There is a certain order in progress which it is impossible to retract. An advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest which it furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; had agriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its own rationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal in which those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which created the ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and death were abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: its pleasures would cease to charm the mind, and its results—pregnancy, child-birth, infancy—would seem positively horrible. But so long as reproduction is necessary the ideal of life must include it. Otherwise we should be constructing not an ideal of life but some dream of non-human happiness, a dream whose only remnant of ideality would be borrowed from such actual human functions as it still expressed indirectly. The true ideal must speak for all necessary and compatible functions. Man being an inevitably reproductive animal his reproductive function must be included in his perfect life. [Sidenote: Inner values already lodged in this function.] Now, any function to reach perfection it must fulfil two conditions: it must be delightful in itself, endowing its occasions and results with ideal interest, and it must also co-operate harmoniously with all other functions so that life may be profitable and happy. In the matter of reproduction nature has already fulfilled the first of these conditions in its essentials. It has indeed super-abundantly fulfilled them, and not only has love appeared in man’s soul, the type and symbol of all vital perfection, but a tenderness and charm, a pathos passing into the frankest joy, has been spread over pregnancy, birth, and childhood. If many pangs and tears still prove how tentative and violent, even here, are nature’s most brilliant feats, science and kindness may strive not unsuccessfully to diminish or abolish those profound traces of evil. But reproduction will not be perfectly organised until the second condition is fulfilled as well, and here nature has as yet been more remiss. Family life, as Western nations possess it, is still regulated in a very bungling, painful, and unstable manner. Hence, in the first rank of evils, prostitution, adultery, divorce, improvident and unhappy marriages; and in the second rank, a morality compacted of three inharmonious parts, with incompatible ideals, each in its way legitimate: I mean the ideals of passion, of convention, and of reason; add, besides, genius and religion thwarted by family ties, single lives empty, wedded lives constrained, a shallow gallantry, and a dull virtue. [Sidenote: Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.]