The Natural Philosophy of Love

ws.-Sexual selection.-Man's place in Nature.-Identity o

an ambition: one wanted to enlarge the general psychology of love, starting it in the very beginning of

ad been acquainted with the science of his time, if he had only read Réaumur and Bonnet, Buffon and Lamarck; if he had been able to merge the two ideas, man and animal into one, he, being a man without insurmountable prejudices, might have produced a still readable book. The moment would have been favorable. People were begi

aim too explanatory and his scale of creatures with man at the summit, as the culmination of universal effort, is of a too theologic simplicity. Man is not the culmination of nature, he is in Nature, he is one of the unities of life, that is all. He is the product of a partial, not of total evolution; the branch whereon he blossoms, parts like a thousand other branches from a common trunk. Moreover, Darwin, truckling to the religiose pudibundery of his ra

for upon animal branches as clearly separate as those of insect and mammifer one fin

potentialities in its amorphous contours to lead it here into being bee and there into being giraffe. An evolution lead

no count of hypothetic subordinations. One does not wish to deny, one wishes rather not to deny, either general or particular evolutions, but the genealogies are too uncertain and the thread which unites them too often broken: wha

not peculiar to the female human? Not at all. Célimène is of all species, and heteroclite above all; she is both mole and spider, she is sparrow and cantharide, she is cricket and adder. A celebrated author in a play called, I think, La Fille Sauvage, represents feminine love as aggressive. An error! The female attacked by the male thinks always of retreat, she never, never attacks, save in certain species which appear to be very ancient a

itted to the essential instincts which govern all animality; there being everywhere the same matter animate with the same desire: to live, to perpetuate life. Man's superiority is in the immense diversity of h

ivities is almost an equivalent of this liberty. Doubtless the strongest motive always wins, but today's stronger is tomorrow's weaker, hence a variety of human gaits feigning liberty, and practically resulting therein. Free will is only the faculty of being guided successively by a great number of different motives. When choice is possible, liberty begins, even though the chosen act is rigorously determined and when there is no possibility of avoiding

ousness, laziness, activity, cruelty, courage, devotion, any of these are common to animals, but each as the quality of an whole species. In the state of differentiation to which superior and cultivated human species have attained, each individual forms surely a separate variety determined by what is called, abstractly, "the character." This individual differentiation, very marked in mankind, is les

which a baby could step over. We are animals, we live on animals, and animals live on us. We both have and are parasites. We are predatory, and we are the living