Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has
preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has
exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native
yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element
of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved
himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of
all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His
mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George
Campbell.
For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are
always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are
always in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims of
society could have had their way--if we had all chosen our wives and our
husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes or
their moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, but
for their 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now
doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and
puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young
men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of
shallow sophistry--because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the
'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at
Coutts's--that we still preserve some vitality and some individual
features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men
who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leaving
none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak
enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine
and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually
reinforcing individualities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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