276 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



they shall tend with care or neglect their children. Many 

 races, ancient and modern, savage and civilized, have practised 

 infanticide apparently without pain or compunction. If it 

 be argued that paternal affection is a deferred instinct which 

 is awakened only by association with the child, then it must 

 be admitted that it must be a very feeble instinct, very 

 unequally distributed, evidently undergoing regression, easily 

 overcome by acquirements, and hard to distinguish from 

 passion, which is based wholly on acquirement. 



443. Sexual love for a particular object, like love for a 

 particular child, is of course an acquirement, though equally 

 of course with an instinctive basis. It is because human 

 beings are capable of making acquirements that love for 

 a particular man or woman or child is possible to them. 

 Purely instinctive animals are incapable of recognizing their 

 mates or their offspring. But the instinctive basis itself 

 appears absent in those women who have no sexual appetites. 

 La Rochefoucauld said truly that to some people love is an 

 affair of fashion. Sexual jealousy is always regarded as 

 instinctive in man. In our country it is a very dominant 

 passion; but even among us the lover is not usually jealous 

 of the legitimate mate as he would be had the passion an 

 inborn basis as among certain lower animals, for example 

 the stag. On the other hand, a husband or wife may combine 

 aversion to the legitimate mate with extreme jealousy. 

 Abroad, in polyandrous lands, men amicably share a common 

 wife, and in polygamous countries women a common husband. 

 It would appear, therefore, that sexual jealousy is little if at 

 all inborn. It seems we feel it, as we feel jealousy for our 

 country, or our religion, because we have acquired it by 

 imitation from other people. The love of property is certainly 

 an acquirement ; we feel just as great or almost as great a 

 jealousy for our houses, lands, or money as for our mates. 

 Sexual love as idealized among modern Western nations is 

 plainly an acquirement. It is quite a recent character an in- 

 vention of mediaeval chivalry, and especially of the troubadours. 

 Ancient communities showed no trace of it, and many 

 modern communities show none. An appreciation of sexual 

 beauty is supposed to be instinctive in human beings ; but 

 in great measure it, also, is plainly a matter of acquirement. 

 The great mane of man, his long hair and beard, is a sexual 

 feature, and probably was his principal means of fascinating 

 the opposite sex when he was becoming human. But women 

 in England would be as much repelled by long locks and an 

 untrimmed beard, as men would by a shaven female head. 



