ABSTRACT
Reproduction, like nutrition, is indispensable to an animal race. The economy of sex is therefore no less important in life than the provision of food. The sexual impulse must be strong enough, at certain seasons, to abolish a more prudential selfishness; and special habits and sentiments must be so rooted in the psyches of parents that their offspring may not perish. This, in man, is a serious commitment, whereas in some other species everything is made ready in the young before birth, or very soon after, so that parenthood is not a serious interruption of hunting or migrating or fresh love-affairs. The prolonged childhood of the human race, on the contrary, demands disinterested and probably unrewarded devotion to the young, at least on the mother’s part. But the birth of more children, before the first is weaned, fetters the spontaneous affections of the father also to his nest and to his wife. This is the basis of human domestic morality.
