sacramental character of marriage -- Sanction by the State of a freer form of marriage (civil marriage, mixed marriage, divorce) -- Psychology of love in the marriage problem -- Inconstancy of human love -- The eternity lie -- Transient character of youthful love -- Gutzkow, Kierkegaard, and Rétif de la Bretonne on this subject -- The poetical character of the first stages of every love -- The sexual need for variety as an anthropologico-biological phenomenon -- This simply an explanatory principle, not an ideal -- Rarity of the “only” love -- The psychologist Stiedenroth on this subject -- The possibility of love felt simultaneously for several persons -- Explanation of this fact -- Examples -- Difficulty of complete harmony between man and wife -- The ideal of the “one” love -- Schleiermacher on the necessity for experiments in love -- The examples of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Caroline Schelling -- The need for love unaffected by disillusion -- Dangers of habituation -- The double rôle of habituation in marriage -- Danger of intimate life in common -- The common bedroom -- Unfavourable conditions with regard to the relative ages of husband and wife -- Increase in premature marriages -- Connexion of this phenomenon with the premature awakening of sexuality -- Too great a difference in age between husband and wife -- Consequent physiological disharmony -- Postponement of marriage in consequence of civilization -- Diminution of marriages in various European countries -- Economical factors -- Mercenary marriage a vestige of earlier times -- Disappearance of the economic background to marriage with the further advance of civilization -- Marriage and the price of corn -- Part played by mercenary marriage in various classes -- Importance of economic factors in marriage -- Summary of the causes of the diminution of the “marriage impulse” -- “Conjugal rights” -- Justification and misuse of these -- Boredom in married life -- Marriage and disease -- Opinion of an alienist on the calamities of marriage -- Statements of a wife -- Schiller and Byron upon love and marriage -- A dictum of Socrates -- Growing disinclination to the coercive character of the marriage bond -- Great increase in the number of divorces in recent years -- § 1568 of the Civil Code -- Legal possibility of several successive divorces on the part of the same individual -- A kind of civil sanction of free love -- Dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom -- Grounds for divorce -- Marriage reform in France -- Composition and programme of the French committee for marriage reform -- The idea of sexual responsibility. Appendix: Report of one hundred typical marriages, and twelve characteristic more detailed pictures of married life, after Gross-Hoffinger. CHAPTER X