It is certain even now that the customs and ways of thought, the artistic and emotional tendencies, which make up the atmosphere of love, unconsciously operate upon its selection to the advantage of the race. This also involves the possibility of such influence becoming conscious, when once it is clearly seen in what direction it ought to go, which are the spiritual and bodily properties that it is desired to eradicate or to enhance, and by what means the properties of the new generation may depend upon the choice of parents. But above all, racial considerations will operate indirectly in the same direction, so that love will be less and less likely to arise under conditions unfavourable to the race. Man is not inwardly a logical creature: les entrailles ne raisonnent pas, elles ne sont pas faites pour ça (George Sand). But by degrees our nature becomes unconsciously transformed through reciprocal influences: the body together with the soul, the soul together with the body; the desires through the thoughts, the thoughts through the desires. It is true that love’s selection will always remain a mystery—from this among many other causes, equally or more important. But the individual and universal qualities which in the main act as an attraction will gradually be more clearly perceived, more sought after by both sexes, and will have more weight in determining their choice.
We have already seen that a displacement of motives, a division of motive power, has during a certain period altered the character of love. Thus, as pointed out above, the influence of the spirit of the age was able during the age of chivalry, and again during the eighteenth century, to separate love both from marriage and from the mission of the race. By the same psychic process a new spirit of the age—full of the aspirations of evolution and determined by the religion of life—may restore this connection and make it closer than ever before. Then will mankind look for a new Blake to glorify the feeling of devotion which fills hearts and souls at the coinciding selection of personal love and of the racial sense, a coincidence which alone gives the certainty that
I am for you, and you are for me,
Not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes,
Envelop’d in you deep greater heroes and bards,
They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.[3]
Religion, poetry, art, and social custom have collaborated to elevate the racial feeling into love. They ought now to collaborate again to make the racial feeling conscious in love. The altars that the ancients raised to the divinities of procreation must be rebuilt. Not for men and women to assemble around them in frenzied orgies, in the red glow of sunset, but in the golden light of the morning and the joy of creative day.
Family feeling, ancestor-worship, pride of pure blood will regain, in a new sense, their decisive power over emotions and actions.
Thus will love’s freedom be limited—but not through idealistic philosophy’s abstract conceptions of citizenship and duty, nor yet through the hard-and-fast breeding rules of a Spartan evolutionism.
Freedom for love’s selection, under conditions favourable to the race; limitation of the freedom, not of love, but of procreation, when the conditions are unfavourable to the race—this is the line of life.