There are two different viewpoints from which we may discuss all phases of Life, namely, the mystical and the ethical. The mystic sees all life from the inside, as it were; and the physicist studies the exterior, the appearance. To the mystic, the visible, or external, world is a succession of symbols, which he must interpret. To him, the everlasting and fundamental truths of the Cosmos are told in a succession of moving pictures. In fact, the mystic has long anticipated the art which we now see manifested in our film-theatres and has realized that the scenes, which appear to the eye as actual events, are but the reflection of scenes enacted in a place far distant and long before the moment of projection upon the screen which meets his eye.
Science examines, dissects, and classifies these symbols according to their relation to other symbols which the mind has previously noted and classified. The same conclusion awaits both Science and Mysticism.
Humanity is ever seeking the Reality—the Noumenon, which we intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena of Nature.
The institution of marriage, coming down to us through all the ages, side by side with the mystery of sex, and incorporated with the sex-mystery into every form and system of religious rites and ceremonials among all peoples, would seem to have a place in human ethics, as substantial and as permanent as the germ of life itself.
Indeed, the institution of marriage, in its first stages of evolution, obtains in the animal kingdom, where selection in a great variety of forms is common.
And it must be confessed that here we find the same tendency to change and variation, both in regard to the individual and the family species, as we have in the human family.
Polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, have been general among some animals while among others only one form of mating has been the rule.
Strange to say, sex promiscuity is not at all general among the animals, though polygamy is common. The adoption of polygamy is obviously due to one of two things, or possibly, to be more specific, to both. First, because the percentage of deaths among the males is greater than among the females; this applies to animal life, both wild and domestic. In wild life, because of frequent combats; in domestic life, because the females are kept for breeding while the males are slaughtered for food.
The second reason is because the female is seldom as virile as the male, and to this is also added the debilitating effect of bearing and rearing the young, the necessity for which must have manifested itself very early among the various families, from motives of self-protection, if from nothing higher, since victory evidently favored the numerically strong.
In bird-life, especially, where love is so vital a part of their life, and so beautifully expressed, monogamy is the rule, and in some species, like that of the robin, a certain aristocracy seems to exist, preventing intercourse with any other family. The robin will mate only with a robin, and not infrequently mates for life; which is to say that should one die, the other refuses to mate again.