For while, where the intellect is highly cultured, and the cerebral
life composes the major activity of the individual, early marriage
becomes generally the most dangerous of all experiments, and the
fruitful cause of human anguish, or the yet more disastrous cause of
human atrophy and non-development, it may, on the other hand, lose all
its danger where the intellectual faculties are more or less dormant
through non-cultivation, and where the action of the physical functions
form the major activity of the individual concerned. For, while the
brain, in the mentally labouring individual often continues to grow
and modify itself till forty, or in exceptional cases till much later,
and while the psychic condition in the case of such persons tends
completely to modify and change itself between the age of adolescence
and the ripe adult maturity of thirty or thirty-five--so that the man
or woman of thirty-three has often little or nothing in common with
the youth or maiden of eighteen, or even of twenty-one, out of whose
crude substance they have developed; and who therefore may have little
or nothing in common with the individual whom that youth or maiden
selected as a companion, and may therefore find, long before middle
life, the continual union with that individual a moral deformity and a
mental death--it is, on the other hand, probable that where the brain
is not highly active, and under conditions of life in which (however
great the natural intelligence) the intellectual faculties are kept
more or less quiescent, where little mental stimulation is brought to
bear on the individual between the ages of puberty and ripe adulthood,
that little or no change or development takes place; and that therefore
the person who is selected as an appropriate companion at eighteen or
twenty-one will probably be quite as harmonious a companion at thirty
or forty; and the danger of early marriage is non-existent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account