an, out of the demands of the individual and the demands
of society, out of the pagan and the Christian points of view, out of
the resolve to mould the future and out of piety towards the past."

No reader of Ellen Key's books can fail to be impressed by the
remarkable harmony between her sexual ethics and the conception that
underlies Sir Francis Galton's scientific eugenics. In setting forth the
latest aspects of his view of eugenics before the Sociological Society,
Galton asserted that the improvement of the race, in harmony with
scientific knowledge, would come about by a new religious movement, and
he gave reasons to show why such an expectation is not unreasonable; in
the past men have obeyed the most difficult marriage rules in response
to what they believed to be supernatural commands, and there is no
ground for supposing that the real demands of the welfare of the race,
founded on exact knowledge, will prove less effective in calling out an
inspiring religious emotion. Writing probably at the same time, Ellen
Key, in her essay entitled _Love and Ethics_, set forth precisely the
same conception, though not from the scientific but from the emotional
standpoint. From the outset she places the sexual question on a basis
which brings it into line with Galton's eugenics. The problem used to be
concerned, she remarks, with the insistence of society on a rigid
marriage form, in conflict with the demand of the individual to gratify
his desires in any manner that seemed good to him, while now it becomes
a question of harmonizing the claims of the improvement of the race with
the claims of the individual to happiness in love. She points out that
on this aspect real harmony becomes more possible. Regard for the
ennoblement of the race serves as a bridge from a chaos of conflicting
tendencies to a truer conception of love, and "love must become on a
higher plane what it was in primitive days--a religion." She compares
the growth of the conception of the vital value of love to the modern
growth of the conception of the value of health as against the medieval
indifference to hygiene. It is inevitable that Ellen Key, approaching
the question from the emotional side, should lay less stress than Galton
on the importance of scientific investigation in heredity, and insist
mainly on the value of sound instincts, unfettered by false and
artificial constraints, and taught to realize that the physical and the
psychic aspects of life a