ABSTRACT
The most profound of all human instincts, besides those of hunger and self-defence, is the erotic instinct. The elementary and fundamental forms of society take shape from the nature of that relation. The Churches, again, have not been guilty of idle folly when they have placed such stress on the control of concupiscence, while preaching a religion of love, as almost to make morals and sexual morals interchangeable words. The suppression of the one is deadness and the extinction of the other is an unlovely anarchy. Sexual satisfaction, turned to satiety, rather dissolves than fortifies any inclination to live quietly in accordance with family obligations. Happy the animals for whom the two major forms of the reproductive or erotic instinct, sexual and maternal, do not come simultaneously into play or into conflict. The desire for protection and the love of mutual society can account for the holding together, around the mother, of primitive communities.
