The reduction of any human function to the plane of sensationalism alone has this strange result that, in the end, the very sensations it provides tend to decline in intensity. It is as if sensation alone were an insufficient psychical foundation to support the whole arch of any permanent human interest or effort, and that where it is not correlated with the feelings of power or purposefulness, it tends to crumble and to perish. The woman in such cases suffers even more quickly than the man, because in her the physiological disappointment sings in chorus with the psychical disillusionment. But in the man too ultimate anæsthesia is inevitable; for, sooner or later, the fact that the natural consequences of his act (offspring) are not forthcoming, will begin to tell on his self-esteem and his sense of power, with which elements more than half the savour of sexual relations must certainly have been associated by his ancestors.[89] A further psychological factor must be reckoned with, which has its share in bringing about matrimonial difficulties in the state of deliberate childlessness, or of the limitation of the family, and that is the feeling of aimlessness that ultimately supervenes, when any two people associate together without any further object in life than that of eating, drinking, or making merry. This is not due to the fact that eating, drinking, and making merry are in themselves bad, as the Puritans would have us believe; but that they are at least monotonous if unrelieved by any other interests. Life, as we have seen, is repetition with a modicum of variation, and so is happiness. Nothing that can introduce variety into the home of the young couple, therefore, ought to be eschewed, for fear lest that lack of variety should be realized which causes life to lose its interest and its savour. Now children are obviously a constant source of variety in the home. Each child, in its turn, gives the home a different aspect, a different outlook, a different responsibility. Children, moreover, give the family unit a superior aim and purpose, which increases in importance with the number of the offspring. In this sense alone, therefore, a state of childlessness or of family limitation (when the number of children is small), in an ordinary home, where there are no compensating features such as ardent artistic, scientific or religious preoccupations, constitutes a dangerous state from the standpoint of connubial stability. Before concluding this discussion of the positive couple in relation to divorce, which we propose to do with an examination of the statistics, it will now be necessary to consider the circumstances under which the positive man himself becomes unfaithful.[90]