olating a boy babe
and a girl babe in a natural state wherein they expressed their love
instinct bestially and brutally and violently. As you say, they have
simply been "left out by the civilising force." And this civilising, or
socialising force is simply the sum of our many inventions. The isolated
pair merely expressed their instincts in the unartificial, natural way.
They had not been taught a certain particular fashion in which to
express those instincts as have you and I and all artificial beings been
taught.

As Mr. Finck has said, "Not till Dante's 'Vita Nuova' appeared was the
gospel of modern love--the romantic adoration of a maiden by a
youth--revealed for the first time in definite language."

Dante, and the men who foreshadowed and followed him, were inventors.
They introduced an artifice for protracting one of our most vital
pleasures. Well, they succeeded. And what of it? There are artifices and
artifices, and some are better than others. The automobile is a more
cunning artifice than the ox-cart, the subway than a palanquin. Devices
come and devices go. Change is the essence of progress. All is
development. The end of rapes and romances is the same--perpetuation.
There may be head love as well as heart love. And in the time to come,
when the brain ceases to be the servant of the belly, the head the
lackey of the heart, in that time stirpiculture, which is scientific
perpetuation, will take the place of romantic love. And in the present
there may be men ready for that time. There must be a beginning, else
would we still be jolting in ox-carts. And I am ready for that time now.

You say, "Love is of a piece with life, like hunger, like joy, like
death." Quite true. And civilisation is merely the expression of
life--a variform utterance which includes love, and hunger, and joy, and
death. Else what is this civilisation for? How did it happen to be? And
I answer: It is the sum of the many inventions we have made to aid us in
our pursuit of life and love and joy. It helps us to live more
abundantly, to love more fruitfully, to joy more intelligently, and to
get grim old Death by his knotty throat and hold him at arm's length as
long as possible.

I stated that "all progress consists in the arbitrary alteration, by
human efforts and devices, of the normal course of nature." This
sociological concept comes inevitably into accord with my philosophy of
love. It is the law of development, and all things of hum