Again in regard to the very alternative of philanthropic or misanthropic sentiment, in a well-known passage of the moral teaching of most Europeans, there occurs the famous command “Love thy neighbour.” And there are not a few sentimentalists who, accepting this doctrine as the remedy for all social evils, proclaim with full-throated fervour, that if only there were more love in the world, all would be well. Now it must surely have occurred to a large number of people, that if there is one human impulse known to all mankind that responds with difficulty to the word of command, it is precisely the impulse to love. A man may, by an effort of will, stop his breathing and die,--it is said that negro slaves constantly did this in the holds of humane British seamen’s ships in the 18th century;--a man may by an effort of will obey the command to kill himself and unhesitatingly raise the means of suicide to his throat;--in Japan this command used [p176] frequently to be given and as frequently obeyed;--but by no effort of will, however severe the command, can a man be made to feel the impulse to love his neighbour. Love springs spontaneously in the human breast. Its provocation is invariably, not a word of command, not a behest, but the charm, grace, or other perfection of an object contemplated. There is therefore little psychological insight in the command “Love thy neighbour.” Nobody would deny that to love one’s neighbour is an excellent prescription for happy social life; but nobody who was not sadly ignorant of human nature, or divinely insular, would dream of attempting to achieve this end by commanding it. The only way to set about loving one’s neighbour, with benignity aforethought, as it were, is, in the first place, _to make him loveable_. For love is a spontaneous impulse springing up in the breast through contemplation or comprehension of some charming or otherwise alluring object. Now it is possible that modern life, with all its besotting, emasculating, and uglifying occupations, with its total absence of any check upon the multiplication of the unsightly and unsavoury, its sickness, and its second-rate, third-rate and fourth-rate healthiness, is pursuing diametrically the opposite aim. It is destroying the æsthetic basis of the impulse to love; and, except where sexual attraction is at work, renders love of one’s neighbour a practical impossibility. It would be ridiculous, and eminently unscientific, to overlook this factor in the gradual disintegration and unhappiness of modern society. For a community in which all the [p177] elements fly asunder when they meet, is unlikely to be either harmonious or happy. Thus the increasing unloveableness of one’s neighbour, as the result of the increasing ugliness and unsavouriness of most European populations, cannot be altogether disregarded.