“We do not,” Albert continues, “regard the province of the sexual life in the society of the future as an Eden, wherein those individuals best suited one to the other will come together with mathematical certainty, to lead a cloudless existence. Just as to-day, there will be unrequited love, uncertain search and endeavour, errors and deceptions, misunderstandings, satiety, aberrations, and sorrows. However great the material prosperity may be which mankind in the future will enjoy, the life of feeling will always remain the source of incalculable disturbances, and love will not be the rarest cause of such disturbances; but still a large proportion of the existing causes of pain can and must disappear.”
The indispensable preliminary to free love is the complete equality of man and woman. This, however, can only be attained by means of communism—that is to say, by that ordering of society in which property and wages cease to exist, in which not only the means of production, but also all the articles of consumption, are appropriated to the common use, and woman will no longer possess a commercial value, as she does at the present day.
Like Albert, Ladislaus Gumplowicz[199] also believes that free love can only be realized in a collectivist community.
However important it is to draw attention to the economic point of view, as was done before Albert and Gumplowicz by Bebel, in his celebrated “Woman and Socialism” (thirty-fourth edition, Stuttgart, 1903), still, it appears to me that the communistic solution is not the only possible solution, and that free love can very well be associated with the preservation of private property.[200]
While the progressive changes in the economic structure of society powerfully influence sexual relationships and lay down the rules for their existing forms, still, physiological individual factors play a great part also in the matter. The first to insist on this fact were the Englishman Carpenter and the Swedish writer Ellen Key.[201]
Edward Carpenter,[202] at one time a priest in the Anglican Church, in his study of the question of free love, without ignoring the economic factor, lays stress above all on the psychical factor, the inward spiritual relationship between man and wife.
He writes (op. cit., p. 120):
“It is in the very nature of Love that as it realizes its own aim it should rivet always more and more towards a durable and distinct relationship, nor rest till the permanent mate and equal is found. As human beings progress, their relations to each other must become much more definite and distinct, instead of less so—and there is no likelihood of society in its onward march lapsing backwards, so to speak, to formlessness again.”
Above all, Carpenter has introduced into the discussion of free love an element which to me appears of great importance from the medical standpoint: the question of relative asceticism, of self-control. He rightly considers that the duty of the love of the future does not subsist merely in the common physical union, but also in spiritual procreation. From the intimate spiritual contact between two differentiated personalities, the highest spiritual values proceed. Only self-control leads us to this highest love.
“It is a matter of common experience that the unrestrained outlet of merely physical desire leaves the nature drained of its higher love-forces.... Any one who has once realized how glorious a thing Love is in its essence, and how indestructible, will hardly need to call anything that leads to it a sacrifice” (op. cit., pp. 7, 8).