iness.
Diseases are indications that we have broken a law of nature. The
plague of London was properly interpreted by our ancestors as a hint
to improve the sanitary conditions of the town. Similarly, we have to
consider the consequences of obeying our instincts. The desire of food
and necessaries is the most powerful of these instincts, and next to
it the passion between the sexes. They are both good, for they are
both natural; but they have to be properly correlated. To 'virtuous
love' in particular we owe the 'sunny spots' in our lives, where the
imagination loves to bask. Desire of necessaries gives us the stimulus
of the comfortable fireside; and love adds the wife and children,
without whom the fireside would lose half its charm. Now, as a rule,
the sexual passion is apt to be in excess. The final cause of this
excess is itself obvious. We cannot but conceive that it is an object
of 'the Creator that the earth should be replenished.'[241] To secure
that object, it is necessary that 'there should be a tendency in the
population to increase faster than food.' If the two instincts were
differently balanced, men would be content though the population of a
fertile region were limited to the most trifling numbers. Hence the
instinct has mercifully been made so powerful as to stimulate
population, and thus indirectly and eventually to produce a population
at once larger and more comfortable. On the one hand, it is of the
very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that they should
not increase too fast,[242] but, on the other hand, if the passion
were weakened, the motives which make a man industrious and capable of
progress would be diminished also. It would, of course, be simpler to
omit the 'teleology'; to say that sanitary regulations are made
necessary by the plague, not that the plague is divinely appointed to
encourage sanitary regulations. Malthus is at the point of view of
Paley which becomes Darwinism when inverted; but the conclusion is
much the same. He reaches elsewhere, in fact, a more precise view of
the value of the 'moral restraint.' In a chapter devoted for once to
an ideal state of things,[243] he shows how a race thoroughly imbued
with that doctrine would reconcile the demands of the two instincts.
Population would in that case increase, but, instead of beginning by
an increase, it would begin by providing the means of supporting. No
man would become a father until he had seen his way to provide