Publisher's Synopsis
An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir George Campbell has set hisface against the time-honoured practice of Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have settheir faces against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only attacked the particularinstance, without venturing to impugn the institution itself on general principles. An old Indianadministrator, however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He would always like toregulate human life generally as a department of the India Office; and so Sir George Campbellwould fain have husbands and wives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, by the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development of the race, in the process which henot very felicitously or elegantly describes as 'man-breeding.' 'Probably, ' he says, as reported inNature, 'we have enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the pairing ofindividuals of the same or allied races if we could only apply that knowledge to make fittingmarriages, instead of giving way to foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whomwe can hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a graver matter in whichthey are most likely to be influenced by frivolous prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discardthe deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to substitute for themsome calm and dispassionate but artificial selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother offuture generations.Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated seriously and reverently. But, itseems to me, Sir George Campbell's conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion nowbeing forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and psychological elements in thisvery complex problem of heredity. So far from considering love as a 'foolish idea, ' opposed to thebest interests of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists, especially thoseof the modern evolutionary school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent andconservative instinct developed and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose ofinsuring just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell thinks hecould himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of selection. More than that, I believe, formy own part (and I feel sure most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficentinherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view far more admirably, subtly, andsatisfactorily, on the average of instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possiblyeffect it.In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief that marriages are made inheaven: with the further corollary that heaven manages them, one time with another, a great dealbetter than Sir George Campbell.Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human efficiency; and then let usconsider what would be the probable result of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for itsome more deliberate external agen
