In a higher ideal of Justice, the sexes being equal in rights, love will have a higher end; the spouses will unite on account of conformity of principles, union of hearts, wedding of intellects, common labor: love will join them to double their strength, to modify them by each other, from the friction of their hearts will be struck out sentiments which neither would have had alone; from the union of their intellects will be born thoughts which neither would have had alone; from the aid that they will lend each other in their common labor will proceed works that neither would have accomplished alone, as from the union of their whole being, will be born new generations more perfect than the preceding because they will be the product of the greatest possible harmony. It will be only when woman shall take her lawful place that humanity will see love in all its splendor, and that this passion, subversive to-day in inequality and incoherence, will become what it should be; one of the great instruments of Progress.

We, my children, who are too rational to mistake the means by which Nature impels us to accomplish her designs for the designs themselves, will take care not to fancy that the end of love is pleasure; on the other hand, we have too much respect for equality to imagine that it is for the benefit of one sex alone. We will remain faithful to the ideal of our lofty destinies, in defining love as the reciprocal attraction of man and woman with the end of perpetuating the species, of improving the partners mutually with respect to intellect and feeling, and of advancing science, art and industry by the labor of the pair.

IV.

Sophists have told you, my son, that all our inclinations are in Nature; that they are good and should be respected.

You asked them doubtless whether the inclinations to theft, to assassination, to violation, to anthropophagy, which are in Nature, are good, and why, instead of respecting them, society punishes their manifestation.

You demonstrated to them, I hope, that there is nothing commendable in the exaggeration or the perversion of instincts.

You demonstrated to them, I hope, that Nature is brutal fatality against which we are bound to struggle both within and without ourselves; that our Justice and virtue are composed only of conquests made over it in us, as all that constitutes our physical well-being is only the result of conquests made over it outside of us.

These sophists have told you that love comes and goes without our knowing how or wherefore; and that we can no more command it to spring up than to endure.

This is true, my son, of the brutal desires of the flesh, which is the passion of animals alone, and is extinguished by possession.

This is also true of that complex passion which has its seat in the imagination and the senses, and ends with the illusion that is always of short duration.