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