person at the same time, with nearly equal tenderness, and to be honestly able to assure each of the passion felt for her or him. Bloch adds that the vast psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love, for it is difficult for anyone to find his complement in a single person, and that this applies to women as well as to men.

Georg Hirth likewise points out (Wege zur Heimat, pp. 543-552) that it is important to remember that women, as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves, he remarks, with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain, can only hold one man at a time, and that if there is a second man it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all erotic writers, poets, and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this class, he says; they look on a woman as property, and of course two men cannot "possess" a woman. (Regarding novelists, however, the remark may be interpolated that there are many exceptions, and Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the same time.) As against this desire to depreciate women's psychic capacity, Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today," Hirth truly declares, "only love and justice can count as honorable motives in marriage. The modern man accords to the beloved wife and life-companion the same freedom which he himself took before marriage, and perhaps still takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be hoped—so much the better! But let there be no lies, no deception; the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion, and consideration. This is the best safeguard against adultery.... Let him, however, who is, nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it console himself with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers the most noble-minded and deep-seeing friend will always have the preference." These wise words cannot be too deeply meditated. The policy of jealousy is only successful—when it is successful—in the hands of the man who counts the external husk of love more precious than the kernel.

It seems to some that the recognition of variations in sexual relationships, of the tendency of the monogamic to overpass its self-imposed bounds, is at best a sad necessity, and a lamentable fall from a high ideal. That, however, is the reverse of the truth. The great evil of monogamy, and its most seriously weak point, is its tendency to self-concentration at the expense of the outer world. The devil always comes to a man in the shape of his wife and children, said Hinton. The family is a great social influence in so far as it is the best instrument for creating children who will make the future citizens; but in a certain sense the family is an anti-social influence, for it tends to absorb unduly the energy that is needed for the invigoration of society. It is possible, indeed, that that fact led to the modification of the monogamic system in early developing periods of human history, when social expansion and cohesion were the primary necessities. The family too often tends to resemble, as someone has said, the secluded collection of grubs sometimes revealed in their narrow home when we casually raise a flat stone in our gardens. Great as are the problems of love, and great as should be our attention to them, it must always be remembered that love is not a little circle that is complete in itself. It is the nature of love to irradiate. Just as family life exists mainly for the social end of breeding the future race, so family love has its social ends in the extension of sympathy and affection to those outside it, and even in ends that go beyond love altogether.[417]

The question is debated from time to time as to how far it is possible for men and women to have intimate friendships with each other outside the erotic sphere.[418] There can be no doubt whatever that it is perfectly possible for a man and a woman to experience for each other a friendship which never intrudes into the sexual sphere. As a rule, however, this only happens under special conditions, and those are generally conditions which exclude the closest and most intimate friendship. If, as we have seen, love may be defined as a synthesis of lust and friendship, friendship inevitably enters into the erotic sphere. Just as sexual emotion tends to merge into friendship, so friendship between persons of opposite sex, if young, healthy, and attractive, tends to involve sexual emotion. The two feelings are too closely allied for an artificial barrier to be permanently placed between them without protest. Men who offer a woman friendship usually find that it is not received with much satisfaction except as the first installment of a warmer emotion, and women who offer friendship to a man usually find that he responds with an offer of love; very often the "friendship" is from the first simply love or flirtation masquerading under another name.

"In the long run," a woman writes (in a letter published in Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 7), "the senses become discontented at their complete exclusion. And I believe that a man can only come into the closest mutual association with a woman by whom, consciously or unconsciously, he is physically attracted. He cannot enter into the closest psychic intercourse with a woman with whom he could not imagine himself in physical intercourse. His prevailing wish is for the possession of a woman, of the whole woman, her soul as well as her body. And a woman also cannot imagine an intimate relation to a man in which the heart and the body, as well as the mind, are not involved. (Naturally I am thinking of people with sound nerves and healthy blood.) Can a woman carry on a Platonic relation with a man from year to year without the thought sometimes coming to her: 'Why does he never kiss me? Have I no charm for him?' And in the most concealed corner of her heart will it not happen that she uses that word 'kiss' in the more comprehensive sense in which the French sometimes employ it?" There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this statement. The frontier between erotic love and friendship is vague, and an intimate psychic intercourse that is sternly debarred from ever manifesting itself in a caress, or other physical manifestation of tender intimacy, tends to be constrained, and arouses unspoken and unspeakable thoughts and desires which are fatal to any complete friendship.

Undoubtedly the only perfect "Platonic friendships" are those which have been reached through the portal of a preliminary erotic intimacy. In such a case bad lovers, when they have resolutely traversed the erotic stage, may become exceedingly good friends. A satisfactory friendship is possible between brother and sister because they have been physically intimate in childhood, and all erotic curiosities are absent. The most admirable "Platonic friendship" may often be attained by husband and wife in whom sympathy and affection and common interests have outlived passion. In nearly all the most famous friendships of distinguished men and women—as we know in some cases and divine in others—an hour's passion, in Sainte-Beuve's words, has served as the golden key to unlock the most precious and intimate secrets of friendship.[419]

The friendships that have been entered through the erotic portal possess an intimacy and retain a spiritually erotic character which could not be attained on the basis of a normal friendship between persons of the same sex. This is true in a far higher degree of the ultimate relationship, under fortunate circumstances, of husband and wife in the years after passion has become impossible. They have ceased to be passionate lovers but they have not become mere friends and comrades. More especially their relationship takes on elements borrowed from the attitude of child to parent, of parent to child. Everyone from his first years retains something of the child which cannot be revealed to all the world; everyone acquires something of the guardian paternal or maternal spirit. Husband and wife are each child to the other, and are indeed parent and child by turn. And here still the woman retains a certain erotic supremacy, for she is to the last more of a child than it is ever easy for the man to be, and much more essentially a mother than he is a father.

Groos (Der AEsthetische Genuss, p. 249) has pointed out that "love" is really made up of both sexual instinct and parental instinct.

"So-called happy marriages," says Professor W. Thomas (Sex and Society, p. 246), "represent an equilibrium reached through an extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after those of the children—cherishing him, in fact, as a child—or in an extension to woman on the part of man of the nurture and affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably dumb) creatures."

"When the devotion in the tie between mother and son," a woman writes, "is added to the relation of husband and wife, the union of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful dignity it deserves, and can attain in this world. It comprehends sympathy, love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults and weaknesses of both sides." "The foundation of every true woman's love," another woman writes, "is a mother's tenderness. He whom she loves is a child of larger growth, although she may at the same time have a deep respect for him." (See also, for similar opinion of another woman of distinguished intellectual ability, footnote at beginning of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy" in volume v of these Studies.)

It is on the basis of these elemental human facts that the permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of sex are developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is extremely difficult," says Kisch in his Sexual Life of Woman, "but a clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to combine in her single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an Aspasia, the chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual greatness of a Cornelia." And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of La Tia Fingida, which has sometimes been attributed to Cervantes, that "a woman should be an angel in the street, a saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in the house, and a demon in bed." The demands made of men by women, on the other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear definite formulation at all. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women," says Helene Stoecker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used, and deceived the woman they love, the man they love is an exception, marked out from all other men; that is the reason they love him." It may be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever stood very far above the ordinary level of humanity by their possession of perfection. They have been human, and their art of love has not always excluded the possession of human frailties; perfection, indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a bad soil for love to strike deep roots in.

It is only when we realize the highly complex nature of the elements which make up erotic love that we can understand how it is that that love can constitute so tremendous a revelation and exert so profound an influence even in men of the greatest genius and intellect and in the sphere of their most spiritual activity. It is not merely passion, nor any conscious skill in the erotic art,—important as these may be,—that would serve to account for Goethe's relationship to Frau von Stein, or Wagner's to Mathilde Wesendonck, or that of Robert and Elizabeth Browning to each other.[420]

It may now be clear to the reader why it has been necessary in a discussion of the sexual impulse in its relationship to society to deal with the art of love. It is true that there is nothing so intimately private and personal as the erotic affairs of the individual. Yet it is equally true that these affairs lie at the basis of the social life, and furnish the conditions—good or bad as the case may be—of that procreative act which is a supreme concern of the State. It is because the question of love is of such purely private interest that it tends to be submerged in the question of breed. We have to realize, not only that the question of love subserves the question of breed, but also that love has a proper, a necessary, even a socially wholesome claim, to stand by itself and to be regarded for its own worth.

In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his death (Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, loc. cit.), there are some interesting remarks on this point: "Society," he says, "has been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied with the problem of answering the 'question of breed' than the 'question of love.' The first problem fills all our civil and commercial codes. The second problem has never been clearly stated, or looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still less since the coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the solutions of marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate. Statesmen have only seen the side on which it touches population. Hence the marriage laws. Sterile love they profess to disdain. Yet it is evident that, though born as the serf of generation, love tends by civilization to be freed from it. In place of a simple method of procreation it has become an end, it has created itself a title, a royal title. Our gardens cultivate flowers that are all the more charming because they are sterile; why is the double corolla of love held more infamous than the sterilized flowers of our gardens?" Tarde replies that the reason is that our politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting for power and wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don Juans rather than Virgils. "The future," he continues, "is to the Virgilians, because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now more and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men and the politicians, and will one day succeed in driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been the problem of love."

FOOTNOTES:

[375] Quaestionum Convivalium, lib. iii, quaestio 6.

[376] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," Open Court, Nov. 1888.

[377] Columbus meeting of the American Medical Association, 1900.

[378] Ellen Key, Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 24.

[379] In an admirable article on Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 5), Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, in pointing out that the Catholic sacramental conception of marriage licensed love, but failed to elevate it, regards Lucinde, with all its defects, as the first expression of the unity of the senses and the soul, and, as such, the basis of the new ethics of love. It must, however, be said that four hundred years earlier Pontano had expressed this same erotic unity far more robustly and wholesomely than Schlegel, though the Latin verse in which he wrote, fresh and vital as it is, remained without influence. Pontano's Carmina, including the "De Amore Conjugali," have at length been reprinted in a scholarly edition by Soldati.

[380] From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries Ovid was, in reality, the most popular and influential classic poet. His works played a large part in moulding Renaissance literature, not least in England, where Marlowe translated his Amores, and Shakespeare, during the early years of his literary activity, was greatly indebted to him (see, e.g., Sidney Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets," Quarterly Review, Ap., 1909).

[381] This has already been discussed in Chapter II.

[382] By the age of twenty-five, as G. Hirth remarks (Wege zur Heimat, p. 541), an energetic and sexually disposed man in a large city has, for the most part, already had relations with some twenty-five women, perhaps even as many as fifty, while a well-bred and cultivated woman at that age is still only beginning to realize the slowly summating excitations of sex.

[383] In his study of "Conjugal Aversion" (Journal Nervous and Mental Disease, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker points out the value of adequate sexual knowledge before marriage in lessening the risks of such aversion.

[384] "It may be said to the honor of men," Adler truly remarks (op. cit., p. 182), "that it is perhaps not often their conscious brutality that is at fault in this matter, but merely lack of skill and lack of understanding. The husband who is not specially endowed by nature and experience for psychic intercourse with women, is not likely, through his earlier intercourse with Venus vulgivaga, to bring into marriage any useful knowledge, psychic or physical."

[385] "The first night," writes a correspondent concerning his marriage, "she found the act very painful and was frightened and surprised at the size of my penis, and at my suddenly getting on her. We had talked very openly about sex things before marriage, and it never occurred to me that she was ignorant of the details of the act. I imagined it would disgust her to talk about these things; but I now see I should have explained things to her. Before marrying I had come to the conclusion that the respect owed to one's wife was incompatible with any talk that might seem indecent, and also I had made a resolve not to subject her to what I thought then were dirty tricks, even to be naked and to have her naked. In fact, I was the victim of mock modesty; it was an artificial reaction from the life I had been living before marriage. Now it seems to me to be natural, if you love a woman, to do whatever occurs to you and to her. If I had not felt it wrong to encourage such acts between us, there might have been established a sexual sympathy which would have bound me more closely to her."

[386] Montaigne, Essais, Bk. iii, Ch. V. It is a significant fact that, even in the matter of information, women, notwithstanding much ignorance and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men. As Fuerbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is usually more chaste at marriage than the husband, yet "she is generally the better informed partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional astonishing confessions."

[387] "She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her," a man writes in a letter, "simply because we are desperately in love with one another, and everything we do—some of which the lowest prostitute might refuse to do—seems but one attempt after another to translate our passion into action. I never realized before, not that to the pure all things are pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent. Yes, I have always felt it, to love her is a liberal education." It is obviously only the existence of such an attitude as this that can enable a pure woman to be passionate.

[388] "To be really understood," as Rafford Pyke well says, "to say what she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own way, to cast aside the traditional conventions that gall her and repress her, to have someone near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to know that not a syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or mistaken, but rather felt just as she feels it all—how wonderfully sweet is this to every woman, and how few men are there who can give it to her!"

[389] In more recent times it has been discussed in relation to the frequency of spontaneous nocturnal emissions. See "The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity," Sect. II, in volume i of these Studies, and cf. Mr. Perry-Coste's remarks on "The Annual Rhythm," in Appendix B of the same volume.

[390] See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these Studies.

[391] Zenobia's practice is referred to by Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ed. Bury, vol. i, p. 302. The Queen of Aragon's decision is recorded by the Montpellier jurist, Nicolas Bohier (Boerius) in his Decisiones, etc., ed. of 1579, p. 563; it is referred to by Montaigne, Essais, Bk. iii, Ch. V.

[392] Haller, Elementa Physiologiae, 1778, vol. vii, p. 57.

[393] Hammond, Sexual Impotence, p. 129.

[394] Fuerbringer, Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 221.

[395] Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 80.

[396] Guyot, Breviaire de l'Amour Experimental, p. 144.

[397] Erb, Ziemssen's Handbuch, Bd. xi, ii, p. 148. Guttceit also considered that the very wide variations found are congenital and natural. It may be added that some believe that there are racial variations. Thus it has been stated that the genital force of the Englishman is low, and that of the Frenchman (especially Provencal, Languedocian, and Gascon) high, while Loewenfeld believes that the Germanic race excels the French in aptitude to repeat the sex act frequently. It is probable that little weight attaches to these opinions, and that the chief differences are individual rather than racial.

[398] Ribbing, L'Hygiene Sexualle, p. 75. Kisch, in his Sexual Life of Woman, expresses the same opinion.

[399] Mohammed, who often displayed a consideration for women very rare in the founders of religions, is an exception. His prescription of once a week represented the right of the wife, quite independently of the number of wives a man might possess.

[400] How fragile the claim of "conjugal rights" is, may be sufficiently proved by the fact that it is now considered by many that the very term "conjugal rights" arose merely by a mistake for "conjugal rites." Before 1733, when legal proceedings were in Latin, the term used was obsequies, and "rights," instead of "rites," seems to have been merely a typesetter's error (see Notes and Queries, May 16, 1891; May 6, 1899). This explanation, it should be added, only applies to the consecrated term, for there can be no doubt that the underlying idea has an existence quite independent of the term.

[401] "In most marriages that are not happy," it is said in Rafford Pyke's thoughtful paper on "Husbands and Wives" (Cosmopolitan, 1902), "it is the wife rather than the husband who is oftenest disappointed."

[402] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," in vol. iii of these Studies.

[403] It is well recognized by erotic writers, however, that women may sometimes take a comparatively active part. Thus Vatsyayana says that sometimes the woman may take the man's position, and with flowers in her hair and smiles mixed with sighs and bent head, caressing him and pressing her breasts against him, say: "You have been my conqueror; it is my turn to make you cry for mercy."

[404] Thus among the Swahili it is on the third day after marriage that the bridegroom is allowed, by custom, to complete defloration, according to Zache, Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, II-III, p. 84.

[405] De l'Amour, vol. ii, p. 57.

[406] Robert Michels, "Brautstandsmoral," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 12.

[407] I may refer once more to the facts brought together in volume iii of these Studies, "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse."

[408] This has been pointed out, for instance, by Rutgers, "Sexuelle Differenzierung," Die Neue Generation, Dec., 1908.

[409] Thus, among the Eskimo, who practice temporary wife-exchange, Rasmussen states that "a man generally discovers that his own wife is, in spite of all, the best."

[410] "I have always held with the late Professor Laycock," remarks Clouston (Hygiene of Mind, p. 214), "who was a very subtle student of human nature, that a married couple need not be always together to be happy, and that in fact reasonable absences and partings tend towards ultimate and closer union." That the prolongation of passion is only compatible with absence scarcely needs pointing out; as Mary Wollstonecraft long since said (Rights of Woman, original ed., p. 61), it is only in absence or in misfortune that passion is durable. It may be added, however, that in her love-letters to Imlay she wrote: "I have ever declared that two people who mean to live together ought not to be long separated."

[411] "Viewed broadly," says Arnold L. Gesell, in his interesting study of "Jealousy" (American Journal of Psychology, Oct., 1906), "jealousy seems such a necessary psychological accompaniment to biological behavior, amidst competitive struggle, that one is tempted to consider it genetically among the oldest of the emotions, synonymous almost with the will to live, and to make it scarcely less fundamental than fear or anger. In fact, jealousy readily passes into anger, and is itself a brand of fear.... In sociability and mutual aid we see the other side of the shield; but jealousy, however anti-social it may be, retains a function in zooelogical economy: viz., to conserve the individual as against the group. It is Nature's great corrective for the purely social emotions."

[412] Many illustrations are brought together in Gesell's study of "Jealousy."

[413] Jealousy among lower races may be disguised or modified by tribal customs. Thus Rasmussen (People of the Polar North, p. 65) says in reference to the Eskimo custom of wife-exchange: "A man once told me that he only beat his wife when she would not receive other men. She would have nothing to do with anyone but him—and that was her only failing!" Rasmussen elsewhere shows that the Eskimo are capable of extreme jealousy.

[414] See, e.g., Moll, Sexualleben des Kindes, p. 158; cf., Gesell's "Study of Jealousy."

[415] Jealousy is notoriously common among drunkards. As K. Birnbaum points out ("Das Sexualleben der Alkokolisten," Sexual-Probleme, Jan., 1909), this jealousy is, in most cases, more or less well-founded, for the wife, disgusted with her husband, naturally seeks sympathy and companionship elsewhere. Alcoholic jealousy, however, goes far beyond its basis of support in fact, and is entangled with delusions and hallucinations. (See e.g., G. Dumas, "La Logique d'un Dement," Revue Philosophique, Feb., 1908; also Stefanowski, "Morbid Jealousy," Alienist and Neurologist, July, 1893.)

[416] Ellen Key, Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 335.

[417] Schrempf points out ("Von Stella zu Klaerchen," Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 7, p. 264) that Goethe strove to show in Egmont that a woman is repelled by the love of a man who knows nothing beyond his love to her, and that it is easy for her to devote herself to the man whose aims lie in the larger world beyond herself. There is profound truth in this view.

[418] A discussion on "Platonic friendship" of this kind by several writers, mostly women, whose opinions were nearly equally divided, may be found, for instance, in the Lady's Realm, March, 1900.

[419] There are no doubt important exceptions. Thus Merimee's famous friendship with Mlle. Jenny Dacquin, enshrined in the Lettres a une Inconnue, was perhaps Platonic throughout on Merimee's side, Mlle. Dacquin adapting herself to his attitude. Cf. A. Lefebvre, La Celebre Inconnue de Merimee, 1908.

[420] The love-letters of all these distinguished persons have been published. Rosa Mayreder (Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit, pp. 229 et seq.) discusses the question of the humble and absolute manner in which even men of the most masculine and impetuous genius abandon themselves to the inspiration of the beloved woman. The case of the Brownings, who have been termed "the hero and heroine of the most wonderful love-story that the world knows of," is specially notable; (Ellen Key has written of the Brownings from this point of view in Menschen, and reference may be made to an article on the Brownings' love-letters in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1899). It is scarcely necessary to add that an erotic relationship may mean very much to persons of high intellectual ability, even when its issue is not happy; of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most intellectually distinguished of women, it may be said that the letters which enshrine her love to the worthless Imlay are among the most passionate and pathetic love-letters in English.



CHAPTER XII.

THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION.

The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love—Sexual Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception—Reproduction Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust—The Question of Procreation as a Religious Question—The Creed of Eugenics—Ellen Key and Sir Francis Galton—Our Debt to Posterity—The Problem of Replacing Natural Selection—The Origin and Development of Eugenics—The General Acceptance of Eugenical Principles To-day—The Two Channels by Which Eugenical Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice—The Sense of Sexual Responsibility in Women—The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood—The Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood—Causes of the Degradation of Motherhood—The Control of Conception—Now Practiced by the Majority of the Population in Civilized Countries—The Fallacy of "Racial Suicide"—Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?—Procreative Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress—The Growth of Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices—Facultative Sterility as Distinct from Neo-Malthusianism—The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of Conception—Preventive Methods—Abortion—The New Doctrine of the Duty to Practice Abortion—How Far is this Justifiable?—Castration as a Method of Controlling Procreation—Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics—The Question of Certificates for Marriage—The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act of Parliament—The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to Heredity—Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood—The Conditions Favorable to Procreation—Sterility—The Question of Artificial Fecundation—The Best Age of Procreation—The Question of Early Motherhood—The Best Time for Procreation—The Completion of the Divine Cycle of Life.

We have seen that the art of love has an independent and amply justifiable right to existence apart, altogether, from procreation. Even if we still believed—as all men must once have believed and some Central Australians yet believe[421]—that sexual intercourse has no essential connection with the propagation of the race it would have full right to existence. In its finer manifestations as an art it is required in civilization for the full development of the individual, and it is equally required for that stability of relationships which is nearly everywhere regarded as a demand of social morality.

When we now turn to the second great constitutional factor of marriage, procreation, the first point we encounter is that the art of love here also has its place. In ancient times the sexual congruence of any man with any woman was supposed to be so much a matter of course that all questions of love and of the art of love could be left out of consideration. The propagative act might, it was thought, be performed as impersonally, as perfunctorily, as the early Christian Fathers imagined it had been performed in Paradise. That view is no longer acceptable. It fails to commend itself to men, and still less to women. We know that in civilization at all events—and it is often indeed the same among savages—erethism is not always easy between two persons selected at random, nor even when they are more specially selected. And we also know, on the authority of very distinguished gynaecologists, that it is not in very many cases sufficient even to effect coitus, it is also necessary to excite orgasm, if conception is to be achieved.

Many primitive peoples, as well as the theologians of the Middle Ages, have believed that sexual excitement on the woman's part is necessary to conception, though they have sometimes mixed up that belief with false science and mere superstition. The belief itself is supported by some of the most cautious and experienced modern gynaecologists. Thus, Matthews Duncan (in his lectures on Sterility in Women) argued that the absence of sexual desire in women, and the absence of pleasure in the sexual act, are powerful influences making for sterility. He brought forward a table based on his case-books, showing that of nearly four hundred sterile women, only about one-fourth experienced sexual desire, while less than half experienced pleasure in the sexual act. In the absence, however, of a corresponding table concerning fertile women, nothing is hereby absolutely proved, and, at most, only a probability established.

Kisch, more recently (in his Sexual Life of Woman), has dealt fully with this question, and reaches the conclusion that it is "extremely probable" that the active erotic participation of the woman in coitus is an important link in the chain of conditions producing conception. It acts, he remarks, in either or both of two ways, by causing reflex changes in the cervical secretions, and so facilitating the passage of the spermatozoa, and by causing reflex erectile changes in the cervix itself, with slight descent of the uterus, so rendering the entrance of the semen easier. Kisch refers to the analogous fact that the first occurrence of menstruation is favored by sexual excitement.

Some authorities go so far as to assert that, until voluptuous excitement occurs in women, no impregnation is possible. This statement seems too extreme. It is true that the occurrence of impregnation during sleep, or in anaesthesia, cannot be opposed to it, for we know that the unconsciousness of these states by no means prevents the occurrence of complete sexual excitement. We cannot fail, however, to connect the fact that impregnation frequently fails to occur for months and even years after marriage, with the fact that sexual pleasure in coitus on the wife's part also frequently fails to occur for a similar period.

"Of all human instincts," Pinard has said,[422] "that of reproduction is the only one which remains in the primitive condition and has received no education. We procreate to-day as they procreated in the Stone Age. The most important act in the life of man, the sublimest of all acts since it is that of his reproduction, man accomplishes to-day with as much carelessness as in the age of the cave-man." And though Pinard himself, as the founder of puericulture, has greatly contributed to call attention to the vast destinies that hang on the act of procreation, there still remains a lamentable amount of truth in this statement. "Future generations," writes Westermarck in his great history of moral ideas,[423] "will probably with a kind of horror look back at a period when the most important, and in its consequences the most far-reaching, function which has fallen to the lot of man was entirely left to individual caprice and lust."

We are told in his Table Talk, that the great Luther was accustomed to say that God's way of making man was very foolish ("sehr naerrisch"), and that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "out of earth." And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own, was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer's remarks. If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity. It was, however, unjust to place the responsibility on God. It is men and women who breed the people that make the world good or bad. They seek to put the evils of society on to something outside themselves. They see how large a proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social, incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life. In old theological language it was often said that such were "children of the Devil," and Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world to the direct interposition of the Devil. Yet these ill-conditioned people who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of Man. The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.

The command "Be fruitful and multiply," which the ancient Hebrews put into the mouth of their tribal God, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons in the world. If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction, as Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable. But we have to remember that to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of mankind in a very different sense.

It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new religious movement. Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of "mere morality." There was a sound natural instinct underlying that protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again revived to-day in a more intelligent form. The claim of the race is the claim of religion. We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our moralities. Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social order from which we cannot escape; every community must have its mores. But we are not entitled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the highest interests entrusted to us. The nations which have done so have already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are developing.

The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized its religious character. This attitude is equally marked in Ellen Key and Francis Galton. In her Century of the Child (English translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with the eugenic movement. "It is only a question of time," she elsewhere writes (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 445), "when the attitude of society towards a sexual union will depend not on the form of the union, but on the value of the children created. Men and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the psychic and physical perfectioning of this sexual task as Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls."

Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt independently, in 1905, on "Restrictions in Marriage," and "Eugenics as a Factor in Religion" (Sociological Papers of the Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks: "Religious precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days, require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of this present time.... Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely, so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognizable from a distance as great as that of the moon. Eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature."

As will always happen in every great movement, a few fanatics have carried into absurdity the belief in the supreme religious importance of procreation. Love, apart from procreation, writes one of these fanatics, Vacher de Lapouge, in the spirit of some of the early Christian Fathers (see ante p. 509), is an aberration comparable to sadism and sodomy. Procreation is the only thing that matters, and it must become "a legally prescribed social duty" only to be exercised by carefully selected persons, and forbidden to others, who must, by necessity, be deprived of the power of procreation, while abortion and infanticide must, under some circumstances, become compulsory. Romantic love will disappear by a process of selection, as also will all religion except a new form of phallic worship (G. Vacher de Lapouge, "Die Crisis der Sexuellen Moral," Politisch Anthropologische Revue, No. 8, 1908). It is sufficient to point out that love is, and always must be, the natural portal to generation. Such excesses of procreative fanaticism cannot fail to occur, and they render the more necessary the emphasis which has here been placed on the art of love.

"What has posterity done for me that I should do anything for posterity?" a cynic is said to have asked. The answer is very simple. The human race has done everything for him. All that he is, and can be, is its creation; all that he can do is the result of its laboriously accumulated traditions. It is only by working towards the creation of a still better posterity, that he can repay the good gifts which the human race has brought him.[426] Just as, within the limits of this present life, many who have received benefits and kindnesses they can never repay to the actual givers, find a pleasure in vicariously repaying the like to others, so the heritage we have received from our ascendents we can never repay, save by handing it on in a better form to our descendants.

It is undoubtedly true that the growth of eugenical ideals has not been, for the most part, due to religious feeling. It has been chiefly the outcome of a very gradual, but very comprehensive, movement towards social amelioration, which has been going on for more than a century, and which has involved a progressive effort towards the betterment of all the conditions of life. The ideals of this movement were proclaimed in the eighteenth century, they began to find expression early in the nineteenth century, in the initiation of the modern system of sanitation, in the growth of factory legislation, in all the movements which have been borne onwards by socialism hand in hand with individualism. The inevitable tendency has been slowly towards the root of the matter; it began to be seen that comparatively little can be effected by improving the conditions of life of adults; attention began to be concentrated on the child, on the infant, on the embryo in its mother's womb, and this resulted in the fruitful movement of puericulture inspired by Pinard, and finally the problem is brought to its source at the point of procreation, and the regulation of sexual selection between stocks and between individuals as the prime condition of life. Here we have the science of eugenics which Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as "the science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or physically, the racial qualities of future generations." In its largest aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man's attempt "to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective."

In the last chapter of his Memories of My Life (1908), on "Race Improvement," Sir Francis Galton sets forth the origin and development of his conception of the science of eugenics. The term, "eugenics," he first used in 1884, in his Human Faculty, but the conception dates from 1865, and even earlier. Galton has more recently discussed the problems of eugenics in papers read before the Sociological Society (Sociological Papers, vols. i and ii, 1905), in the Herbert Spencer Lecture on "Probability the Foundation of Eugenics," (1907), and elsewhere. Galton's numerous memoirs on this subject have now been published in a collected form by the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in 1907, to further and to popularize the eugenical attitude towards social questions; The Eugenics Review is published by this Society. On the more strictly scientific side, eugenic studies are carried on in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London, established by Sir Francis Galton, and now working in connection with Professor Karl Pearson's biometric laboratory, in University College. Much of Professor Pearson's statistical work in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and suggestions thrown out by Galton. See, e.g., Karl Pearson's Robert Boyle Lecture, "The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics" (1907). Biometrika, edited by Karl Pearson in association with other workers, contains numerous statistical memoirs on eugenics. In Germany, the Archiv fuer Rassen und Gesellschafts-biologie, and the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, are largely occupied with various aspects of such subjects, and in America, The Popular Science Monthly from time to time, publishes articles which have a bearing on eugenics.

At one time there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic movement. It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals, and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars. It is now beginning to be better understood. None but fanatics dream of abolishing love in order to effect pairing by rule. It is merely a question of limiting the possible number of mates from whom each may select a partner, and that, we must remember, has always been done even by savages, for, as it has been said, "eugenics is the oldest of the sciences." The question has merely been transformed. Instead of being limited mechanically by caste, we begin to see that the choice of sexual mates must be limited intelligently by actual fitness. Promiscuous marriages have never been the rule; the possibility of choice has always been narrow, and the most primitive peoples have exerted the most marked self-restraint. It is not so merely among remote races but among our own European ancestors. Throughout the whole period of Catholic supremacy the Canon law multiplied the impediments to matrimony, as by ordaining that consanguinity to the fourth degree (third cousins), as well as spiritual relationship, is an impediment, and by such arbitrary prohibitions limited the range of possible mates at least as much as it would be limited by the more reasonable dictates of eugenic considerations.

At the present day it may be said that the principle of the voluntary control of procreation, not for the selfish ends of the individual, but in order to extinguish disease, to limit human misery, and to raise the general level of humanity by substituting the ideal of quality for the vulgar ideal of mere quantity, is now generally accepted, alike by medical pathologists, embryologists and neurologists, and by sociologists and moralists.

It would be easy to multiply quotations from distinguished authorities on this point. Thus, Metchnikoff points out (Essais Optimistes, p. 419) that orthobiosis seems to involve the limitation of offspring in the fight against disease. Ballantyne concludes his great treatise on Antenanal Pathology with the statement that "Eugenics" or well-begetting, is one of the world's most pressing problems. Dr. Louise Robinovitch, the editor of the Journal of Mental Pathology, in a brilliant and thoughtful paper, read before the Rome Congress of Psychology in 1905, well spoke in the same sense: "Nations have not yet elevated the energy of genesic function to the dignity of an energy. Other energies known to us, even of the meanest grade, have long since been wisely utilized, and their activities based on the principle of the strictest possible economy. This economic utilization has been brought about, not through any enforcement of legislative restrictions, but through steadily progressive human intelligence. Economic handling of genesic function will, like the economic function of other energies, come about through a steady and progressive intellectual development of nations." "There are circumstances," says C.H. Hughes, ("Restricted Procreation," Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1908), "under which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal as the taking of a life already begun."