Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/291

it were not so the offspring would not be full of vitality and energy. Hence, marriage, the only relationship between man and woman countenanced by society in which offspring are produced, should be the result of love. For love is the great regulator of the life of the race, the impelling force which promotes the perfecting of the species and tries to prevent its physical decay. Love is the instinctive recognition of the fact by one being, that it must be united with a certain other being of the opposite sex, so that its good qualities may be increased, its bad neutralized and its offspring prove at least no deterioration of its type, and if possible an improvement upon it. The propagating impulse alone is blind, and it needs the reliable guide, love, to enable it to reach its natural goal, which is at the same time the perpetuation and improvement of its kind. If this guide is lacking, if the union of man and woman is determined by chance or external interests, which have nothing to do with its physiological purpose, and not by mutual attraction, then the offspring of such an ill-assorted couple will be almost always bad or mediocre. The children inherit the faults of the parents which appear in an increased form in them, while their good qualities are modified or lacking entirely. The generation, the race thus produced is inharmonious, distracted within itself and decaying, doomed to become speedily extinct. Only one voice, the voice of love, tells the individual that his union with a certain other individual is desirable in the interests of the preservation and perfection of his kind, while his union with a certain other would be disastrous. Goethe employed a single word to express the essence of love, which comprehends it so wonderfully and defines it so exhaustively that volumes of definition could add nothing to it; this word is: "Wahlwandtschaft," which has been translated: "elective