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The old view, while we were yet untroubled by ethnology, sociology, and psychology, was that life is a sort of Sunday school, which we entered at birth to fit us for a future life. It had rules we were bound to obey, virtues and vices to be acquired and shunned, praise and, above all, blame, to be duly apportioned. Alas! for the Sunday school and its virtues; it has gone the way of the Garden of Eden. We may well nowadays sometimes sigh for their lost simplicity. The life we know now is more like a great maelstrom of forces out of which man, in tardy self-consciousness, just uprears his head. And the maelstrom is not only of mechanical forces, which he might compute and balance, and which by counterpoise negate each other, but of vital spiritual and mental forces, which grew by counterpoise and whose infinite intricacy baffles computation. Not the least difficult, and certainly among the most intricate and complex of the problems before us, is the due counterpoise of sex and humanity.
The problem is not likely to grow simpler. Sex shows no sign of a tendency to atrophy. In view of evolutionary laws, how should it? It is by and through sex that the fittest survive. On the whole, it is those least highly dowered with sex who remain unmarried and die out. It is true, however, that though the sex-impulse does not atrophy, it becomes milder and less purely instinctive by being blended with other impulses. From a blind reproductive force it becomes a complex sentiment. Therein, in the diffusion and softening of the impulse lies the real hope, but therein lies the complexity of the problem. It is interesting, and may be, I think, instructive, to note a very early and widespread attempt at solution made,
