boat as ordinary
mortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true
love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or
reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this
predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as
were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment.
Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent a
thinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks could
have differed from us only in their _ideas_ about love, and not in
their feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in the
review referred to,

"that individual women should not at all times have had the
power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted
respect.... So powerful and instinctive, an emotion can
never have been recently evolved. But our ideas _about_ our
emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very
much from one generation to another."

In the next paragraph he admits, however, that "no doubt the
way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions
themselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;" and in
this admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object of
my chapter "How Sentiments Change and Grow" is to show how men's
_ideas_ regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty,
chastity, incest, affect and modify their _feelings_ in relation to
them, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objection
made to my theory.[313]

Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but
dampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung
up in them. Their literature attests that they considered love a
degrading, sensual passion, not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment,
as we do. With such an _idea_ how could they have possibly _felt_
toward women as we do? With the _idea_ firmly implanted in their minds
that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they
have experienced that _emotional_ state of ecstatic adoration and
worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love? Of
necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from
such love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they,
though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have
risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of
women; for