In modern human civilized life instincts in general, even irrespective of the sex of the person in whom they are manifested, are the worst possible guides. The love instinct is also among the worst, simply because its present-day vestiges are so overlaid with restrictions and conventions that it cannot be seen clearly. It has been so inhibited that it needs an apologist.
When looking at the two broad divisions of egoistic-social and love instincts, one has to have demonstrated the essential superiority of the love instinct and its far greater ability to cause happiness, health, and, in the deepest sense, success.
Over two thousand years ago Aristotle saw, and said, that the greatest satisfaction comes from fullest use of all one’s powers. Today we are beginning to realize, after the study of the ductless glands, that there is a kind of reaction in the body not mediated by nerves, as are muscular reactions, and that we have, in the hormones, a mode of interaction between the parts of the body that has been as yet unnoted by physiologist and psychologist alike, an interaction that places marriage in the forefront as a necessity not only for health but for the fullest development of our latent powers.
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For among the dozen or so ductless glands, which Berman[16] has called an “interlocking directorate” of all the human activities, is the interstitial gland which places in circulation in the blood a hormone that vitalizes all the secretions of all the other glands, and which requires for its own perfect working the concomitant and synchronous perfect working of the homologous gland in the mate, in the other demi-human of the complete social unit. In other words perfect physiological health is secured in no better way than by marrying provided marriage is complete marriage and not merely a “Platonic” or business relation.
From these considerations it is evident that as motives for action that leads to happiness, the erotic instincts (if we can succeed in extracting their ore from the mine of our unconscious and refining it from the dross of egoistic-social accretions) are infinitely superior to the egoistic-social.