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 PART II

THE CONSERVATION OF BEAUTY

Human beauty, we have pointed out, is a sign of fitness for parenthood: fitness to propagate children who shall be, in high degree, able to hold their own in the mental and physical struggle with nature and with their human competitors. It is the sign which is intuitively recognized by the race and upon which the process of sexual selection is based. It therefore is nothing superficial: it is the external appearance of the germinal potentiality which is the most important of all things for society.

When we say that this sign is intuitively recognized, we do not mean that it has any mystic properties: we mean that it is a sign wh ich is accepted and acted upon, without induction or inference, or reasoned process: recognized in the visual details of form and coloration and graceful movement, in the audible details of voice, and the tactually felt smoothness of skin and firmness of muscle and glossiness of hair. Concerning the processes of development through which this recognition may have passed, and the conjectural mechanism through which it has come about, we need not