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Title: How Sentiments Change And Grow Author: Henry Theophilus Finck [More Titles by Finck] In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such a strong and elemental passion, is most easily shaken in this _a priori_ position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings in our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. The love of grand, wild scenery, for instance--what we call romantic scenery--is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskin tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery "comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress."
NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens, jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. "In the Australian bush," writes Tylor (_P.C._, II., 203), "demons whistle in the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to seize the wayfarer;" and Powers writes in regard to California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable horror:
NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful, infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now, without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. The moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names--"The Rioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The Murderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous, revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They are demoralized heathen--monster expressions of moral corruption" (Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat each other just as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of the dead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, _P.R_., I., 275). It might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery, revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his gods cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quite true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge, murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, are altogether too coarse and callous to be able to experience the higher religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful observer (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 291) says:
If any pious reader of such details--which might he multiplied a thousand-fold--still believes that religious emotion (like love!) is the same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings during worship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway those who participate in a religious ceremony like that described in the following passage taken from Rowney's _Wild Tribes of India_ (105). It refers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the God of War, the victims of which, both male and female, are often bought young and brought up for this special purpose: Still more horrible details of these sacrifices are supplied by Dalton: "Major Macpherson notes that the Meriah in some "Colonel Campbell thus describes the _modus operandi_ in In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild tribes of India. Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterly abhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but a well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbe Dubois, declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements of Hindoo religious life:
More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings of their deities. The _Bhagavata_ is a book which deals with the adventures of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 205):
Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship--the eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient gods. The progress--like the Evolution of Romantic Love--has been from the sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highest religious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration that of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still very far from that lofty ideal.
Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined agnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just as there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never will know the emotions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seem so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans? I offer this consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory. The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change with our ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to suppose that a man whose ideas in regard to the nature of his gods do not prevent him from flogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same as those of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, says to his revered Creator: "Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven," and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in the religious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it so unlikely that the sexual passion, too, should "suffer a sea change into something rich and strange?" The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion that love is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact that the comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has been strangely neglected. Anthropology, the Klondike of the comparative psychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than the absence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civilized nations who had not yet discovered the nobler super-sensual fascinations which women are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in that science show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into its present exalted form. I will illustrate this assertion with reference to one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pages regarding virtues relating to the sexual sphere and directly connected with the subject of this book.
MURDER AS A VIRTUE The committing of wilful murder is looked on with unutterable horror in modern civilized communities, yet it took eons of time and the co-operation of many religious, social, and moral agencies before the idea of the sanctity of human life became what it is now when it might be taken for an instinct inherent in human nature itself. How far it is from being such an instinct we shall see by looking at the facts. Among the lowest races and even some of the higher barbarians, murder, far from being regarded as a crime, is honored as a virtue and a source of glory. An American Indian's chief pride and claim to tribal honor lies in the number of scalps he has torn from the heads of men he has killed. Of the Fijian, Williams says:
Dalton says of the Oraons in India: "It is doubtful if they see any moral guilt in murder." But the most astounding race of professional murderers are the Dyaks of Borneo. "Among them," says Earl, "the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected." "The white man reads," said a Dyak to St. John: "_we_ hunt heads instead." "Our Dyaks," says Charles Brooke, "were eternally requesting to be allowed to go for heads, and their urgent entreaties often bore resemblance to children crying after sugar-plums." "An old Dyak," writes Dalton, "loves to dwell upon his success on these hunting excursions, and the terror of the women and children taken affords a fruitful theme of amusement at their meetings." Dalton speaks of one expedition from which seven hundred heads were brought home. The young women were carried off, the old ones killed and all the men's heads were cut off. Not that the women always escaped. Among the Dusun, as a rule, says Preyer,
SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS. In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present. In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up only a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--the others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. "The aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp" (Fison and Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the words of Professor Robertson Smith:
These facts have long been familiar to students of anthropology, but their true significance has been obscured by the additional information that many tribes addicted to infanticide, nevertheless displayed a good deal of "affection" toward those whom they spared. A closer examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is no true affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for the little ones, chiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification it affords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent to inherited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only in self-sacrifice; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for their children is the one quality most lacking in these child-murderers. Sentimentalists, with their usual lack of insight and logical sense, have endeavored to excuse these assassins on the ground that necessity compelled them to destroy their infants. Their arguments have misled even so eminent a specialist as Professor E.B. Tylor into declaring (_Anthropology,_ 427) that "infanticide comes from hardness of life rather than from hardness of heart." What he means, may be made clear by reference to the case of the Arabs who, living in a desert country, were in constant dread of suffering from scarcity of food; wherefore, as Robertson Smith remarks (281), "to bury a daughter was regarded not only as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible if the reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe." This explains the murders in question but does not show them to be excusable; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishness and hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infants than restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the children they could provide for. In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as much semblance of an excuse as the Arabs. Turner relates (284) that in the New Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposed that they could not attend to more than two or three, all the others were buried alive; in other words the babes were murdered to save trouble and allow the men to live in indolence. In the instances from India referred to above, various trivial excuses for female infanticide were offered: that it would save the expenses connected with the marriage rites; that it was cheaper to buy girls than to bring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes; that male births are increased by the destruction of female infants; and that it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them to grow up and become causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians, says Williams, there is in infanticide "no admixture of anything like religious feeling or fear, but _merely whim, expediency, anger, or indolence_." Sometimes the general idea of woman's inferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleading missionary: "Why should she live? Will she wield a club? Will she poise a spear?" But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide reached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their children because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; or because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to suffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because they liked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no other reason than because they could not make them stop crying. So they buried them alive though they might be months or even years old (Ellis, _P.R_., IV., 240). These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardness of heart"--sensual, selfish indulgence--that smothers the parental instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring. In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings. But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on that there are other things in which animals are superior not only to savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.
HONORABLE POLYGAMY Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find further interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow. The monogamous sentiment--the feeling that a man and his wife belong to each other exclusively--is now so strong that a person who commits bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprison him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable people will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to make polygamy a feature of their religion, but in 1882 Congress passed a law suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamous sentiment exist "always and everywhere?" Livingstone relates (_M.S.A._, I., 306-312) that the King of the Beetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor had only one wife:
In Equatorial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that he can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and calls him a stingy fellow if he declines to do so" (Reade, 259). Livingstone (_N.E.Z._, 284) says of the Makalolo women:
King Solomon was held in honor though he had unnumbered wives, concubines, and virgins at his disposal. How far the sentiment of monogamy--one of the essential ingredients of Romantic Love--had penetrated the skulls of American Indians may be inferred from the amusing and typical details related by the historian Parkman (_O.T._, chap. xi.) of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, among whom he sojourned. The man most likely to become the next chief was a fellow named Mahto-Tatonka, whose father had left a family of thirty, which number the young man was evidently anxious to beat: Thus the admiration of the men, the love (Indian style) of the women, and the certainty of the chieftainship--the highest honor accessible to an Indian--were the rewards of actions which in a civilized community would soon bring such a "brave" to the gallows. Some of the agencies by which the belief that wife-stealing and polygamy are honorable was displaced by the modern sentiment in favor of monogamy, will be considered later on. Here I simply wish to enforce the additional moral that not only the _ideas_ regarding bigamy and polygamy have changed, but the _emotions_ aroused by such actions; execration having taken the place of admiration. Judging by such cases, is it likely that ideas concerning women and love could change so utterly as they have since the days of the ancient Greeks, without changing the emotions of love itself? Sentiments consist of ideas and emotions. If both are altered, the sentiments must have changed as a matter of course. Let us take as a further example the sentiment of modesty.
CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY There are many Christian women who, if offered the choice between death and walking naked down the street, would choose death as being preferable to eternal disgrace and social suicide. If they preferred the other alternative, they would be arrested and, if known to be respectable, sent to an insane asylum. The English legend relates that "peeping Tom" was struck blind because he did not stay in the house as commanded when the good Lady Godiva was obliged to ride naked through the market-place. So strong, indeed, is the sentiment of modesty in our community that the old-fashioned philosophers used to maintain it was an innate instinct, always present under normal conditions. The fact that every child has to be gradually taught to avoid indecent exposure, ought to have enlightened these philosophers as to their error, which is further made plain to the orthodox by the Biblical story that in the beginning of human life the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed. Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man wherever climatic and other motives do not prescribe dress. Writing of the Arabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (_N.T.A_., 265):
Max Buchner gives a graphic description (1878) of the nude female surf swimmers in the Hawaiian Islands. Nor is this indifference to nudity manifested only by these primitive races. In Japan, to the present day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely by a partition, two or three feet high.[8] Zoeller relates of the Cholos of Ecuador (_P. and A_., 364) that "men and women bathe together in the rivers with a naivete surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders." A writer in the _Ausland_ (1870, p. 294) reports that in Paraguay he saw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for the sun to dry it, they stood by naked calmly smoking their cigars.
But natural indifference to nudity is the least of the curiosities of modesty. Sometimes nakedness is actually prescribed by law or by strict etiquette. In Rohl all women who are not Arabic are forbidden to wear clothing of any sort. The King of Mandingo allowed no women, not even princesses, to approach him unless they were naked (Hellwald, 77-8). Dubois (I., 265) says that in some of the southern provinces of India the women of certain castes must uncover their body from the head to the girdle when speaking to a man: "It would be thought a want of politeness and good breeding to speak to men with that part of the body clothed." In his travels among the Cameroon negroes Zoeller (II., 185) came across a strange bit of religious etiquette in regard to nudity. The women there wear nothing but a loin cloth, except in case of a death, when, like ourselves, they appear all in black--with a startling difference, however. One day, writes Zoeller,
According to Gill, the Papuans of Southwestern New Guinea "glory in their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women." There are many places where the women alone were clothed, while in others the women alone were naked. Mtesa, the King of Uganda, who died in 1884, inflicted the death penalty on any man who dared to approach him without having every inch of his legs carefully covered; but the women who acted as his servants were stark naked (Hellwald, 78). While the etiquette of modesty is thus subject to an endless variety of details, every nation and tribe enforces its own ideal of propriety as the only correct thing. In Tahiti and Tonga it would be considered highly indecent to go about without being tattooed. Among Samoans and other Malayans the claims of propriety are satisfied if only the navel is covered. "The savage tribes of Sumatra and Celebes have a like feeling about the knee, which is always carefully covered" (Westermarck, 207). In China it is considered extremely indecent if a woman allows her bare feet to be seen, even by her husband, and a similar idea prevails among some Turkish women, who carefully wrap up their feet before they go to bed (Ploss, I., 344). Hindoo women must not show their faces, but it is not improper to wear a dress so gauzy that the whole figure is revealed through it. "In Moruland," says Emin Bey,
Another paradox remains to be noted. Anthropologists have now proved beyond all possibility of doubt that modesty, far from having led to the use of clothing, was itself merely a secondary consequence of the gradual adoption of apparel as a protection. They have also shown[10] that the earliest forms of dress were extremely scanty, and were intended not to cover certain parts of the body, but actually and wantonly to call attention to them, while in other cases the only parts of the body habitually covered were such as we should consider it no special impropriety to leave uncovered. But enough has been said to demonstrate what we started out to prove: that the strong sentiment of modesty in our community--so strong that many insist it must be part and parcel of human nature (like love!)--has, like all the other sentiments here discussed, grown up slowly from microscopic beginnings.
INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY Closely connected with modesty, and yet entirely distinct from it, is another and still stronger sentiment--the regard for chastity. Many an American officer whose brave wife accompanied him in a frontier war has been asked by her to promise that he would shoot her with his own revolver rather than let her fall into the clutches of licentious Indians. Though deliberate murder is punishable by death, no American jury has ever convicted a man for slaying the seducer of his wife, daughter, or sister. Modern law punishes rape with death, and its victim is held to have suffered a fate worse than death. The brightest of all jewels in a bride's crown of virtues is chastity--a jewel without which all the others lose their value. Yet this jewel of jewels formerly had no more value than a pebble in a brook-bed. The sentiment in behalf of chastity had no existence for ages, and for a long time after it came into existence chastity was known not as a virtue but only as a necessity, inculcated by fear of punishment or loss of worldly advantages. In support of this statement a whole volume might be written; but as abundant evidence will be given in later chapters relating to the lower races in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, America, and Asia, only a few instances need be cited here. In his recent work on the _Origin and Growth of the Moral Sense_ (1898), Alexander Sutherland, an Australian author, writes (I., 180):
De Varigny, who lived forty years in the Hawaiian Islands, says that "the chief difficulty of the missionaries in the
What Dalton says of the Chilikata Mishmis, one of the wild tribes of India, applies to many of the lower races in all parts of the world:
The wide prevalence in all parts of the world of the custom of lending or exchanging wives, or offering wife or daughter to a guest,[11] also bears witness to the utter indifference to chastity, conjugal and maiden; as does the custom known as the _jus primae noctis._ Dr. Karl Schmidt has tried very hard to prove that such a "right" to the bride never existed. But no one can read his treatises without noting that his argument rests on a mere quibble, the word _jus_. There may have been no codified _law_ or "right" allowing kings, bishops, chiefs, landlords, medicine men, and priests to claim brides first, but that the _privilege_ existed in various countries and was extensively made use of, there can be no doubt. Westermarck (73-80), Letourneau (56-62), Ploss (I., 400-405), and others have collected abundant proofs. Here I have room for only a few instances, showing that those whom we would consider the _victims_ of such a horrible custom, not only submitted to it with resignation, but actually looked on it as an _honor_ and a highly coveted privilege. "Navarette tells us that, on the coast of Malabar, the "Egede informs us that the women of Greenland thought "In Cumana the priests, who were regarded as holy,
Chastity, modesty, polygamy, murder, religion, and nature have now furnished us an abundance of illustrations showing the changeableness and former non-existence of sentiments which in us are so strong that we are inclined to fancy they must have been the same always and everywhere. Before proceeding to prove that romantic love is another sentiment of which the same may be said, let us pause a moment to discuss a sentiment which presents one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of love, the Horror of Incest.
HORROR OF INCEST A young man does not fall in love with his sister though she be the most attractive girl he knows. Nor does her father fall in love with her, nor the mother with the son, or the son with the mother. Not only is there no sexual love between them, but the very idea of marriage fills their mind with unutterable horror, and in the occasional cases where such a marriage is made through ignorance of the relationship, both parties usually commit suicide, though they are guiltless of deliberate crime. Here we have the most striking and absolute proof that circumstances, habits, ideas, laws, customs, can and do utterly annihilate sexual love in millions of individuals. Why then should it be so unlikely that the laws and customs of the ancient Greeks, for instance, with their ideas about women and marriage, should have prevented the growth of sentimental love? Note the modesty of my claim. While it is certain that both the sensual and the sentimental sides of sexual love are stifled by the horror of incest, all that I claim in regard to ancient and primitive races is that the sentimental side of love was smothered by unfavorable circumstances and hindered in growth by various obstacles which will be described later on in this volume. Surely this is not such a reckless theory as it seemed to some of my critics. Like the other sentiments discussed in this chapter, the horror of incest has been found to be absent among races in various stages of development. Incestuous unions occurred among Chippewas and other American Indians. Of the Peruvian Indians, Garcilasso de la Vega says that some cohabited with their sisters, daughters, or mothers; similar facts are recorded of some Brazilians, Polynesians, Africans, and wild tribes of India. "Among the Annamese, according to a missionary who has lived among them for forty years, no girl who is twelve years old and has a brother is a virgin" (Westermarck, 292). Gypsies allow a brother to marry a sister, while among the Veddahs of Ceylon the marriage of a man with his younger sister is considered _the_ proper marriage. In the Indian Archipelago and elsewhere there are tribes who permit marriage between parents and their children. The legends of India and Hindoo theology abound in allusions to incestuous unions, and a nation's mythology reflects its own customs. According to Strabo the ancient Irish married their mothers and sisters. Among the love-stories of the ancient Greeks, as we shall see later on, there are a surprising number the subject of which is incest, indicating that that crime was of not infrequent occurrence. But it is especially by royal personages that incest has been practised. In ancient Persia, Parthia, Egypt, and other countries the kings married their own sisters, as did the Incas of Peru, for political reasons, other women being regarded as too low in rank to become queens; and the same phenomenon occurs in Hawaii, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, Madagascar, etc. In some cases incestuous unions for kings and priests are even prescribed by religion. At the licentious festivals common among tribes in America, Africa, India, and elsewhere, incest was one of the many forms of bestiality indulged in; this gives it a wide prevalence. Much ingenuity has been expended in attempts to account for the origin of the horror of incest. The main reason why it has so far remained more or less of a mystery, is that each writer advanced a single cause, which he pressed into service to explain all the facts, the result being confusion and contradiction. In my opinion different agencies must be assumed in different cases. When we find among Australians, American Indians (and even the Chinese), customs, enforced by the strongest feelings, forbidding a man to marry a woman belonging to the same clan or having the same surname, though not at all related, while allowing a marriage with a sister or other near blood relative, we are obviously not dealing with a question of incest at all, but with some of the foolish taboos prevalent among these races, the origin of which they themselves have forgotten. Mr. Andrew Lang probably hit the nail on the head when he said (258) in regard to the rule which compels savages to marry only outside of the tribe, that these prohibitions "must have arisen in a stage of culture when ideas of kindred were confused, included kinship with animals and plants, and were to us almost, if not quite, unintelligible." To speak of instinct and natural selection teaching the Veddahs to abhor marriage with an elder sister while making union with a younger sister _the_ proper marriage (Westermarck, 292) is surely to assume that instinct and natural selection act in an asinine way, which they never do--except in asses. In a second class of cases, where lower races have ideas similar to ours, I believe that the origin of domestic chastity must be sought in utilitarian practices. In the earlier stages of marriage, girls are usually bought of their parents, who profit by the sale or barter. Now when a man marries a girl to be his wife and maid of all work, he does not want to take her to his home hampered by a bevy of young children. Fathers guilty of incestuous practices would therefore be unable to dispose of their daughters to advantage, and thus a prejudice in favor of domestic purity would gradually arise which a shrewd medicine man would some day raise to the rank of a religious or social taboo. As regards modern society, Darwin, Brinton, Hellwald, Bentham, and others have advocated or endorsed the view that the reason why such a horror of incestuous unions prevails, is that novelty is the chief stimulus to the sexual feelings, and that the familiarity of the same household breeds indifference. I do not understand how any thinker can have held such a view for one moment. When Bentham wrote (_Theory of Legislation_, pt. iii., chap. V.) that "individuals accustomed to see each other from an age which is capable neither of conceiving desire nor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the end of life," he showed infinitely less knowledge of human nature than the author of _Paul and Virginia_, who makes a boy and a girl grow up almost like brother and sister, and at the proper time fall violently in love with one another. Who cannot recall in his own experience love marriages of schoolmates or of cousins living in intimate association from their childhood? To say that such bringing up together creates "indifference" is obviously incorrect; to say that it leads to "aversion" is altogether unwarranted; and to trace to it such a feeling as our horror at the thought of marrying a sister, or mother, is simply preposterous. The real source of the horror of incest in civilized communities was indicated more than two thousand years ago by Plato. He believed that the reason why incestuous unions were avoided and abhorred, was to be found in the constant inculcation, at home and in literature, that
Absolute proof that the horror of incest is not innate lies furthermore in the unquestionable fact that a man can escape the calamity of falling in love with his sister or daughter only if he _knows_ the relationship. There are many instances on record--to which the daily press adds others--of incestuous unions brought about by ignorance of the consanguinity. Oedipus was not saved by an instinct from marrying his mother. It was only after the discovery of the relationship that his mind was filled with unutterable horror, while his wife and mother committed suicide. This case, though legendary, is typical--a mirror of actuality--showing how potent _ideas_ are to alter _emotions_. Yet I am assailed for asserting that the Greeks and the lower races, whose ideas regarding women, love, polygamy, chastity, and marriage were so different from ours, also differed from us in their feelings--the quality of their love. There were numerous obstacles to overcome before romantic love was able to emerge--obstacles so serious and diverse that it is a wonder they were ever conquered. But before considering those obstacles it will be advisable to explain definitely just what romantic love is and how it differs from the sensual "love" or lust which, of course, has always existed among men as among other animals. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |