Post-Prandial Philosophy, page 59 by Grant Allen
<< Return to Title Details & Download60
nge is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word, what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.
XIV.
THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE.
Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a marriage.
Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs." "College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal with a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions: to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate--because he loves her. It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don't let us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do for drawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us try to take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point of vantage of a biological outlook.
Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon quelconque, 'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there to investigate.
Taking society throughout--not