Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
"Probably we have all taken for granted that husbands and wives
have always loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted
... in the lower reaches of Human Nature, husband and wife do not
love one another ... for the vast mass of mankind during the long
ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all
but unknown....
"The idea that the existence of sex accounts for the existence of
love is untrue. Marriage among early races has nothing to do with
love. Among savage peoples, the phenomenon everywhere confronts us
of wedded life without a grain of love. Love then is no necessary
ingredient of the sex-relation; it is not an outgrowth of passion.
Love is love and has always been love, and has never been anything
lower."
Even to-day, despite the evolution of the higher faculties, despite long
centuries of inherited habit and tradition, and despite the circumstance
that in all the nobler types of men and women the sex-instinct is
spiritualised by affection and understanding--Even in this late day of
civilisation, the male sex-instinct may be seen still in all its native
tyranny and selfishness; seeking gratification in sensuality and
cruelty, with callous disregard alike of the welfare as of the suffering
of its victim. In the violation of women and children that occurs both
in peace and in war, the instinct manifests as an impulse of aggression,
and the sex-function as one of brutality or ruthless lust.
IV
Respecting the origin of Mind and Emotion, Charles Darwin said:
"In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the
lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself
first originated."
And Huxley:
"I know nothing, and never hope to know anything of the steps by
which the passage from molecular movement to states of
consciousness is effected. The two things are on two utterly
different platforms, the physical facts go along by themselves and
the mental facts go along by themselves."
While Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (the biologist who was working out the
theory of Natural Selection simultaneously with Darwin, both unaware
that the other was working in the same direction) attributes to a
Creative act of God, all the moral and intellectual qualities which have
been super-added in man to those lesser and simpler ones he possesses in
common with the higher animals. Wallace describes this as a "Divine
Influx," and regards it as being wholly distinct and apart from the slow
and gradual processes of Natural Selection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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