Trace it up. Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first
of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which
fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the
riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree. The
one is crudely artificial, the other consummately artificial. That is
all. There have been improvements. The first inventors grasped that
truthful paradox, "the longest way round is the shortest way home," and
forsook the direct pursuit of happiness for the indirect pursuit of
happiness. If the happiness of a savage depended upon his crossing an
extensive body of water, he did not directly proceed to swim it, but
turned his back upon it, selected a tree from the forest, shaped it with
his rude tools and hollowed it out with fire, then launched it in the
water and paddled toward where his happiness lay.
Now concerning love. In the state of nature it is a brutal passion,
nothing more. There is no romance attached. But life creeps upward, and
the gregarious human forms social groups the like of which never existed
before. Consider the family group, for instance. Such a group becomes in
itself an entity. By means of the group man is better enabled to pursue
happiness. But to maintain the group it must be regulated; so man
formulates rules, codes, dim ethical laws for the conduct of the group
members. Sexual ties are made less promiscuous and more orderly. A
greater privacy is observed. And out of order and privacy spring respect
and sacredness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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