e sexual and social alertness is constant in the male, only periodic
in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures
throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd
together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the
time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of
what they have just discovered to be the fair.

[Sidenote: Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.]

A naturalist not ashamed to indulge his poetic imagination might easily
paint for us the drama of these diverse loves. It suffices for our
purpose to observe that the varying passions and duties which life can
contain depend upon the organic functions of the animal. A fish
incapable of coition, absolved from all care for its young, which it
never sees or never distinguishes from the casual swimmers darting
across its path, such a fish, being without social faculties or calls to
co-operation, cannot have the instincts, perceptions, or emotions which
belong to social beings. A male of some higher species that feels only
once a year the sudden solicitations of love cannot be sentimental in
all the four seasons: his head-long passion, exhausted upon its present
object and dismissed at once without remainder, leaves his senses
perfectly free and colourless to scrutinise his residual world. Whatever
further fears or desires may haunt him will have nothing mystical or
sentimental about them. He will be a man of business all the year round,
and a lover only on May-day. A female that does not suffice for the
rearing of her young will expect and normally receive her mate's aid
long after the pleasures of love are forgotten by him. Disinterested
fidelity on his part will then be her right and his duty. But a female
that, once pregnant, needs, like the hen, no further co-operation on the
male's part will turn from him at once with absolute indifference to
brood perpetually on her eggs, undisturbed by the least sense of
solitude or jealousy. And the chicks that at first follow her and find
shelter under her wings will soon be forgotten also and relegated to the
mechanical landscape. There is no pain in the timely snapping of the
dearest bonds where society has not become a permanent organism, and
perpetual friendship is not one of its possible modes.

Transcendent and ideal passions may well judge themselves to have an
incomparable dignity. Yet that dignity is hardly more tha