any useful function at
the periods when conception is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
the fact that among animals the female only experiences sexual desire at
the season of impregnation, and that desire ceases as soon as impregnation
takes place, though this is only in a few species true of the male,
obviously because, if his sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
brief a period, the chances of the female meeting the right male at the
right moment would be too seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
inquisitive attitude towards the female by the male animal--which we may
often think we see still traceable in the human species--is not the
outcome of lustfulness for personal gratification ("wantonly to satisfy
carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for the benefit of the female
and the attainment of the primary object of procreation. This primary
object we may term the animal end of marriage.

This object remains not only the primary but even the sole end of marriage
among the lower races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in its deeper
sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind.
It is found, it is true, among some lower races, and it appears that some
tribes possess a word for the joy of love in a purely psychic sense. But
even among European races the evolution was late. The Greek poets, except
the latest, showed little recognition of love as an element of marriage.
Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the
Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
breeding as the one recognisable object of marriage; any other object was
mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside
marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive
conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and
Christianity--though, as I will point out later, it has tended to enlarge
the conception--at the outset only offered the choice between celibacy on
the one hand and on the other marriage for the production of offspring.

Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of
sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great
objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in
man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift
circuit through th