Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/285

life-career, its individuals lose their ability to experience normal and natural love. The family instinct dies out. The men do not wish to marry because they find it inconvenient to assume the burden of responsibility for another human life and to provide for another being beside themselves. The women avoid the pains and inconveniences of motherhood and even when married, strive by the most unhallowed means to remain childless. The instinct of propagating, which has lost its aim of reproducing the species, dies out in some persons and in others, degenerates into the strangest and most abnormal complications. The act of generation, that most sublime function of the organism, which can not take place until it has reached its full maturity and with which are connected the most powerful sensations of which the nervous system is capable, is degraded into a mere wanton sensuality no longer having for its object the preservation and reproduction of the species, but merely a gratification of the senses, without the slightest aim or value for the community. Where love still appears, as a relic or case of atavism, it is not the union of two incomplete, half individualities into one whole and complete individuality of a higher type, it is not the transformation of a sterile single life into a fruitful dual life, that can be perpetuated in its offspring far into futurity, it is not the unconscious blending and extinction of egotism in altruism, it is not the discharging of the stagnant waters of an isolated, individual existence into the rushing, impetuous stream of the existence of the race—it is nothing but a strange longing incomprehensible even to itself, partly revery, partly hysteria, partly self-deception, reminiscences, self-application of what has been heard and read, combined with a sickly, sentimental, morbid imagination, and partly sheer lunacy, emotional or melancholy insanity. Un-