we could prevent such marriages without any violation of feeling or
propriety, we clearly ought; and the prohibition in the course of time
would be protected by a 'horror naturalis' similar to that which, in
all civilized ages and countries, has prevented the marriage of near
relations by blood. Mankind would have been the happier, if some things
which are now allowed had from the beginning been denied to them; if the
sanction of religion could have prohibited practices inimical to health;
if sanitary principles could in early ages have been invested with a
superstitious awe. But, living as we do far on in the world's history,
we are no longer able to stamp at once with the impress of religion a
new prohibition. A free agent cannot have his fancies regulated by law;
and the execution of the law would be rendered impossible, owing to the
uncertainty of the cases in which marriage was to be forbidden. Who
can weigh virtue, or even fortune against health, or moral and mental
qualities against bodily? Who can measure probabilities against
certainties? There has been some good as well as evil in the discipline
of suffering; and there are diseases, such as consumption, which have
exercised a refining and softening influence on the character. Youth is
too inexperienced to balance such nice considerations; parents do not
often think of them, or think of them too late. They are at a distance
and may probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the
interests of a home may be the cure of them. So persons vainly reason
when their minds are already made up and their fortunes irrevocably
linked together. Nor is there any ground for supposing that marriages
are to any great extent influenced by reflections of this sort, which
seem unable to make any head against the irresistible impulse of
individual attachment.

Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the passions
in youth, the difficulty of regulating them, and the effects on the
whole mind and nature which follow from them, the stimulus which
is given to them by the imagination, without feeling that there is
something unsatisfactory in our method of treating them. That the most
important influence on human life should be wholly left to chance or
shrouded in mystery, and instead of being disciplined or understood,
should be required to conform only to an external standard of
propriety--cannot be regarded by the philosopher as a safe or
satisfactory