278 Human Physiology, 



Such love may have many objects, each attracting the kind and 

 degree of affection which it is able to inspire. Such love of 

 men for women, and women for men, may be free, and will be 

 free, just in the degree in which it is freed from the bondage of 

 sensual passion. Such love has a direct tendency to raise men 

 above the control of their senses. The more such love one 

 has, and the more it is diffused, the less the liability to sink into 

 the lower and disorderly loves of the sensual life. 



The idea that every attraction, every attachment, every love 

 between the sexes, must lead to marriage that no love can be 

 tolerated but with that end in view, is a very false and mis- 

 chievous one. It deprives men and women of the strength and 

 happiness they might have in pure friendships and pure loves, 

 and it leads to a multitude of false and bad marriages. Two 

 persons are drawn together by strong attractions and tender 

 sentiments for each other, who have no more right to be 

 married than if they were brother and sister, but who have the 

 same right to love each other. But their true sentiments for 

 each other, and consequent relation to each other, are not 

 understood by those around them, and perhaps not by them- 

 selves. They are urged, by the misapprehension of others, by 

 their expectation, by ignorant gossip, by the prejudice of society 

 based upon low and sensual estimates of life, to marry; they 

 find often that they must either marry or lose the happiness 

 they have in each other's society, and they make the irrevocable 

 mistake. 



When it is understood that there are other loves than that 

 of marriage when the special attraction that justifies union for 

 life, and the begetting of offspring, is discriminated from all 

 the other attractions that may bring two souls into very near 

 and tender relations to each other, there will be more happi- 

 ness in the world, and fewer incomplete, imperfect, and there- 

 fore more or less unhappy marriages. Nothing can be more 

 detestable than that playing with fire, which goes by the name 



