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it would attract. The important thing is to clear the air and see plainly that this sex-devotion, this egotism of self-abasement, is not altruism. It causes none of the healthy reactions of altruism, none of that bracing and expanding and uplifting of the spirit that mysteriously comes of "giving ourselves to something other and greater than ourselves."
But, it may again be urged, granted that sex leads to egotism, yet because it is intimately bound up with the parental instinct, it does also lead to altruism. Bound up with, associated—yes, but of its essence, no. People do not marry that they may indulge the altruism of bringing up their children. Races exist who are not even aware that marriage has any connection with the birth of children, and to whom therefore the prospect can lend no altruistic impulse. Parental, or, rather, maternal instinct is one, and perhaps the greatest source of "tender" altruistic emotion, of that disinterested love for and desire to protect the helpless which is the least egotistical and perhaps the loveliest of human sentiments. But the maternal instinct in the main is a thing healthy indeed and happy, but nowise specially holy. It is an extended egotism. Our ego, we are nowadays taught, is not limited by our own personality. It extends to wife and husband, to children and relations, to our clothes and possessions, to our clubs and associations. The extended ego, like the personal ego, is apt to be at war with herd-altruism. Love of my own children does not necessarily lead to love of yours. A woman will often shamelessly indulge about her children an egotism that she would blush to
