All vulgar allusions to love, all flippant talk on the subject of sex are distinctly contrary to good taste, they dishonour human nature, but I submit that it is an outrage on common sense, and an immoral action, when students of the Population—or any other grave social question—allow this spurious delicacy to interfere with their facing the whole facts of life, or to bias judgment in reasoning from the facts. On the publication of my previous volume, _Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness_, in 1885, a woman of superior intellect and attainments reviewed the book. One passage in her criticism stands thus: “A certain instinct that in such matters the instinct of reprobation is as healthy as it is superficially unreasonable, may make one sicken at the suggestions of neo-Malthusianism.” (_The Academy_ of May 15th, 1886.) Such squeamishness is no indication of health or good taste. Its unreasonableness condemns it, and the source from which it springs is prejudice induced through specific conditions. The reviewer appears to suspect as much, for, later she remarks: “One cannot put down the book without a greatly increased sense of the supreme necessity of criticizing all established theories and institutions and of the supreme duty of refraining from precipitate action.” This is a sentiment one can endorse, and I appeal to all my readers, especially to women, to refrain from forming any judgment on any part of this difficult, all-important problem, until they have mastered the subject in all its aspects. To pursue the opposite course is to act irrationally and immorally. It causes to spring up in other minds the prejudice which distorts and disguises truth. In nutritive functions, all repulsive animalism becomes overborne, as human nature refines and civilizes, and in a profounder sense the brutality of sex-passion vanishes through the growth of a higher love, which has for its dominant quality—not eagerness for possession—but unselfish tenderness. This tenderness, permeating the individual and extending its benign influence into society, issues in the gentle manners and virtuous actions that seem to spring directly from a universal principle of sympathy and love. The scientific exposition of the phenomena has long been before the public. G. H. Lewes, in his _Problems of Life and Mind_, demonstrated that whilst the individual functions of man (alimentation being one of these) arise in relation to the cosmos, his general functions, including sex-appetite, arise in relation to the social medium, and “animal impulses become blended with human emotions,” until “in process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness.” The social instincts, which he calls analogues of the individual instincts, tend more and more to make “sociality dominate animality and thus subordinate personality to humanity.” (_Problems of Life and Mind_, vol. 1, p. 159.)