t of your letter? That sexual selection obtains? I
grant it. That it is incumbent upon us as intelligent men and women to
call to the aid of instinct our social wisdom? I grant and avow it. But
our social wisdom insists that we obey the choices of instinct; our
social wisdom is only another phase of our refinement, which, in
impelling us to a love of the beautiful, does not the less impel us to
love. Our social wisdom educates our taste without lessening our taste
for the thing. "Love a beautiful person nobly, but be sure you love
her," says our social wisdom with interesting tautology. Besides, you
are a heretic to your own breed, Herbert. It is you who would forsake
our present social wisdom, ruling modern men by laws which obtained in
primitive life. It is you who steadily hark back to the past, and to
states of consciousness which were but can never be again. The early
facts of biology cannot include that which transcends them. To borrow
from Ernest Seton Thompson, man is evolved with the lower orders in the
same way that water is changed into steam, and the nature of the change,
when it is effected, is as radical. Add a number of degrees of heat to
water and it is still water. Let one degree be wanting to the necessary
number, and the substance is still intact. Add the last degree, and
water is no longer water. From water to steam is a radical change and a
transformation.

You agree to improve upon the beasts of the fields and upon our own race
in the past, and in this you go farther than you have need if marriage
is for nothing else than to serve the instinct for perpetuation. You
shew some respect for what is natural and instinctive, yet you say that
all would be as well if individual choice had not prevailed, and men and
women were "shuffled about." You draw up a cold programme for action in
affairs of the spirit and formulate a code of procedure in matters of
the heart.

I have a programme too. Mine does not break with nature. On the
contrary, it obeys every instinct and listens to every call on the
senses. My love begins in my biologic self, grows with my growth, takes
its hues from visioned sunsets in corn-flower skies, its grace from
swaying rivers of grain seen in dreams. It is for me what it is for fish
and fowl, beast and vegetable. It is my passion for perpetuation, but it
is also something as different from this as I am different from beast
and vegetable. My love is "blind, unreasoning, and compelling,