Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/58

52 beauty proper; but nevertheless there is a tendency to admit, or rather demand, especially of women, moral characters not demanded in the case of primary beauty. While the handsome old man is, rather strictly, the man who still retains in some degree the marks of positive beauty (the marks having a retrospective significance), the beautiful old woman is she who, retaining the retrospective characters, also gives evidence of graces and temperamental qualities which are possibly more the result of environment than of constitution, and which in the younger woman are set off from beauty as “sweetness.”

This admission of retrospective personal values is one feature of the consideration which civilization has given to the aged, i. e., to the individual no longer potential for the race. This consideration, perhaps, has not increased since patriarchal times, but it is an advance over the attitude of still more primitive races amongst whom the individual who is no longer useful as a warrior or a parent is ignored or eliminated.

Finally, I must refer to the popular distinction between prettiness and beauty; a distinction which at least as it applies to women rests on solid psychobiological grounds, and which offers abundant opportunity for psychological research, having practical application to some of the pressing social problems.