[Contents]CHAPTER III.CHASTITY.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—Losing their beauty and their native grace,with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.[Contents]E.—REFORM.Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]
[Contents]CHAPTER III.CHASTITY.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—Losing their beauty and their native grace,with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.[Contents]E.—REFORM.Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]
[Contents]CHAPTER III.CHASTITY.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—Losing their beauty and their native grace,with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.[Contents]E.—REFORM.Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]
CHAPTER III.CHASTITY.
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—Losing their beauty and their native grace,with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.[Contents]E.—REFORM.Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49]
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49]
The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of[46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.
In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.
The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct ofsexual selectionseems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages[47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.
And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of itsdirection. For, while the sexual instinct,per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers tothe composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek thecomplementof their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, andvice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice[48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.
In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.[49]
[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.
In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”
And if marriages are planned in heaven, that[50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.
[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.
C.—PERVERSION.
The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.
The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as anà-priorisafeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism[51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a mannot to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrationsà laOrigenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.
In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria[52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.
[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—Losing their beauty and their native grace,with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—Losing their beauty and their native grace,with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.
Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract[53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—
Losing their beauty and their native grace,
Losing their beauty and their native grace,
with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolutene plus ultraof imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:
Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)
The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries[54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.
[Contents]E.—REFORM.Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]
E.—REFORM.
Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]
Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.
Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted[55]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.
In a community ofReformants(as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.[56]