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 This does not imply that love, more than any other expression of life, can be withdrawn from human arbitration, but it implies that _such arbitration will be faulty when it is decided by the forms of a union instead of by its results_.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