But these incidents as the one before mentioned, where women are concerned, are notoriously only isolated examples. It will require the development of several generations before it will be the woman's instinct, an irresistibly mastering instinct, to allow no physically or psychically degenerated or perverted man to become the father of her children. The instinct of the man is far stronger in this direction, but it is dulled too by an antiquated legal conception, according to which the woman must subject herself as a duty to requirements against which her whole being revolts. In this respect a woman has only one duty, an unmistakable one, against which every transgression is a sin, namely that the new being to which she gives life, must be born in love and purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete common will, in a complete common happiness. Until women see this as a duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by beings, who in a moment of their existence have been robbed of the best pre-conditions of their life's happiness and their life's efficiency. Occasionally they show plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or of discord. Occasionally they seem for a long time to be healthy and powerful specimens of humanity, until in some critical moment they go to pieces through an insufficient supply of physical and psychical vitality caused by their very origin. As to marriages between healthy and active individuals, legislation can do nothing. Ethics alone can exert an influence for betterment. Children must be taught from their earliest years about their existence and their future duties as men and women. So mothers and fathers together can impress on the conscience of the children not any abstract conception of purity, but the concrete commandment of chastity in letters of fire. So they will keep their health, their attractiveness, their guilelessness, for the being they are to love; for the children who from this love will receive their life. The impulse to preserve the species, it is true, makes human beings low, small, or laughable; as poets like Maupassant, Tolstoi, and others have depicted from quite different points of view; but it only does so when the impulse appears without relation to the end given it in nature, or when this end is attained without consideration for the production of an offspring qualified to live. The kind of love which disturbs life is that which diminishes the value of an individual as a creator of life. This type of love really degrades human beings, is immoral from the standpoint of the modern view, which wills life to be, but above all, wills the progress of life to ever higher forms.