Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/80

64 For common men, or men corrupted by our present education, it is a mere pretext for their inclinations towards the harem if they put up a doctrine of the "plurality of love;" uncorrupted men can at most look upon the doctrine as a make-shift for the misfortune of not having an opportunity in this perverse world for a free choice according to natural affinity. In a world as it ought to be the exclusiveness of love will be all the moréa law because no free woman will want to share a beloved man with another, and vice versa.

Thus we have reached the subject of jealousy. I would not designate jealousy either as an "inborn" nor as an "inbred" passion. It is an accidental passion, for which the faculty indeed is inborn. In its nobler form and in its nobler motives it arises from love and can, according to circumstances and the character of the person from whom it emanates, differ in its nature and in its mode of expression. The noblest jealousy is a sort of ambition or pride of the loving person who feels it as an insult that another one should assume it. as possible to supplant his love, or it is the highest degree of devotion which sees a desecration of its object in the foreign invasion, as it were, of his own altar. A jealousy of this sort, which would fain keep away everything unworthy from the beloved person, is far superior to that lower grade which arises from the anxiety of losing the beloved object through the approach