real
life. We may now return to our main contention.

In our quotation from Herbert Spencer we may notice the significant
assertion that amongst intellectual attractions it is natural faculty,
quickness, wit and insight, rather than acquired knowledge, that a man
admires in a woman. In considering that point the somewhat hazardous
assertion was ventured upon that the woman rates intellectual
attractions in the man higher than he does in her. One has indeed heard
it stated that a man marries for beauty and a woman for brains. A
statement so brief cannot be accurate in such a case. But we may insist
upon the contrast between acquired knowledge and natural faculty.
Spencer was no doubt right in believing that man values the natural
faculty rather than the acquired knowledge. A woman no doubt does so
too. If she admires a man for being an encyclopaedia, it is only, one
hopes, because she admires the natural qualities of studiousness,
perseverance and memory which his knowledge involves. Nor would she be
long in finding out whether his knowledge is digested, and the capacity
to digest it, remember, is a natural faculty.

The reader who remembers our principle that the individual exists for
the future will not fail to see what we are driving at. Directly we
study in any critical way the causes of attraction among the sexes, we
see that under healthy conditions, unvitiated by convention or money, it
is always the inborn rather than the acquired that counts. If Spencer
had cared to pursue his point half a century ago, he had the key to it
in his hands. Youth prefers the natural to the acquired qualities.

Nature, greatest of match-makers, has so constructed youth because she
is a Eugenist, and because she knows that it is the natural qualities
and not the acquired ones which are transmitted to offspring.

And now it may be shown that this fact wholly consorts with our
contention that there is no antinomy between the happiness of the
individual and the happiness of the race in the marriage choice. For the
race it is only the natural qualities of its future parents that matter,
for only these are transmissible. From the strictly eugenic point of
view, therefore, the girl should be counselled to choose her mate, not
merely on the ground of his personal qualities but, more strictly still,
on the ground of those personal qualities which are natural and not
acquired. And my last point is that these qualities, which are alone of
l