Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

It is true enough that human beings are often weaker in execution than in resolve. But then they must content themselves with enlarging old ideas of morality, for such as they are not called to make new morals. And it is true that life occasionally lends an unexpected hand in the correction of a mistake; but as a rule the consequences are as the cause. A woman who for purely selfish reasons shuns motherhood will thus usually show herself to be a mistress without affection; a wife who breaks loose from a marriage before she has tried to extract from it its possibilities of happiness will probably throw away her chances in the same way in a new one. No relation can be better than the persons who compose it. This law is so inflexible that the administration of moral justice might confidently be left to time. This does not imply that love, more than any other expression of life, can be withdrawn from human arbitration, but it implies that such arbitration will be faulty when it is decided by the forms of a union instead of by its results. Here we are on the watershed between the old and the new morality. The course of the former is determined by doubts of, and that of the latter by belief in, the resources of the power in human nature. The doubts of the former lead to the obligation of the individual to submit himself to the claims of society; the belief of the latter leads to the liberty of the individual to choose his own duty to society. On account of the weakness of human nature, and of consequent care for the well-being of society, the conservatives claim that the individual must convince society in advance of his willingness to serve its ends in his love, by renouncing a part of his easily misused liberty. On account of the richness of human nature and the claims of development, the reformers demand for the individual the right of serving the community with his love according to his own choice, and of using the freedom of his love under his own responsibility.

He who does not allow his eye to be caught by the light straws that float and are lost upon the stream of time will soon become aware that the new morality is growing deeper and deeper with fresh tributaries.

Christian morality starts from the conception of human nature as complete in its constitution though not in its culture, and of a human being divided into body and soul. The soul is of divine origin, but fallen, and must be raised again by a process of culture determined by religion, the object of which is that mankind may attain the ideal provided by religion, that is, Christ.

There is another morality which rests—or which rested—upon the belief in the inborn divinity of human nature and the equality of all men; this belief ended in the efforts of the eighteenth century towards universal welfare, and in the expectation that liberty, equality, and fraternity could be realised even with the existing human material.

The new morality, on the other hand, adopts humanism in the form of evolutionism. It is determined by a monistic belief in the soul and body as two forms of the same existence; by the belief of evolutionism that man’s psycho-physical being is neither fallen nor perfect, but capable of perfection; that it is susceptible of modification for the very reason that it is not constitutively completed. Both utilitarian and Christian humanism saw “culture,” “progress,” and “development” in man’s improvement of material and non-material resources within and without himself. But evolutionism knows that all this has only been the preparation for a development which is to improve and ennoble the very material of mankind, hitherto, so to speak, only experimentally produced.

Our present “nature” means only what, at this stage of development, is psychologically and physiologically necessary that we may exist as people of a certain time, a certain race, a certain nation. Hairiness was once “nature,” as nakedness is now. Marriage by capture was once “natural,” as courtship is now. What new transformations the race is destined to undergo; what losses and gains, at present unsuspected, of organs and senses, faculties and properties of the soul, await it—this is the secret of the future. But the more mankind is convinced of its power of intervening in its own development, the more necessary does a conscious purpose become. We must understand what obstructions we will root out, what roads we will block up, and what sacrifices we will impose upon ourselves.

The new morality is in the stage of enquiry on many questions—such as labour, crime, and education—but above all on the sexual life. Even on this question it no longer accepts commandments from the mountains of Sinai or Galilee; here as everywhere else evolutionism can only regard continuous experience as revelation. Evolutionism does not reject the results of historical experience, nor the fruits of Christian-human civilisation—even if it were possible to “reject” what has become soul and blood in humanity. But it regards the course of historical civilisation that lies behind us as a battle-field of mutually conflicting ideas and purposes, with no more conscious plan than the warfare of savages. Not until humanity chooses its ends and its means—and makes its more immediate end the enhancement of all that is at present characteristic of humanity—not until it begins to measure all its other gains and losses by the degree in which they further or retard that enhancement, will it also adopt the right attitude towards its inheritance from former ages. Then it will reject what hinders and select what assists its struggle for the strengthening of its position as humanity and its elevation to super-humanity.

We stand on the verge of a stage of culture which will be that of the depths, not, as hitherto, of the surface alone; a stage which will not be merely a culture through mankind, but culture of mankind. For the first time, the great fashioners of culture will be able to work in marble, instead of, as hitherto, being forced to work in snow. The true relation between the rights of the individual and those of the race will become in the field of love as important as the relation between the rights of the individual and those of society in the field of labour. The conditions of labour raise or lower the value of the present as well as of the future generation. The same holds good—and in an even higher degree—of the conditions of love.