Seeing love between the sexes as the strongest and most dominant of the civilised passions, it is natural to infer that it was born of the instinctive attraction between male and female, and that this instinctive attraction, with the growth and expansion of faculty, mental and temperamental, has evolved to the high and tender issues to be found in latter-day romantic passion; theme of poets, novelists, artists; richest and most exquisite of life's emotions; inspiration and motive of the finest human achievements. A passion which, for a space at least, transfigures the natures and ennobles the lives of all but the crass and the sordid.
Nevertheless—Love did not arise out of sex. The sex-relation in primal men and women held no element of affection; no sympathy, tenderness, self-sacrifice, or other attribute of Love. On the part of the female, it was compulsory surrender and the habit of surrender to superior strength, mitigated, doubtless, by a subconscious instinct to secure offspring. In the male, it was impulse as tyrannous and selfish as was the instinct to kill. Like the instinct to kill, a factor in it made for fitness for survival. There was in it, accordingly, an element of instinctive selection. But the selection made for survival-fitness merely in the mate. It owed nothing to sentimental appeal exercised by one female, and lacking in another. The instinct to mate was implanted by Nature for the continuation of species. If its observance contained an element of gratification, it held no more of reciprocity than did the gratification of that stronger lust, to kill, include a consideration of the feelings of the prey, or than greed of any other form of possession extends a grace of reciprocal benefit to the thing acquired.
Modern savages have no conception of sexual love. There are no love-songs, no courtship, no affection in their matings. The males marry mainly in order to secure wives to work for them. And they select strong women because these are best fitted for work. Or they select women who have some or another small possession. Biological instinct is a factor, doubtless, but it is not a factor of sentiment.
In his fine book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Professor Drummond says:
"Probably we have all taken for granted that husbands and wives have always loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted ... in the lower reaches of Human Nature, husband and wife do not love one another ... for the vast mass of mankind during the long ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all but unknown....
"The idea that the existence of sex accounts for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among early races has nothing to do with love. Among savage peoples, the phenomenon everywhere confronts us of wedded life without a grain of love. Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex-relation; it is not an outgrowth of passion. Love is love and has always been love, and has never been anything lower."
Even to-day, despite the evolution of the higher faculties, despite long centuries of inherited habit and tradition, and despite the circumstance that in all the nobler types of men and women the sex-instinct is spiritualised by affection and understanding—Even in this late day of civilisation, the male sex-instinct may be seen still in all its native tyranny and selfishness; seeking gratification in sensuality and cruelty, with callous disregard alike of the welfare as of the suffering of its victim. In the violation of women and children that occurs both in peace and in war, the instinct manifests as an impulse of aggression, and the sex-function as one of brutality or ruthless lust.
IV
Respecting the origin of Mind and Emotion, Charles Darwin said:
"In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself first originated."