d won applause.
This whole field for ideals is largely influenced by suggestion from the
current tastes and fashionable standards in the group, but
autosuggestion is also very active in it. (_d_) Ideals also find a great
field in marriage. In this case ideals of happiness have powerfully
affected the institution at all its stages. Experience of marriage has
been partly pleasant and partly the contrary. The experience has
stimulated the reflection: How blessed it would be if only this or that
unpleasant detail could be corrected! This has led to idealization or
the imaginative conception of a modified institution. Our novels now
sometimes aid in this idealization. Men loved their daughters with
zealous and protective affection long before they loved their wives. The
father's love reached out to follow his daughter into matrimony and to
secure for her some stipulations which should free wedlock for her from
pain or care which other wives had to endure. These stipulations were
always guided by idealization. The rich and great were first able to
realize the modifications. These then passed into fashion, custom, and
the mores, and the institution was perfected and refined by them.

+205. Ideals of beauty.+ The educated ideals under the second and third
of the above heads become mass phenomena under the influence of fashion,
when they control many or all. Ideal types of beauty are adopted by a
group. Uncivilized people adopt such types of bodily beauty (sec. 189).
The origin of them is unknown. A Samoan mother presses her thumb on the
nose of her baby to flatten it.[419] An Indian mother puts a board on
the forehead of her baby to make it recede. Teeth are knocked out, or
filed into prescribed shapes, or blackened. The skin is painted, cut
into scars, or tattooed. Goblinism may have furnished the original
motives for some deformations, but the natural physical features of the
group which distinguish it from others, or the features produced by
goblinistic usages, come to be the standard of beauty for the group.
Those features are accentuated and exaggerated by the deformations which
are practiced. The aim is at an ideal perfection of physical beauty. All
fashion in dress has the same philosophy. In other cases, also, it seems
that fashion is pursuing a fleeting and impossible ideal of perfect
beauty, style, grace, dexterity, etc., which shall give distinction and
superiority or impose subjection.

+206. The man-as-he-should-b