CHAPTER I
THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT OF SEXUAL MORALITY
All thoughtful persons perceive that the ideas of the morality of sexual relations upheld by the religions and laws of the Western nations are in our time undergoing a radical transformation.
Like all other such changes, this one is opposed by the distrust of the guardians of society, a distrust which is based upon the view that human beings lack the power of themselves directing their development on an upward course. According to these critics, this direction is the concern of transcendental reason, which expresses itself in the real and thus causes the real to become rational. Marriage as it exists is a historically produced reality, and therefore also rational. Historical continuity—as well as religious and ethical needs—must entail the permanence of the actual institution of marriage as an indispensable condition of the existence of society.
The reformers leave transcendental reason on one side. But they too acknowledge the connection between the real and the rational to this extent, that what has been real, has also been rational—so long as in certain given sociological and psychological conditions it has answered best the needs of humanity in some particular direction. They acknowledge the necessity of fixed laws and customs, since these alone intensify the feelings into sources of impulse, strong enough to be translated into action. They perceive that the conservative, tenacious emotions have the same importance for the soul as the skeleton for the body.
But the historical necessity, on the other hand, according to which it is alleged that mankind awaits and surrenders itself to a fate over which it has no control, is to these reformers an absurdity. The “historical necessity” in every age is the realised will of the strongest men, either in number or character, realised in the degree in which nature and history favour their exercise of power. The reformers know that the Western institution of marriage has arisen partly from the permanent, physico-psychological causes of the maintenance of the race, partly from historical causes which were transitory, although their effects in this domain, as in many others, still continue. They know that of all the fabrics of society marriage is the most complicated, the most delicate, and the most significant; they understand, therefore, that the majority must be seized with terror when the shrine of so many generations is threatened.
But they know also that all life is subject to transformation; that each transformation involves the death of once active realities, and the formation of new ones. They know that this dying-off and replacing never takes place uniformly; that laws and customs, which have become a drag upon the lives of those in a better position, are still of advantage to the majority, and therefore ought to continue in existence as long as they remain so. But they know at the same time that it is through the few in a better position—those whose needs and powers are most ennobled—that a higher standard of existence will finally become the portion also of the majority. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action.
It is thus the dissatisfaction of the most cultured class with the existing contradictions between its sexual needs and the form of their legitimate gratification which is now giving rise to attacks on that institution of marriage which was still sufficient for their own grandparents, just as it is even now for a countless number of their contemporaries. These people know well enough that their dissatisfaction will not destroy marriage, so long as the psychological and social conditions which now maintain it continue to exist. But they know at the same time that their will is destined gradually to transform these psychological and social conditions. And they already see on the hemisphere of the soul signs and wonders which portend that the fulness of time is at hand.
The reformers do not believe that the inconsistencies and contradictions which are indissolubly connected with the natural conditions of the maintenance of the race can be got rid of by any legislation. And since they understand that complete freedom is an idea which only corresponds with perfected development, they are also aware that new forms frequently entail hitherto unknown limitations, as well as extensions, of liberty.
What they desire is such forms as, whether they limit or extend liberty of action, will promote a life-enhancing use of the sexual powers both for the individual and for the race. They have no hope that the new form will arrive in a state of perfection, any more than they expect that all mankind will be prepared for it. But they hope to foster the higher needs, to awaken the richer powers, which are destined finally to render the new form necessary also to the majority. This hope kindles their calculated efforts, which are directed by the certainty that personal love is life’s highest value, as well directly for the individual himself as indirectly for the new lives his love creates. And this certainty is spreading from day to day all over the world.
Unless one believes in a superhuman reason which directs evolution, one is bound to believe in a reason inherent in humanity, a motive power transcending that of each separate people, just as the power of the organism transcends that of the organ. This reason increases in proportion as the unity of mankind becomes established. Less and less are the individual nations able to preserve their own peculiarities from the influence of their neighbours. And this is now becoming especially plain with regard to sexual questions. While Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon ideas on sexual morality appear here and there in the literature of the Latin races, the Latin view of love has helped to shape the ideas which in Scandinavia go by the name of “the new immorality.”
Thus from one country to another fly the shuttles of gold and shuttles of steel, drawing the fine and many-coloured woof of contemporary consciousness through thread after thread of the strong warp, made up of the laws and customs of various nations. What follows is in part a drawing of the new pattern this weaving is fashioning, in part an insertion into this pattern of certain new motives.
Those who regard monogamy as the only standard of sexual morality and the only legitimate form of personal love, do not mean the ostensible monogamy now established by law but circumvented by custom. They mean real monogamy: one man for one woman during that man’s lifetime; one woman for one man during that woman’s lifetime, and beyond that complete abstinence. In the way of development, they acknowledge only one gradual realisation of this ideal; in the tendency of the present day to adopt several lines of development they see nothing but decadence.
Again, those who profess the faith of Life regard the ideals of mankind as an expression of man’s higher needs. Ideals which were once incentives to development thus become a drag upon it, whenever life’s needs demand new forms that are not recognised by the prevailing idealism. Only he who believes in supersensuous, God-inspired ideals will consider these fixed for all natures and all times. Evolution, on the other hand, shows us that the same ideals never have been and never can be accepted by all the beings we include in the single expression, the human race, but which in reality belong to almost as many separate races as the animal world. Evolutionists indeed rejoice that humanity cannot be equated under a single faith, a single code of custom, a single ideal, since in the diversity of life they see a great part of its worth. They think that this in itself is a sufficient reason for gradually granting to individuals of the same time and country that liberty which, from a historical point of view, is allowed to the same nation at different periods, and, from an ethnographical point of view, to different nations at the same period: namely, the liberty, within certain limits, of choosing its own form of sexual life. And they would be the more ready to do so, since the geographical, climatic, historical, and economic differences between individuals are just as great as those between nations and periods, and thus what is adequate to the needs and development of one cannot answer to those of the rest.
Few propositions are so lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of sexual life which is indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations. Neither history nor ethnography need be appealed to against an assertion which is sufficiently refuted by the fact that _monogamy_, according to our strict definition above, _has never yet been a reality even among the Christian nations_, except for a minority of individuals; that all the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place while monogamy was indeed the law but polygamy the custom. During the period which is rhetorically alluded to as that of “virtue and manliness,” the days of heathenism in the North, those laws and customs prevailed which now—after a thousand years’ further refinement of the emotional life under Christianity—are regarded as involving the dissolution of society! Our excellent forefathers, whose morals seem so greatly to have outshone our own, were all born in civil matrimony and brought up in homes where not infrequently the concubine lived by the same hearth as the wife, and where the latter was liable to be repudiated for reasons as trivial as those for which she might herself obtain divorce. Indeed, these ancestors were sometimes the offspring of a “free love” which found a home in the wilderness when the guardian had forbidden the lawful union of a loving couple. The introduction by the Catholic Church of an indissoluble marriage tie did not prevent the people from narrowly escaping ruin in the Middle Ages. No one, again, will give to eighteenth-century France the credit for monogamous morality. Nevertheless, France retained vitality enough to determine the history of Europe by her economical, intellectual, and military power. And, in spite of its erotic “immorality,” the heart of the French nation still possesses a great reserve of health and tenacity, together with excellent civic virtues and powers of work.
Those who are so fond of asserting that monogamy and indissoluble marriage determine the existence of nations, are either ignorant of the past history and present condition of the nations, or conceal their knowledge behind the prejudiced view that the white humanity of Europe is to be taken as the criterion for the morality as well as for the faith of the whole race.
On the other hand, what can be proved is this: that the vitality of a people depends first and foremost on the capacity and willingness of its women to bear and foster children fit to live, and on their husbands’ capacity and willingness to protect the national existence. In the next place, it depends on the whole people’s fondness for work and ability in the achievement of prosperity for itself and of value for mankind at large, and finally on the will of the individual to sacrifice his own ends when the common weal demands it. What can further be proved is that, if a people wastes its strength in sexual dissipation, this will often prevent its fulfilling the conditions we have mentioned as necessary to its progress, and will thus bring about its ruin.
But this does not involve any proof that a nation will be ruined if it alters the forms of sexual life according to a newly-acquired knowledge of the most reasonable sexual morality!
Monogamy was victorious from many causes, above all from experience of its advantages. It minimised the struggle of the men for the women and thus economised forces for other ends; it provided an incentive to work for offspring; it developed modesty and tenderness within the sexual relationship and thus raised the position of the woman and with it her importance in the bringing-up of the children; it provided them and her with a protection against the arbitrary will of the husband; through home life it fostered self-command and co-operation; the need of the two for each other led to mutual kindness. The authority of the husband was ennobled by the sense of responsibility and the joy of protection; the dependence of the wife by devotion and fidelity. This last was strengthened by fear of the husband’s proprietary jealousy, by his craving for the certainty that his property would be inherited by his own children; by religions, according to which the admixture of foreign blood in the race was a sin; by the hope of Christianity for a life together beyond the grave; and by their common children, the feeling of tenderness for whom grew deeper as development proceeded. And monogamy still continues to exercise this cultivating influence on the morals and on the soul. It might, therefore, seem that this admission of the value of even an imperfect monogamy rendered all further proof unnecessary for those who assert that the true development of sexual morality can only be secured through a gradually perfected monogamy. But they forget that monogamy, which was a custom long before the introduction of Christianity, _became injurious as well as beneficial to true sexual morality, from the moment the Church prescribed it as the only form of this morality_.
Then, by a common trick of thought, the conclusion was drawn that the mighty development of culture which had taken place under monogamy would have been impossible if this had not been the sole legitimate form of sexual relationship. And thus it was established as the indispensable condition of all higher culture!
The import of the moral controversies which now arise with increasing frequency is _the examination of the relatively higher value for real sexual morality of marriage or love_.
So long as man believed that he had been created perfect, had then fallen and continued in everlasting strife between the spirit and the flesh, no doubt could arise of the absolute value of the Christian ideal of morality. Even those who strove hardest to attain this ideal, even those vanquished in the strife, confessed themselves sinners in so far as the flesh triumphed over the spirit. It was evolutionism that first gave man courage to wonder whether he may not also be “sinning” when the spirit triumphs over the flesh; to ask himself whether perchance marriage did not exist for mankind, and not mankind for marriage; to assert the right of the present time to more universal experience with regard to the sexual customs most favourable to the development of the race. For “the idea of marriage” is to them nothing else than to further this development. But universal experience cannot be won so long as religion and law prescribe a single custom as certainly the right custom and all others are thus condemned and obstructed—as soon as they show themselves with serious frankness—while secret trespass against the monogamous ideal is countenanced. It cannot be denied that the sanctioning of this ideal has incited many to try to realise it; indeed, hypocrisy itself is an indirect tribute to its worth. But its fixity has now become a danger to continued evolution.
On the question of marriage, as in all other respects, Lutheranism is a compromise, a bridge between two logical views of the universe: the Catholic-Christian and the Individualistic Monist. And bridges are made to go over, not to stand upon.
None of our “immoral” authors has insisted more strongly than Luther and Olaus Petri on the power of the sexual life. Both regard modesty without marriage as unthinkable. Both see in marriage the means given by God to satisfy desire, just as food is the means given by God to satisfy hunger. But man has as little right to satisfy the former by unchastity as he has to still the latter by theft. There would be nothing to object to in this if unchastity had not been made synonymous with every form of sexual relation outside matrimony, while chastity became equivalent to every form of marriage.
Luther showed some knowledge of nature when he taught that, though it may be possible for human beings to repress their actions outside wedlock, they cannot repress their feelings and desires. On the other hand he knew nothing of that creation of culture, love, and therefore he failed to see that exactly the same sentence which he used to confute celibacy may also be employed to confute marriage, for the vow of fidelity no more entails real faithfulness than the vow of chastity is the cause of true purity. Real fidelity can only arise when love and marriage become equivalent terms. The substance of Luther’s controversy on marriage was not a higher conception of matrimony than that of the Catholic Church, it was merely the restoration of marriage to churchmen and monastic communities. We have to thank Luther for the Lutheran parsonage and with it for a great contribution to the poetry of country life, to popular culture, to the production of many great minds, and—indirectly—to the moulding of many passionate free-thinkers. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage, on the other hand, deserves no thanks, since—like Protestantism as a whole—it stopped short in an insoluble contradiction. Instead of upholding, in the spirit of the Catholic Church and of Christ, the indissolubility of marriage and demanding the suppression of sensuality when the peace of the soul required it, Luther, by his insistence on the strength of natural inclinations, was forced into concessions, which—quite in accordance with the teachings of the Bible—went so far as to approve of bigamy. To the gross apprehension of the Reformation period the choice of a personal love meant nothing. With marriage possible from a natural point of view alone, it might be contracted with any one; indeed, to the genuinely pious it seemed a higher thing to enter into matrimony without any earthly love, which interfered with the love of God. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage made God “indulgent” towards all the impurity that the sexual life shut up within the whited sepulchre of lawful wedlock. He has shut his eyes to all the wife-murders that the command of fecundity involved; to all the worthless children produced by ill-matched and impure marriages. He has “blessed” all unions entered into, even though from the lowest motives, under the most unnatural circumstances: between a sick person and a healthy one, an old and a young, a willing and an unwilling or two unwilling ones, coupled together by their families. To-day, countless women are still being sacrificed to this doctrine of marriage, or to its unconscious effects; their exhausted wombs are a poor soil for the new generation; their crushed souls a broken support for the growth of new wills. For one woman who defends herself with the resolution lent by horror, there are thousands who have conceived and still conceive children in loathing. For one wife who is met with the modest prayer of love, there are thousands who with a feeling of humiliation concede to their proprietors the right inculcated by the Lutheran doctrine of matrimony. But the signs of the times are visible even within the Lutheran Church. There are to be found younger men who maintain that love—not merely the formula about love in the marriage-service—must be present if the marriage is to be regarded as a moral one. And probably these neo-Lutheran prophets of love use their influence to prevent a number of repulsive marriages. But it does not occur either to them or to their congregation to treat with contempt a couple who have been married for the most despicable reasons. On the other hand, if two young and healthy people, united only by their love, should live together and fulfil the command of fruitfulness, then indeed this couple would be made to feel, through shameful treatment—if not by the young clergyman himself, then by his flock—that a sexual connection sanctioned by law is the only one that is respected, and that, therefore, it is not the seriousness of personal love in itself, but primarily society’s official stamp that makes it pass as a moral ground for the cohabitation of two human beings. And if a person who is unhappy in a loveless marriage frees himself and establishes a new home on “personal love, the moral ground of marriage,” then the churchmen hasten to substitute for “the moral ground of marriage” that of duty.
The doctrine that love is the moral ground of sexual relations is thus as yet only an unendorsed sequence of words. The attempt to realise it was for a long time a punishable crime in Lutheran countries, and will probably be still treated about the year 2000 as a culpable error.
Thus the marriage doctrine of Lutheranism—like that of Christianity in general—has ended, according to the moral ideas of the religion of Life, in immorality, since it no more protects the right of the race to the best conditions of life than it admits the right of the individual to realise his love according to the needs of his personal morality. The object of the Lutheran marriage was to unite man and woman, with or without love, as a means to securing their mutual morality, to make them breeders of children for society, and in addition to retain the husband as breadwinner. By relentlessly pursuing this object, the church has succeeded in damming up but not in purifying sensuality, in developing the sense of responsibility but not of love. It has thus merely rough-planed the material for a higher morality. This rough-planed material may still be the most suitable for general use, but more and more people will now require finer instruments.
The new conception of morality grows out of the hope of the gradual ascent of the race towards greater perfection. Those forms of sexual life which best serve this progress must therefore become the standards of the new morality. But as the nature of a relation can only be determined by its results, those who hold the faith of Life will _apply a conditional judgment also in the case of sexual affairs_. Only cohabitation can decide the morality of a particular case—in other words, its power to enhance the life of the individuals who are living together and that of the race. _Thus sanction can never be granted in advance_ nor—with certain exceptions relating to children—_can it be denied to any matrimonial relationship. Each fresh couple_, whatever form they may choose for their cohabitation, _must themselves prove its moral claim_.
This is the new morality, which is now called immoral by the same type of souls as condemned Luther on his appearance as immoral,—a judgment which is repeated in the Catholic world, where to-day the same abuse is heaped upon “the unchaste monk” as is poured upon the adherents of “free love” within the Lutheran communities. The question for Luther’s present-day “liberal” followers, both in this matter and in that of faith, is whether they shall turn back or go forward; back to the firm ground of absolute authority, or over the bridge of free experiment into the untrodden country of an entirely personal faith; back to indissoluble marriage or over the bridge of coercion to the rights of love. The right course of a consistent thought admits of no third possibility.
The neo-Protestant doctrine of marriage is already much less logical than Luther’s. They agree with him in admitting the right of the sensual side of love, and with their contemporaries in granting to love its share in human life. But when they proceed to draw limits for both, they bring themselves into an untenable position.
They bring themselves into an untenable position not because they insist upon self-control within as well as outside of matrimony (all preparation for a final enhancement of life involves temporary checks upon life) but because the self-control they demand is so comprehensive that it will be in a high degree obstructive to life without the compensation of a final enhancement, for they limit the sexual part of love to the task of continuing the species, and the part of love in human life to a single relationship. Those couples who are unable or unwilling to take upon themselves the responsibility for a new life are thus condemned to celibacy in marriage. Those couples who have once founded their marriage on love must maintain the relationship even without love.
These demands are more ruthless to human nature than those opposed by Luther. Complete celibacy is easier than married celibacy. The needs of the soul are stronger than those of the senses. This ought not, however, to prevent the setting up of the strict demands if these were really conducive to a higher existence from the sexual point of view. But only one who disregards life’s reality (and the Christian is often such a one) can at the same time set up personal love as the ground of sexual morality and limit its rights within certain bounds of morality.
Personal love, as now developed by civilisation, has become so complicated, comprehensive, and involved that _not only does it constitute in itself_ (independently of its mission to the race) _a great asset in life, but it also raises or lowers the value of all else_. It has acquired a new significance besides its original one: that of bearing the flame of life from generation to generation. No one calls him immoral who—disappointed in his love—abstains from continuing the race in his marriage; nor would the couple be called immoral who continue in a marriage made happy by love, although it has shown itself to be childless. But in both these cases, the parties concerned _follow their subjective feelings at the cost of the race and treat their love as an end in itself_. The right already granted to the individuals in these cases at the cost of the race will in future be extended more and more in proportion as the significance of love grows. On the other hand, the new morality will demand of love an ever greater _voluntary limitation of its rights, during the times that a new life claims it, as well as voluntary or compulsory renunciation of the right to produce new lives, under conditions which would render them of less value_.
The marriage doctrine of neo-Protestantism, like that of Tolstoy, rests finally on the ascetic distrust of the sexual life. Neither doctrine supposes that the sensual side can be ennobled otherwise than by being placed exclusively at the service of the race. It is this point of view which is finally decisive in all Christian conceptions of morality. Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man’s life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual—or even than that of the race.
When the foundation of sexual morality was laid in an existence beyond this world, it lost its connection with the continuation of the race and thus was brought into contradiction with itself. This is the reason why Christianity, while it has indirectly done much for the spiritualisation of love, has yet never succeeded in combining the needs of the individual with those of the race, the cravings of the soul with those of the senses. That moral standard will alone be all-embracing which is determined by the belief that the meaning of life is its development through individuals towards higher and higher forms of life for the whole race. This standard will not regard any asceticism as moral which contemplates the freeing of the soul from the bonds of sensuality, as is the great aspiration of Eastern asceticism. It only recognises the claim of such self-discipline as brings about an ever-increasing unity between the soul and the will of the body. Such a self-discipline, indeed, renounces the nearer and lesser good for the more distant and greater. But it finds this good, in the domain of love as in everything else, _in an increasingly soulful sensuousness, or in an increasingly sensuous soulfulness_, not in the spirituality of asceticism, more and more freed from the senses. To the chapel of this spirituality a mountain path leads, which—however arduous every step may be—yet goes straight to the goal. The soulful-sensual existence again is a cell to which a labyrinth leads. Here each step is less difficult, but the whole journey involves infinitely greater dangers and excitement. It may be for this reason that as yet it only attracts the strongest—those who never renounce pleasure, since they find pleasure even in renunciation. For him who seeks the latter goal a single standard of morality will appear inapplicable—simply because human nature is manifold. Sexual abstinence in youth, for instance, may strengthen nine out of ten young men. The tenth it may change into a man of bestial impulses, who, although before marriage he has been chaste, may show, when married, a coarseness or depravity which drags down the wife to his level or opens an abyss between them. Purely sensual unions may in nine cases out of ten deteriorate both the man and the woman. In the tenth case such a connection may deepen into a feeling that determines the course of two lives, and the resulting marriage offers better prospects of happiness than that of many a young couple who have entered upon married life according to the rule which is regarded as the only one to give security of happiness. Thus it is possible in one case out of ten that the love for which a young man has kept himself pure until marriage really is personal love. In the other nine cases it is not so, but on the contrary the most impersonal of all love. Thus in nine cases out of ten, it is possible that such disappointments can be borne through a sense of duty, so that personality grows beneath them. In the tenth, again, persistence in the mistake will be the ruin of personality.
Those who make—and rightly—complete purity before marriage and personal love in the married state the standard of morality, ought, on account of innumerable similar experiences, to make up their minds to let every one decide for himself how this purity can best be attained, before as well as after marriage, and what personal love shall be held to imply. Either it must mean nothing for or against the sanctity of marriage; or, if it is to mean sanctity at the outset of married life, then it must also mean the same during its continuance. But only the individual himself knows how long his marriage remains sanctified by personal love or when it ceased to be so. No one can be burdened with the duty of remaining in an unhallowed relation, and neo-Protestantism must therefore either declare personal love to be the moral ground of marriage or unconditional fidelity to be the expression of moral personality.
The monist in these questions does not ask whether a sexual relationship is the first and only one, before he acknowledges its morality. He only wishes to know whether it was such that it did not exclude the personalities of the lovers; whether it was _a union in which_ “_neither the soul betrayed the senses nor the senses the soul_.”
In these words George Sand gave the idea of the new chastity.
The claims of the new sexual morality show curious similarities and dissimilarities to those to which the age of chivalry gave rise in the same sphere. Thus the Courts of Love held the principle that marriage and love are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, the conception of personality has given rise to a desire for unity which makes it repulsive to many people to live in matrimony unless there is a longing of the soul and of the senses for one’s partner in marriage. The age of chivalry in its idea of love ignored the new generation whereas the hope of the present day is through love to perfect the race just as much as the lovers themselves.
Nor does the new morality deny to the many, who have not even been capable of dreaming of personal love, the right to contract a marriage, which will at least contribute to their poor existence the interest of home and the joy of parentage. But it will be severe with those who, having had experience or intuition of love, have entered without it into a marriage which will certainly impoverish and perhaps ruin more lives than their own. Prudence may counsel leniency of judgment in the individual case, since the majority of human beings learn to know their hearts late in life, if at all. Once more, _as a guiding principle of morality, the unity of marriage and love must be maintained_. By his power of creating ideals, and the ever-increasing demand for happiness which results, man has deepened his instinct of spiritual needs, and the same power of idealisation is now ruthlessly withdrawing the outward supports of sexual morality and replacing them by the idea of unity. That the halt and the lame are thereby deprived of their crutches will be no stumbling-block to him who looks beyond the halt and the lame to the finer and healthier men of the future.
It is true that the idea of unity involves the right of every person to shape his sexual life in accordance with his individual needs, but only on condition that he does not prejudice unity or the rights of the beings to whom his love gives life. _Love thus becomes more and more a private affair of the individual, while children are more and more the business of society_, and from this it follows that the two lowest expressions of sexual division (dualism) sanctioned by society, namely, _coercive marriage and prostitution, will by degrees become impossible, since after the triumph of the idea of unity they will no longer answer to the needs of humanity_.
By coercive marriage is meant that under which not only are the morality of cohabitation and the rights of the children dependent on the form of cohabitation, but the possibility of divorce for one of the parties is also dependent on the other’s will. By prostitution is meant all trading with one’s sex, whether this traffic is carried on by women or by men, who from necessity or inclination sell themselves with or without marriage. Both these things occur under grosser and under milder forms. There is a scale of degrees for loveless marriage, as there is for loveless—“love.” The distance is great between, for instance, “La Dame aux Camélias” or Raskolnikoff’s “Sonja” on the one hand, and a prowler of the gutter on the other. So it is between a woman who contracts a marriage from the longing for motherhood and one who does it from love of luxury; between a man who seeks a partner in his work and one who only wants a wife to console his creditors. But whether one, with part of one’s person, buys one’s self free from hunger or from debts, loneliness or desire; however great in itself the value one gains may be, still the transaction remains, for buyer as well as for seller, a humiliation from the point of view of the sexual morality which sees things as a whole.
The development of the consciousness of erotic personality is at present hindered in an equal degree by the “morality” settled by society, and by the “immorality” regulated by society. Whether it is a question of maintaining the former or of excusing the latter, we are told that idealism must make way for “the needs of real life.” The same men who with reason are afraid of the dissolution of society if the right of the hungry to steal were preached in the name of “the needs of real life,” consider themselves wise when, in a far more important sphere than that of property, they proclaim the necessity of stealing, in the form of prostitution.
Real life has certainly its claims: in the one case, that all who are hungry for food should have work, at such a rate of pay that they can eat; in the other, that all who are of marriageable age should have the possibility of contracting marriage at the right time. But the changes that must take place before this can come to pass will fail to appear so long as society—under the assumption that prostitution is a necessary evil—superintends its results and thus gives itself the illusion that its dangers can be provided against. For thus society escapes the search for expedients which would better provide for the two fundamental needs—love and hunger—for the satisfaction of which prostitution at present provides the only means for many men and women.
But these changes will also fail to appear so long as society—under the assumption that marriage is a necessary good—retains this as the sole mark of morality in sexual relations.
For this state of things, those preachers of morality are to blame who persuade themselves that the only cure for the evil is a still stricter maintenance of the claims of monogamy. They are afraid of any mention of the wealth of varied experience, of the longing for happiness, or the joy of life. They proclaim nothing but the sense of duty, responsibility for one’s individual soul, and obligations to society. But this has been constantly preached from the dawn of Christianity, and yet the standard of sexual morality as a whole is no higher than it was. This gives food for reflection. The more so when this dread of love is carried as far as Tolstoy’s—or rather, the Oriental world’s—detestation of the senses; when marriage is regarded solely as a palliative for a hereditary disease, which ought rather to be stamped out so as to render the remedy unnecessary.
When psychical phenomena have been as much investigated as physical, love will also receive its cumatology—that is, its science of waves. We shall follow the curves of the emotions through the ages, their movement of rise and fall, the oppositions and side-influences by which they have been determined. Such a rising wave in our time is the growing detestation of young men for socially protected immorality, their longing for singleness in love. An opposing influence, again, is the disinclination of many young women for love. They are not content, like the neo-Protestant clergymen, with demanding that carnality shall be sanctified by marriage: they want to kill it. They do not merely hate—and with reason—desire apart from love: they depreciate love itself, even when it appears as the unity of soul and senses. According to them, marriage ought to be merely the highest form of sympathetic friendship, in conjunction with a sense of duty directed to the procreation and rearing of children. When marriage is freed from feelings of carnal pleasure as well as from claims of personal happiness, when it is the union of two friends in the duty and joy of living entirely for their children—then alone will it become “moral”!
On the other hand, love, treated as a synthesis of spiritual sympathy and the life of the race, as the vital force through which a human being’s existence is enhanced and beautified, is to them worthless; and the idea of a distinction between the nature of woman and of man is to them meaningless. They demand of both complete abstinence outside marriage, and within it they permit only certain few exceptions, which nature’s yet imperfect arrangements render necessary for the continuance of the race. With the advance of science, they hope that chemistry and biology will set humanity free from its degradation in love, just as Werner von Heidenstam expects his “food-powder” to bring freedom from degradation by hunger. Possibly they will both be right. But with these possibilities the people of the twentieth century have nothing to do. What we rather require at present is more love—and more food—not less.
It is therefore not likely that the line we have just touched upon will be that followed by the development of sexual morality, for even now an increasing proportion of mankind shows itself too exacting in erotic questions to allow of the realisation of the above-mentioned ideal of purity. No thought of the end will to their minds sanctify a means which when deprived of love appears to them ugly.
The children begotten under a sense of duty would moreover be deprived of a number of essential conditions of life; among others that of finding in their parents beings full of life and radiating happiness, which constitutes the chief spiritual nourishment of children—and it may be added that parents who “live entirely for their children” are seldom good company for them.
The programme of morality here alluded to is explicable from a justified hatred of socially protected immorality and a—partly—justified resentment against the love which leaves the child out of account. But its solution of love’s deepest conflict—that between the claims of the individual and those of the race—is prejudicial to the will of nature as well as to the conditions of civilisation. Independently of both factors, these zealots believe they can attain that white world of purity which attracts their minds, afflicted as they are by the impurity and misery with which sexual relations still load existence. They forget that above the snow-line only the poorest forms of life can flourish. But human development tends towards the production of an ever richer and stronger series of forms. Any attempt to separate morality from sensuousness will not accelerate development but only retard it, since the transplantation of sexual emotion to a soil other than that of the senses is an impossibility in our present earthly conditions.
The demand for purity which aims at non-sensuousness—or supersensuousness—may perhaps provide protection from minor dangers. In great ones it will be as futile as a hedge against a forest fire. No obstructing of appetites, but only their release in other directions, can really purify them. Passions can be curbed only by means of stronger passions. In the same appetite and the same passion in which the danger lies, in the instinct of love itself, we have the true starting-point for its ennobling. He to whom the destruction of this instinct is a passionate desire possesses in this passion itself a prospect of attaining his unnatural end. He, again, who does not wish to kill, but only to control the sexual instinct, will become, in his struggle against this desire—still immeasurably stimulated through heredity and social custom—a strong and proud conqueror only when he imagines and finally experiences unity in love. Assuredly also secondary expedients are to be found. Before all, that of acquiring the instinct of chastity from parents; of being strengthened and protected from childhood against the dangers of callousness as well as those of softness; of being instructed in a refined and gentle way of the great purpose and great dangers of sexual destiny; of receiving impressions through public opinion of the possibility of self-control and its importance to the happiness of the individual himself and of the race; of avoiding the abuse of means of enjoyment, especially of intoxicating liquors, which both directly and indirectly weaken the will-power in the case of sexual, as of all other kinds of, temptation. It is beyond question that noble sport, dancing, and games—and they are only noble when practised finely and worthily, with the mind as well as the body—are a means of replacing and controlling the sexual instinct. Equally certain is it that bodily and mental labour, whether undertaken independently or as a participation in some form of social endeavour, is important as occupying and consuming the sexual powers in a substituted form. All genuine artistic enjoyment is in the highest degree important for the ennobling of sexual life. But all this self-discipline, all these aids from the world of beauty and labour, all this cultivation of the body to strength and beauty, will be as lines without a centre so long as they do not all lead in the direction of love—love, which certain preachers of morality would leave altogether outside the question, as though even it were a danger and a temptation. No one would venture to deny that healthy habits of life and strict self-control may be elevating for the individual, even if love means nothing in his life. But life in its entirety gains nothing by the production of hardened or harassed ascetic types, which by exhausting bodily exercise, by reading that leaves the imagination arid, and by art that smothers nudity, have succeeded in lulling to sleep the sensuousness which, nevertheless, will perhaps some day awake. Life has as little joy of these harsh guardians of their “higher” nature as they themselves have of life. We have not gained much if we are to have a youth which attains sexual abstinence at the cost of other excellent qualities equally necessary to the race. A youth, with large blinkers, shunning the delights of the senses, the varied joy of life, the mobility of the fancy; a youth devoid of all spiritual adventure—such, with all its “purity,” would be a dead asset in life.
Those on the other hand who preserve but control the wealth of suggestion of the sexual life will be—even though their control has not always been complete—of infinitely greater service to existence.
The prejudice originally fostered by Christianity, that sexual purity is in itself so great an asset in life that it outweighs the sacrifice of all others—this prejudice must be overcome. A person is estimable for sexual purity only to the extent to which it fits him to fulfil the purpose of life for himself and for the race: that of leading an ever higher life. His purity is too dearly won if it costs him, and through him the race, irreparable losses of vital joy, courage, and power.
And for the present—until many generations of marriage and bringing-up have arrived at a transformation of present-day human, and especially men’s, nature—the demand for purity will not admit of realisation without such losses; that is, if this demand takes the shape of the neo-Protestant formula, or, even more, that of Tolstoy.
Those ascetics who recommend only self-control as a remedy for the mastery of the sexual instinct, even when such control becomes merely obstructive to life, are like the physician who tried only to drive the fever out of his patient: it was nothing to him that the sick man died of the cure.
But these ascetics may have arrived at their fanaticism by two different paths. One group—which includes most of the female ascetics—hates Cupid because he has never shown to them any favour. The other group—embracing the majority of male ascetics—curse him because he never leaves them in peace. Meanwhile, those who put a tremendous emphasis on purity and those who rave about pleasure, meet on the common ground of distrust of love’s possibilities of development. Love to them means desire and nothing else; if the soul enters into it, it becomes friendship and that alone. They have never experienced a love which is creative in the fullest sense of the word. Sterility—of the soul or the body or both—is the mark of the only love these two groups are acquainted with. The slaves of eroticism are admirably characterised by Lord Chesterfield’s confession that he had made violent love to at least twenty women, all of whom personally were entirely indifferent to him. They know nothing of the soul’s desire for one single person, from among an unlimited selection; a desire which—when it is deeply rooted—is met by the desire of the other. They do not know that the elective affinity of sympathy causes the one to gather from the other’s eyes an all-mastering, liberating force. For they themselves experience in the violence of desire only prostration and humiliation of their higher being. An otherwise sensitive man may feel unnerved by eroticism to such a degree that now he will wish all women dead, to be thus freed from his thraldom; now he will desire, as Caligula did of the Romans, that they had but a single neck—but not to sever it. The hatred of these men for eroticism is that of the savage for the hideous gods on whom he believes himself dependent, and whom he knows to be making sport of his destiny. And nothing is more certain than that love, thus conceived, makes men degraded and ridiculous. Even he who in his innermost soul loves tragedy and hates farce, is made, under the attraction of this love, to halt between the two and to turn his life into a tragi-comedy; for in order to attain to the true tragic greatness a man must be prepared to surrender himself unconditionally to, and to suffer through what is greatest in, his nature, his innermost ego. But the tragic destiny is apt to pass a man by against his innermost will, and then arises the impure form of the tragic that we have just mentioned. Thus men and women, who have only sought fresh stimulants in eroticism, at last come across a person who does not understand love in that way, and who ends the game for ever. Or perchance they themselves are gripped by a great emotion, but their past destroys the hope of its now being granted to them to worship in any holy grove the divinity to whom hitherto they have only burned paper lanterns in the turmoil of a fair. In most cases the tragi-comedy takes the same form as with the drunkard: satisfaction becomes more and more impossible; the insatiable one is continually forced to fly to grosser means in order to quench his desire in some degree, to indulge with increasing frequency, but with diminishing festival gladness. He who has sunk to this kind of intoxication becomes by degrees as weak-willed, as heartless, as devoid of character and conscience as the dipsomaniac, and equally incapable of selection and appreciation within the sphere of his appetites. The most sublime woman’s love will at last leave him as insusceptible as is the drunkard to the liquid topaz of Rhenish wine, its bouquet and dewy freshness. “Love’s freedom” will finally mean to him nothing but freedom from responsibility, from consideration, from danger, and from expense. In comparison with this kind of “free love,” prostitution is doubtless more dangerous to health, but far less injurious to personality. Prostitution detracts from personality by a cleaving which excludes the soul; but it does not consume the personality in the same way as the “love” with which a man buys women who are not venal. If they expect him to redeem his bonds in true coin, they will be disappointed. Love may possess, according to his belief, no sterling value: he regards it as always a forged note with which nature obtains the co-operation of human beings—especially of women—to her ends.
This love knows no atmosphere but that of the alcoves where it has pursued its bought or stolen pleasure. It has never breathed the air of the wilds, the air which quivers with sunshine and shakes with storms; the air through which murmurs all life’s longing for renewal, all the wistful intuition of eternity born of a hunger for happiness, which raises generation above generation towards unknown goals; an air which immeasurably enhances and eternally absorbs vitality; the air of the wide expanses, where ferocity and madness are not yet extinct, where man and woman fight their eternal battles and suffer their eternal pains; pains whose source even Lucretius knew to be dualism.
But that only unity is capable of sealing up this source—that was known to none before our own time.
In literature it is sometimes from the alcoves, sometimes from these wilds that the complaint arises of the mastery of the sexual instinct.
In the works of not a few of the writers on morality one fails to find even a suspicion of these wildernesses of human life. These teachers betray their ignorance in a boundless narrow-mindedness, a narrow-mindedness which includes the most far-reaching questions of humanity among—gymnastic and bath apparatus! To their short-sighted view, immorality has revealed itself not only as venal but in the shape of “free love.” They do not suspect that free love as well as marriage includes many degrees of morality and immorality, rising above or sinking below the ethical zero, at which both the free love and the marriage of the majority are to be found.
Between the free or lawful love which becomes ugly, revengeful, or murderous and the love which may perhaps take its own life but never that of the loved one, the distance is therefore great. From the point of view of enhancement of life there will be nevertheless a great difference between the free—or lawful—love which is devoted, courageous, self-sacrificing, faithful, and that which leaves all the best human qualities unemployed. In the same way, the distance is great between the sterile erotic “adventures” of a paltry vanity, a sordid hunger for sensation, and the passion through which a human being attains to new creative power. The concession to the storm of passion is in one case the pennant, in the other the sail.
The artistic temperament often expresses itself in the demand for erotic renewal. But while some thus increase their strength and health, others grow ever poorer and uglier. Goethe was one of the former sort, George Sand likewise. Natures of this type contain a wonderful power of renewal. They can love several times without becoming erotically depreciated. Their souls, like the volcanic soils of the South, can bear three crops without being exhausted. But this is not the spiritual soil or climate of humanity at large. And even such Olympian gods and goddesses suspect that love may have some secret kept from them. Goethe, who prayed of fate that he might only be required to love once in another existence, may have known less of love than Dante, to whom was vouchsafed the marvellous vision described in the wonderful words
_Vede il cuor tuo_ ...
George Sand, who implored of the gods the flame of a great love, was never so thoroughly fired thereby as her sister poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who gave witness of her sympathy for her in the perfect lines which begin,
_Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man_ ...
But great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life’s gracious gifts to its elect. _There can be no other standard of morality for him who loves more than once than for him who loves once only: that of the enhancement of life._ He who in a new love hears the singing of dried-up springs, feels the sap rising in dead boughs, the renewal of life’s creative forces; he who is prompted anew to magnanimity and truth, to gentleness and generosity, he who finds strength as well as intoxication in his new love, nourishment as well as a feast—that man has a right to the experience. Those on the other hand—and they are the majority—whom every new love makes poorer in the qualities common to humanity and in personal sense of power, weaker in will, less efficient in work, have, from the point of view of the religion of Life, no right to such self-deterioration. By its fruits love is known. Nothing is truer than that “there is no such thing as local demoralisation.” A person who in all his other doings is healthy and genuine; who continues strong and sound in his work, is in most cases moral also in sexual matters according to his conscience—even if this does not harmonise with the doctrine of monogamy. He, on the other hand, who shows himself a cheat or a wretch in his other dealings will probably be the same in the affairs of love, whether his morals are those of monogamy or polygamy; and it is therefore more unreasonable to judge of a man’s morality in other matters from his sexual code than it is to judge of his sexual morality from his ethical standpoint in other questions. Nor does the latter afford an infallible criterion, for these are people who reach the summit of their natures in a great love, but remain below it in the rest of their affairs. Others again never succeed in raising their erotic dealings to the level of the rest of their personality. But in regard to the accuracy of the result the latter standard is nevertheless as superior to the former as a chemist’s scales are to an old-fashioned steelyard. It may often be the case that a person’s other manifestations are in a certain sense greater or less than himself, but his love, on the other hand, will in a thousand cases to one be his inmost self. Great or mean, rich or poor, pure or impure as he is in that, so will one also find him in the other important relations of life. Of all summary characteristics of a person, therefore, none is more sure than this that, as a man has loved, so he is.
Although in this way a follower of the religion of Life regards the Tolstoy code of sexual morality as profoundly immoral, he recognises that it has a purer as well as a less pure origin.
The former is the case with those who have suffered deeply from the passions which they now advise others to uproot for the sake of their peace; also with those who are in the early spring of their age, when life is still asleep and nature appears to wear the hues of autumn.
The latter is the case with those for whom life has been all autumn, since they were born withered; women and men who have been seized with a hatred of the conditions of procreation because they have been the victims of those vices and sufferings which still make of erotics the _Divina Commedia_ of earthly life; but not as in that of Dante an architectonic arrangement of hell, heaven, and purgatory, giving them a definite sequence in space and time, but a drama wherein the three states break in upon one another like waves on the shore. But whether the haters of sexual life belong to the exhausted or to the excluded, to the sterile or to the immature, the withered or the poisoned, they may doubtless be entitled individually to more or less leniency; their doctrine of morality, however, must for the reasons we have given, be rejected as entirely worthless.
The same holds good of those who solve the sexual problem as though it were one with the claim of individual liberty, irrespective of any consideration for the race.
These latter are in the habit of comparing the right to satisfy sexual desire with the right to satisfy hunger. The former, on the other hand, reject this comparison as untenable, since, of course, a person can live healthily in lifelong sexual abstinence. Instead of it they compare the erotic passion with other passions, such as gambling and drunkenness, in which popular opinion recommends self-control and the will is capable of it.
Both regard the question in an equally superficial way. To compare the fundamental conditions of natural life, the motive forces of civilised life, love and hunger, with any other passion than each other, falsifies the whole statement of the problem. The instinct of love, as that of hunger, may to a certain extent be suppressed; in both cases an increase of strength in a certain direction may incidentally be gained. But both needs must be satisfied in the right way if the individual being and the human race are to live and fulfil the intention of life in a higher development. Fasting men in the question of love are of as little value to the enhancement of life as they are in other fields.
Christianity has so accustomed us to treat sexual purity as a question of the individual that, whether we regard it from the point of view of the enthusiast for chastity or from that of the enthusiast for liberty, we do not perceive that, while one satisfies hunger to prolong one’s own life, one produces children to prolong that of the race. This renders the ascetic talk about the innocuousness of abstinence as superficial as the alleged right to satisfy sexual desire with the same freedom as hunger.
If the individual remains without food, he himself loses his life; _but if he remains without the right of procreation, the race loses the life he might have given to it_. Again, if the individual dies of overeating, he is the only one who suffers; _if the sexual instinct is abused through excess, it is the race that suffers_.
The existing immorality involves an uninterrupted blood-poisoning of the organism of humanity. The existing order of society and morality starves this organism. It is not only with the melancholy their own inevitable fate inspires in them, but also with indignation against unnecessary suffering, that innumerable excellent men and women know that they are condemned to die without having given their blood, their souls, as an inheritance to a new generation of beings.
It is beyond all question that the instinct of the individual to continue his existence in the race must be controlled, if it is to be an enhancement, and not an obstruction, to life. _But this, in the most literal sense, is the vital question for the individual and for the race_: HOW _and_ WHY _and_ TO WHAT EXTENT _this control is to be exercised_.
Thus both the life of the individual and that of the race are enhanced when young people live in abstinence till they have reached full maturity. The development of the race gains when the lives less worthy to survive are not reproduced in offspring; but the life of the individual and of the race suffers when young people, mature and in every way fit, are not in a position to produce and rear offspring.
At a low stage of development, hunger as well as celibacy has been an ennobling force. Man has gradually learned to limit the quantity of his food while improving its quality and regulating the supply. He now knows that the value of food depends to a large extent on the enjoyment it provides and the gratification with which it is associated; that what is unappetising does not fulfil its purpose. He knows too that the organism cannot be nourished by a diet accurately calculated for every age or for every class of work, but that only a certain superfluity really gives the necessary satisfaction. Experience has shown that too great economy is as injurious as excess and that personal needs must within certain limits be the deciding criterion in a full and life-enhancing system of diet. Our understanding of this subject is now far in advance of the ability of the bulk of mankind to follow it. In the question of the racial instinct, on the other hand, we are still a long way from knowledge of the conditions of equilibrium, and we have much farther still to go before we actually arrive at that equilibrium between the starvation and excess in the satisfaction of this need which are at present characteristic of our Western communities.
It was natural that Luther should put an end to fasting as well as celibacy. Both were expressions of the Oriental longing to attain the ideal condition of freedom from desire; both had been necessary factors in the education of the Germanic peoples. But at the same time it was unfortunately inevitable that Luther’s work of liberation should be inconclusive; that he was incapable of adopting the belief of the ancients in the divinity of humanity, the rights of nature; that he continually sought the sanctification of human nature by means exterior to itself. Someone has said that the courage of Luther the monk in marrying a nun was worth more than all his doctrine. That is a true saying. Filippo Lippi certainly did the same. The world gained thereby some magnificent madonnas and—Filippino Lippi. But neither Fra Filippo nor any other vow-breaking monk brought about a revolution: that was the achievement of Luther alone, who asserted his divine and natural right to his action.
The problem of the present day is to follow up the consequences of this declaration of natural rights.
But nature is no more infallible than she is perfect, no more reasonable than unreasonable, no more consistent than contrary in her purposes; since she is all these. She may be transformed—ennobled or debased—by culture, and therefore a natural declaration of rights implies only _the right of man consciously to cultivate nature_, so that in a certain direction she may fulfil her own purpose with a gradual approach to perfection; or, in other words, that the needs created by nature in and with human beings may by them be satisfied in a more beautiful and healthy way. But this culture of the erotic nature cannot find its moral criterion in any divine command or transcendental idea. _It can only find it in the same mysterious longing for perfection, which in the course of evolution has raised instinct into passion, passion into love, and which is now striving to raise love itself to an even greater love._
There are some who think that love should therefore advance a claim to a glory of its own, which is incompatible with its “natural” mission, namely the perpetuation of the race.
Every one knows, however, that evolution brings about a more complicated, heterogeneous state than the original one; and in this respect love is the most conspicuous example. Love—as we have already shown—has now become a great spiritual power, a form of genius comparable with any other creative force in the domain of culture, and its production in that region is just as important as in the so-called natural field. Just as we now recognise the right of the artist to shape his work, or of the scientific man to carry out his investigations as it seems good to him, so must we allow to love the right to employ its creative force in its own way provided only that in one way or another it finally conduces to the general good.
From this point of view, then, we cannot extend the proposition that love is an end in itself so far as to say that _it may remain unfruitful_. It must give life; if not new living beings then new values; it must enrich the lovers themselves and through them mankind. Here as everywhere the truth which gives faith in life and creates morality is to be found included in the experience which creates happiness; and the most serious charge against certain forms of “free love” is that it is unhappy love; for there is no unhappy love but the unfruitful.
The capacity of mankind for forgetting is more wonderful than its capacity for learning. If this were not so, there would be no necessity to recall again and again that every band of apostles includes a Judas; nay, that the truth can only be accepted by disciples in the hands of its enemies. One is reminded by this that every reformation has its visionaries who arrest the blow when the reformers have put their axe to the root of the tree; and one is not surprised that with every spring flood not only the ice but the earth itself is washed away.
Mankind seems determined not to remember. They must therefore be reminded once more that the new morality’s band of combatants, ever more closely united and more rapidly increasing, are distinguished from their scattered followers and from their light advance-guard by the knowledge that _love is subject to the same law as every other creative force; the law of dependence on the whole for its own enhancement to its highest possible value_. Love, indeed, whose origin is the very instinct of the race, must be more deeply bound up with the race than any other emotion. And experience shows too that it cannot preserve and promote its vital force if it lacks any connection with, and does not stand in some relation, either of giving or receiving, to the race. It is therefore an indisputable necessity that every love entirely detached from the rest of humanity must die for want of nourishment.
But the band which attaches it to humanity may be woven of several materials; the gift to the race may express itself in various ways. In one case a great emotion may bring about a tragic fate, which opens the eyes of humanity to the red abysses it contains within itself. Another time it may create a great happiness, which sheds a radiance around the happy ones, illuminating all who come near them. In many cases love translates itself into intellectual achievements, or useful social work; in most it results in two more perfect human beings, and new creatures, still more perfect than themselves.
Those couples, on the other hand, who have shed no radiance either in their life or in their death; who have not taken one step on the golden ladder to a higher humanity, and who have only found in each other the lust of the beasts—without their readiness to sacrifice themselves for offspring —these are immoral, since their love has not served the ascending development of life. Whether this lifeless love has taken the form of a light and irregular or of a lifelong and lawful connection, it has in no respect enriched the life of the couple, much less therefore that of the race.
With the enhancement of life as love’s standard of morality, it is thus impossible, as we maintained at the beginning, to decide in advance whether either a free or a married love, an interrupted or a continued marriage, voluntary childlessness or parentage, is moral or immoral; for the result depends in each individual case on the will, the choice, which lies behind it, and _only the development of events can decide the nature of this will and this choice_.
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.
How the boundary will finally be defined—in the one case as in the other—we cannot know at present. It is true that there is here and there a glimmer of light which already shows the way; but until these gleams become more frequent, mankind can only grope and stumble along the path by which perhaps it will one day march in full daylight.
Many who regard sexual morality from the point of view of evolutionism have never enquired whether monogamy—and an increasingly perfect monogamy—is really the best means of human development. These evolutionists unite with the champions of Christian idealism in condemnation of “the immorality of the present day,” which declares itself in sexual matters in the form of free connections outside matrimony; of an increase of divorce among those married; of disinclination for parentage and of the claim of unmarried women to the right of motherhood. Other evolutionists think that all this is the earliest announcement of the awakening which will assign to love its full importance, not only for the perpetuation, but for the progress of the race. With the will of active, effective life they attack the current standard of morality and the rights of the family. The object of the conflict is not itself new; what is new is only the boldness, fostered, consciously or unconsciously, by the evolutionary idea, of thus asserting the rights of love against those of society, the code of the future against that of the past.
The new morality knows that in a wide sense civilisation will only attain lasting power over nature when it combines higher emotions of happiness with the ends in the pursuit of which harsh means may be demanded. That creed of life which makes the mission of the race co-operate with personal happiness in love, will also demand of the latter the sacrifices which the former renders necessary. But it must not augment these requirements by ascetic demands for purity which are meaningless for the racial mission. The followers of this creed will take love as the criterion of the individual’s sexual emotions and actions, above all because they believe that _the happiness of the individual is the most important condition also for the enhancement of the race_.
They desire to fill the earth with hungerers for happiness, since they know that only thus will earthly life attain its inmost purpose, that of forming—in an altogether new sense—creatures of eternity.
The word, which through Eros became flesh and dwells among us, is the profoundest of all: _Joy is perfection._
If we accept this dictum of Spinoza as the highest revelation of life’s meaning, our eyes are at the same time opened to the harmony of existence. We perceive that the more perfect race will be in the fullest sense of the word _created by love_. But this will not take place until love has become a religion, the highest expression of the fear of life—not the fear of God;—when faith in life has scattered the superstition and unbelief which still disfigure love. When the eldest of the gods has no other god before him, then will the monsters who now fill the murky deeps over which the spirit of the god moves perish in the light of the new day of creation.
For the sake of clearness, it has been necessary to sum up here the main ideas of the following exposition. In some measure it will therefore be also necessary to return to them during the following treatment of the movements which have the deepest influence on sexual morality: _the evolution of love_, its _freedom_ and its _selection_; the claims of a _right to_ and an _exemption from motherhood_; of _collective motherhood_, of _free divorce_, and of a _new marriage law_.