Note AF — Chapter XII · SENSUAL LOVE

This common every-day kind of love, which is nothing else but a refined sexuality, pure and simple, has been elevated to a fetich by the modern so-called intellectuals and extolled in and out of season. The advocates of the new love-morality show by the attributes, as love at first sight, that what they understand by love is sensual love. Yet upon this prosaic attachment they try to build up their new system of sexual ethics.

Every union not based upon this kind of sensual attachment is decried as mere prostitution in marriage. Any marriage influenced by such motives as loneliness, poverty, welfare of the nearest relatives, the advance in social position, advance in business or in the professions, without the obligatory romance, which after all is only refined animalism, is considered contemptible. Such motives are held to be honorable enough to govern any other action in the life of the individual, but when it comes to marriage the line is drawn. Without the quickly wearing off glamor of a silly moon-light romance, the best of motives for contracting marriage relations are nowadays considered ulterior, and the sought-for party regards itself as having married under a misapprehension.

Even eugenic power is attributed to this wonderful love. Two intellectual and physical giants will beget weaklings, so we are told, if their union has not preceded by love’s desire; while if two weaklings marry upon short notice, guided only by their pent-up sex promptings, the offspring, as a child of love, is prophesied to become a physical and intellectual giant. As if the chromosomes, the carriers of the determiners of the unit-characters, could be influenced by love’s perjuries.