So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be
the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned,
so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with
all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking
for the good of the human race in all future generations.

On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!)
that mankind could conceivably divest itself of 'these foolish ideas
about love and the tastes of young people,' and could hand over the
choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided
over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I
wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would
they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and
functions and differences which would enable them to join together in
holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living
man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions,
so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily
undertake to pick out off-hand a help meet for him? I trow not! A man is
not a horse or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple
inspection. You cannot see _a priori_ why a Hanoverian bandsman and his
heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should conspire to produce a Sir
William Herschel. If you tried to improve the breed artificially, either
by choice from outside, or by the creation of an independent moral
sentiment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we call
Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would
only do one of two things--either spoil his constitution, or produce a
tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all
initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would
get an animated moral code instead of living men and women.

Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the analogy to which
breeding reformers always point with special pride: but what does it
really teach us? That you can't improve the efficiency of animals in any
one point to any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of
their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a particular day at
a particular place, bar accidents, with wonderful speed: but that is
about all he is good for. His health as a whole is so surprisingly
feeble that he has to be tre