But where our instrumental philosophy has had the most grotesque effect has been upon our conception of love. People have come to regard love as merely a device for propagating the race. Now this view of love is not new; it has always been dear to the bourgeoisie, who have always thought it a matter of immense moment that they should have sons to carry on their businesses when they were dead. It is the immemorial philistine conception of love: the strange thing is that it has been taken over by the intelligentsia and glorified. This is in the strictest sense a revolution in thought. No one who has written beautifully of love has thought of it as the intellectuals think. To Plato and Dante the essence of love did not reside in procreation; nor has procreation been anything but a divine accident to the poets. And that is in the human tradition, and probably in the natural order of things; for it is possible that both love and procreation are most perfect when they are unpremeditated, and the child comes as a gift and a surprise; for in the fruits of joy there is a principle of exuberance which distinguishes them from the fruits of duty. The intellectuals have destroyed the humanistic conception of love as pure spontaneity, as expression, by setting its justification not within itself, but in the child. In “Man and Superman” Mr. Shaw makes Tanner say that if our love did not produce another human being to serve the community, the community would have the sacred right of killing us off, just as the hive kills off the drones who do not attain the queen bee. But what does that mean? It means that happiness is of no importance, that it is a matter of the slightest moment whether, in a life which will never be given to us again, we realize some of the potentialities of our being or pass through it blind to the end. If it is worth while living at all, this must needs be the precise opposite of the truth. The child, like everything else, is justified; but it is not justified because it adds to the potential wealth of society, but because it adds to our present delight, and moreover lives a life as valid as our own. The truth is that we dare not admit that any pleasure whatever has a right to exist without serving society, and serving it deliberately. The joys of other generations have become our duties; and it is significant that Mr. Shaw and the bulk of the intelligentsia are at one on the birth-rate with the Roman Catholic Church, that church which has on many occasions through its theologians affirmed its belief that sensual love is a guilty thing, and, using its own kind of logic, has exhorted man to multiply and replenish the earth.