Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/364

360 vigor follows emotional marriages. The weak man or woman is absorbed in one individual and hates or at least is indifferent to mankind. Normality and great physical vigor tend in the opposite direction. They displace hysterical emotions with a vivid power of idealization by which the whole race becomes the object of thought; the gentle but vivid emotion of love that results goes out to all mankind and becomes personal only incidentally if at all. Love and hysteria are thus at opposite poles of physical vigor. Through idealization love imposes qualities on others they do not have and diminishes the antipathy of people to those of other stocks. It improves the race by favoring marriages that are real crosses, thus giving to children new and better qualities. The source of love is thus positive and within one's self while that of an affinity is negative, being aroused only by the presence of another defective individual. Love thus elevates and broadens while an absorbing affinity narrows and degrades.

In primitive times when the defective could not survive, emotional marriages like an emotional religion had certain advantages, and it is evident why they were both popular and useful, but when the dominance of humanitarian motives allows the weak to arrive at maturity, the power of affinity both in marriage and in religion becomes a potent force for evil. The broader interests of the race are subordinated to a narrow family and sectarian life. Vivid emotion and hysteria localize and isolate mankind into opposing groups. The marriage of affinities and the inbreeding of religious sectarians cut down the birth rate and reduce the vigor of each generation. There is thus a force that prevents degeneration even where the reduction of disease and humanitarian motives tend to permit the survival of the weak. Race suicide does in a generation what disease and brutality would have done in a few years. The increase in the number of normal people would lift men above the dangers of hysteria and degeneration and substitute rational methods for the primitive impulses that control our social life; social attraction based on a love for dissimilar people would then displace the power of affinity binding together people of the same stock. This higher bond can be secured only by transforming the defects due to economic deficits into the positive characters that would come of themselves if the mass of the people had income and leisure. Health, vigor, idealization and the love of those dissimilar to ourselves are steps in progress that follow the appearance of an economic surplus. The misleading impulses of hysteria and the narrowing grasp of affinity are the forces that mislead men in their marriage relations. Set them aside and eugenic marriages will be as common as now they are rare.