In class (_d_) we also have a very large and growing section of the population, particularly among the middle classes. It consists of people, not unlike the former, but who know exactly what real passion does, and how it does it, and who proceed to ape it in every momentous incident of their lives. They are negative and therefore have no genuine promptings from passion; but they read and observe a good deal, and they emulate their passionate fellows with a pertinacity worthy of a better purpose. They will fall in love, marry, commit adultery, divorce, and even commit murder, provided that they can convince themselves that each successive step has been taken in the grand style. And, as they proceed through their various metamorphoses, they watch themselves with the double interest of participators and spectators of a great drama. * * * * * Of the whole negative class it may be said that they are radically unstable in marriage, because they are not actuated by any natural passion or impulse, and therefore do not become _wedded_ to any environment where their instincts find perfect adaptation. On the other hand, however, they are frequently able, owing to this very lack of natural passion, to endure for a lifetime matrimonial unions which would be intolerable to the positive type for a month, and this accounts for the fact that, in England particularly, there are so many peaceful lifelong unions of couples who are childless and doomed to childlessness. The most constant characteristic of all negative people, however, is this, that they are always prepared, and able, to silence the natural passions (because in them these forces are so feeble) and to direct their conduct according to any conceivable rule other than that of these natural passions. Thus opportunism, vanity, an eye to the main chance, love of display, histrionic tastes, indolence, caution, cowardice—each one of these factors may at different moments direct their lives; but true passion certainly never will, and the very fact that it cannot, they will dress in every form of high-falutin’ euphemism. They will call their lack of passion, self-control, or strength of will; they will describe it as ordinary common decency; they will even have the impudence to call it simply “good breeding,” and sometimes they will have the duplicity and arrogance to call it purity. FOOTNOTES: [70] See Chapter 44 of the _Ergänzung zum vierten Buch_ of the _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_. In _La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée_, by C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero (Paris, Felix Alcan, 1896) the authors, wishing to emphasize the same fact, say very plainly: “C’est le besoin de l’espèce, le besoin maternel, qui pousse la femme vers l’homme, l’amour féminin étant une fonction subordonnée à la maternité” (p. 107). [71] See _ante_, p. 148. See also Lombroso and Ferrero, Op. cit. (p. 112): “Psychiquement, l’amour de la mère se greffe toujours et l’emporte sur le besoin du sexe.”