Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
For the preservation of species, two rôles are essential: the Male rôle
of Combat, demanding strength and boldness, resource and
fighting-quality, in order to protect and provide for the female and
offspring; and the Female rôle of Devotion and Self-surrender, in order
to nurture offspring ante-natally, and, after birth, to nurture and to
tend its helplessness.
Now all but biologists, perhaps, take it as matter-of-course that Love
had its origin in Sex.
Seeing love between the sexes as the strongest and most dominant of the
civilised passions, it is natural to infer that it was born of the
instinctive attraction between male and female, and that this
instinctive attraction, with the growth and expansion of faculty, mental
and temperamental, has evolved to the high and tender issues to be found
in latter-day romantic passion; theme of poets, novelists, artists;
richest and most exquisite of life's emotions; inspiration and motive of
the finest human achievements. A passion which, for a space at least,
transfigures the natures and ennobles the lives of all but the crass and
the sordid.
Nevertheless--Love did not arise out of sex. The sex-relation in primal
men and women held no element of affection; no sympathy, tenderness,
self-sacrifice, or other attribute of Love. On the part of the female,
it was compulsory surrender and the habit of surrender to superior
strength, mitigated, doubtless, by a subconscious instinct to secure
offspring. In the male, it was impulse as tyrannous and selfish as was
the instinct to kill. Like the instinct to kill, a factor in it made for
fitness for survival. There was in it, accordingly, an element of
instinctive selection. But the selection made for survival-fitness
merely in the mate. It owed nothing to sentimental appeal exercised by
one female, and lacking in another. The instinct to mate was implanted
by Nature for the continuation of species. If its observance contained
an element of gratification, it held no more of reciprocity than did the
gratification of that stronger lust, to kill, include a consideration of
the feelings of the prey, or than greed of any other form of possession
extends a grace of reciprocal benefit to the thing acquired.
Modern savages have no conception of sexual love. There are no
love-songs, no courtship, no affection in their matings. The males marry
mainly in order to secure wives to work for them. And they select strong
women because these are best fitted for work. Or they select women who
have some or another small possession. Biological instinct is a factor,
doubtless, but it is not a factor of sentiment.
In his fine book, _Natural Law in the Spiritual World_, Professor
Drummond says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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