the stimuli impinging upon its
members. One policy has been to eliminate objectionable stimuli, as in
the outlawing of the saloon. The other is to change the nature of the
affective response of the individual to certain stimuli in the
environment where the natural or organic responses would be at variance
with conduct considered socially desirable.[3]

Modern psychological knowledge enables us to understand the mechanism
of this last method of social control as the building up of the
conditioned emotional response. If our civilization is to endure it must
learn to apply this method of control to the sex life of the individual
so that reproduction will fall to the lot of the most desirable eugenic
stock instead of being left to the workings of chance as it is at the
present time.

From the viewpoint of individual psychology, one of the principal
problems of the erotic life is to find a smooth transition from the
romantic love of the courtship period to the less ethereal emotions of
the married state. Indirectly, this is also socially significant,
because of the overwhelming effect of the home environment in shaping
the reactions of the next generation. As a rule, only the children who
have grown up in a happy and wholesome atmosphere of sincere parental
comradeship and affection can have an entirely sane and healthy reaction
to their own erotic functions in later years.

Although romantic love in its present expression may often lead to
uncongenial marriages and even involve dysgenic mating, its aesthetic and
refining influences are such as to make it desirable in spite of these
drawbacks. Its influence upon literature has been noted by Bloch[2]
while its potency in the formation of a deep and tender feeling between
men and women has been elaborately discussed by Finck.[4] Thus it is
evident that its individual and social advantages more than balance its
disadvantages.

Unfortunately, with the entrance into the marital relationship and the
release of the erotic emotion into natural channels so that it no longer
seeks the vicarious outlets which were partly supplied in the
idealization of the lovers, there is a tendency for this romantic
element to fade from their affection. The conjugal affection which
replaces it is built on quite other foundations. It is not composed of
day dreams about the beloved, but is wrought out of mutual interests, of
joys and sorrows shared together, of the pleasure of unrestricted
compani