tachment of two beings of
opposite sexes can be conceived the spiritual ennobling of relations
that rest upon purely physical laws. Civilized man demands that the
mutual attraction continue beyond the accomplishment of the sexual act,
and _that it prolong its purifying influence upon the home that flows
from the mutual union_.[65] The fact that these demands can not be made
upon numberless marriages in modern society is what led Barnhagen von
Ense to say: "That which we saw with our own eyes, both with regard to
contracted marriages and marriages yet to be contracted, was not
calculated to give us a good opinion of such unions. On the contrary,
the whole institution, which was to have only love and respect for its
foundation, and which in all these instances (in Berlin) we saw founded
on everything but that, seemed to us mean and contemptible, and we
loudly joined in the saying of Frederick Schlegel which we read in the
fragments of the 'Atheneum': Almost all marriages are concubinages,
left-handed unions, or rather provisional attempts and distant
resemblances at and of a true marriage, whose real feature consists,
according to all spiritual and temporal laws, in that two persons become
one."[66] Which is completely in the sense of Kant.

The duty towards and pleasure in posterity make permanent the love
relations of two persons, when such really exists. A couple that wishes
to enter into matrimonial relations must, therefore, be first clear
whether the physical and moral qualities of the two are fit for such a
union. The answer should be arrived at uninfluenced; and that can happen
only, first, _by keeping away all other interests_, that have nothing to
do with the real object of the union,--the gratification of the natural
instinct, and the transmission of one's being in the propagation of the
race; secondly, by a certain degree of insight that curbs blind passion.
Seeing, however, as we shall show, that _both conditions are, in
innumerable cases, absent in modern society, it follows that modern
marriage is frequently far from fulfilling its true purpose; hence that
it is not just to represent it, as is done, in the light of an ideal
institution_.

How large the number is of the marriages, contracted with views wholly
different from these, can, naturally, not be statistically given. The
parties concerned are interested in having their marriage appear to the
world different from what it is in fact. There is on this f