Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/79

61 in which, together with his body and his mind, the world around him also grew; along with his slowly-rising, constantly-extended horizon, the circle of his hopes enlarged, and his noble young heart was ever learning to beat more ardently in quick curiosity, with impatient enthusiasm for all that is great, and good, and beautiful. The flower of the sexual instinct develops later in a healthy, unstimulated (ungereizten) man than in any animal; for he is to live long and should not dissipate too early the noblest essence of his mental and vital powers. The insect, which serves love early, dies early also; all chaste monogamous species of animals live longer than those which live without marriage. The lustful cock soon dies; the constant wood-pigeon may live fifty years. Thus marriage too is ordered for nature's favorite here below; and the first fresh years of his life he should live to himself, like an unopened bud of innocence. Then follow long years of virile and most cheerful powers, in which his reason ripens, which in man, along moreover with the generative powers, flourishes to an advanced age unknown among the animals; till at last death gently comes and releases the falling dust as well as the shut-in spirit from a union foreign even to themselves. Thus nature has expended on the fragile habitation of the human body all the art which a creature of the earth could receive; and even in that which shortens and enfeebles life, she has requited the briefer with the more sensible enjoyment, the consuming with the more ardently-experienced power."

If the rhetorical, not to say rhapsodical, form of the argument is disregarded, it will be seen that the passage contains several suggestions of the later doctrine. The connection of childhood with longevity, and of both with the life of sex, bear no relation to Fiske's formulation of the principle. But the view that man matures slowly, that his infancy is prolonged because he has so much to learn, is distinctly suggestive of the theory which Fiske worked out somewhat less than a century after the appearance of Herder's work. The contrast between man and animal also deserves notice, although it is less definite than it became in Fiske's treatment of the subject.

The next section traces the "formation of man for humanity (Humanität) and religion." As in the case of every organism, it is held, man's impulses have reference to self-preservation, on the one hand, and to sympathy or communion (Theilnehmung oder Mittheilung), on the other. Sexual love in its finer development leads with him to the life