16 FALLING IN LOVE 



value and importance of the instinct. Most men and 

 women select for themselves partners for life at an age 

 when they know but little of the world, when they judge 

 but superficially of characters and motives, when they still 

 make many mistakes in the conduct of life and in the esti- 

 mation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days 

 that they have really chosen out of all the world one of 

 the persons best adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make 

 their joint lives enjoyable and useful, I make every allow- 

 ance for the effects of habit, for the growth of sentiment, 

 for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies ; 

 but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with 

 every one of us who has been long married, that we could 

 hardly conceivably have made ourselves happy with any of 

 the partners whom others have chosen ; and that we have 

 actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for 

 ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native 

 instinct. Yet adaptation between husband and wife, so 

 far as their own happiness is concerned, can have had com- 

 paratively little to do with the evolution of the instinct, as 

 compared with adaptation for the joint production of vigorous 

 and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all 

 the stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the 

 first one. If, then, the instinct is found on the whole so 

 trustworthy in the minor matter, for which it has not 

 specially been fashioned, how far more trustworthy and 

 valuable must it probably prove in the greater matter 

 greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race for 

 which it has been mainly or almost solely developed ! 



I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense 

 of moral responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow 

 up among us. But it will not take the false direction of 

 ignoring these our profoundest and holiest instincts. Mar- 

 riage for money may go ; marriage for rank may go ; mar- 



