Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/125

Rh protest against the same liberty and science on your part in the name of all the principles of morality!

Goethe, to be sure, did not express this last sentence in words; but neither this liberal friend of women nor any other one would have declared himself contented if his beloved had surprised him with the news:

 Heart-felt love unites us forever and faithful yearnings; But desire still craves the pleasures of change.

Let us meet in advance an objection which will be raised against the theory of adultery as here set forth. On the basis of the old conceptions it will be said that this theory would logically protect and argue away every violation of duty. But the very end to be sought is the release of the essence and conditions of marriage from the bonds of duty in which it has been chained, and to place it unfettered upon the ground upon which it thrives — upon the ground of spontaneous attachment. The present moralists acknowledge marriages in which the sense of duty takes the place of attachment or makes it unnecessary; a sense of duty, namely, which is stimulated or dictated by external considerations. But true liberty and morality cannot acknowledge such marriages, for they are thoroughly immoral. A duty can never exist at the expense of ethical conceptions