On the other hand reason must intervene. The instructive transports of maternal love soon require a counterpoise. It is important to prevent them from degenerating into unreasonable spoiling, by scientific and medical education of the infants. Modern medical art has made great progress in this direction, but unfortunately, egoism, negligence, routine, the desire of enjoyment, or often the poverty of many mothers prevent them from benefiting from this progress and applying it as they should. Instead of looking after their children they leave them to nurses. The latter may be necessary to help and instruct young wives during their first childbirth; but a natural mother will profit by these instructions and will herself become an excellent nurse, because she will feel her natural ties and will consecrate herself to them with the devotion of a maternal love heightened and refined by reason and knowledge. Among the lower classes the poverty and ignorance of mothers, often also their thoughtlessness and indolence, are an obstacle to the rational education of infants.
"Monkey's Love."—Maternal love thus constitutes the most important irradiation of the sexual instincts in woman. It very easily degenerates into weakness, that is to say into unreasonable passion and blind compliance with all the faults of the child, which the mother excuses and transforms into virtues. The foibles of maternal love do much harm to the child and are often the origin of bitter deceptions. Hereditary weakness of character here plays a great, or even the principal part. Nevertheless, maternal foibles have other causes—riches, absence of culture, idleness, too few children, etc.
The best antidote for this unreasonable maternal love, which the Germans call "monkey's love" consists in active occupations for the mother, combined with a healthy education of her character. Work alone is not sufficient, if the mother has limited ideas, and if she is not freed from routine, ignorance, superstition and weakness of will.
Sentiments and Perseverance.—The power of love in woman does not rest alone on the varied harmony of her sentiments of sympathy for her husband and children, and on the extraordinary finesse and natural tact which she adds to it; such qualities make her, no doubt, the ray of sunshine in the family life, but more powerful still are the tenacity and perseverance of her love.
In general, it is by will-power that woman is superior to man, and it is in the domain of love that this superiority shines in all its glory. As a general rule it is the wife who sustains the family. Among the common people, it is she who economizes, she who watches carefully over all and corrects the failings, the passionate and impulsive acts, the discouragements, so frequent with the husband. How often do we see the father abandon the children, waste his earnings and leave his situation under some futile pretext, while his courageous wife, although suffering from hunger and destitution, holds firm and manages to save the debris which has escaped the excesses and egoism of the husband.
The husband of a feeble or alcoholic wife sometimes becomes the sole support of the family, but such exceptions only prove the rule, that where the normal love and courage of woman are wanting, the family becomes broken up, for man very rarely possesses the necessary faculties for its preservation.
It follows from these facts that the modern tendency of women to become pleasure-seekers, and to take a dislike to maternity, leads to complete degeneration of society. This is a grave social evil, which rapidly changes the qualities and power of expansion of a race, and which must be cured in time, or the race affected by it will be supplanted by others.
If the feminine mind is generally wanting in intellectual imagination and power of combination, it is all the more powerful in the practical intuition of its judgment and in sentimental imagination. The finesse of its moral and æsthetic sentiments, its natural tact, its instructive desire to put some element of poetry into all the details of life, contribute to form true family happiness, a happiness which the husband and children too often enjoy without fully realizing the devoted labor, the love and the pains which the mother has given to create it.
Routine.—The reverse of the irradiations of love in woman is constituted by her failings, which we have already partly indicated. We may add that her intelligence is usually superficial, that she attributes an exaggerated importance to trifles, that she often does not understand the object of ideal conceptions, and remains attached by routine to all her hobbies. This routine represents in feminine psychology the excess of a tenacious will applied only to the repetition of what has been taught. In the family, woman constitutes the conservative element because sentiment in her much more than in man, combined with persevering tenacity, predominates over intelligence; but sentiments represent everywhere and always the conservative element in the human mind.
This is why woman is the strongest supporter of dogmas, customs, fashions, prejudices and mysticism. It is not that she herself is more disposed than man to mystic beliefs, but these when once dogmatized dazzle the eyes of the suffering with visions of compensation in a better world. In this way a number of unhappy or disappointed women are affected with religious exaltation and thus cling to the hope of happiness after death which they believe will compensate them for the vicissitudes of their existence.