Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/8



, mine, I am about to treat herein the grandest subject that ever engaged or challenged human thought. In doing so it is likely that I may repeat some things elsewhere, by myself or others, said before; but even if so, I have struck upon many things now given to the race for the first time.

A vast amount of "physiological" chaff is current in the world, originating in the pulpy brains of certain people with "M.D" after their names; folks who eke out a good living by putting medicines, of which they know little, into bodies whereof they know less.

A still larger amount of "chaff" labelled "philosophy" is afloat, generated for the most part in the angular heads of people, whom a chronic prostatitis or ovarian fever has so deranged that they really imagine themselves philosophers,—being only shams,—who propose to revolutionize the world, especially the domain of Marriage-land, by inculcating pudacious sophistries, better calculated to kill than to cure the victims, on either side. One thing is certain: Light is needed; and this work (originally intended to be called by a different title, but which intent was abandoned, owing to the vastly larger scope of the completed and rewritten volume) is meant to afford exactly what is required; and

I. What a tremendous deal of suffering, horror, crime, wretchedness and despair there is in this beautiful, but badly misused world of ours!—most of which might be prevented in the first instance, or remedied in the second, were there less consummate and confounded ignorance afloat up and down the earth's strong tides of human life, with its strangely, wildly surging ebbs and flows, heats