Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/100

84 from a union which would have ceased had not external considerations or binding fetters held it together, transmits the curse of the misfortune and of the immorality to the next generation.

As a second end of marriage, which we must at the same time call its origin, I designate love. I shall spare myself the trouble of combating those philosophers who would deny the existence of love. At the same time I do not content my. self with conceiving of love only in its romantic form, and I do not care to construct a cornerstone of the moral order of things from an intoxication of the senses or of the imagination. I shall let the happiness which accompanies this intoxication stand in all its beauty wherever it is present; but we must place its substance on a basis of reason, and make a consciousness of the intoxication. This is accomplished by tracing love to man's perfect consciousness of his sovereignty in the world, of his worth and his liberty, and then, moreover, to the true recognition of the advantages of external and internal beauty which satisfy not only a sensual but, at the same time, an ethical and æsthetical need in the lovers. Lovers must come to be to each other that which men have hitherto placed above the clouds by the words "god"? and "goddess;" yes, they must become even more to each other, namely, the realized ideal of their moral conceptions and of their sense of beauty. If they learn to seek and to appreciate