taken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at variance with facts. It is
odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers cited
confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators.

Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations
were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of
love, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, _Discours sur
l'inégalité_ (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers
to jealousy, know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being as
well pleased with one woman as with another. Although, as we shall see
later, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and
individual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically at
a great truth--the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of
love are not to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought,
naturally, was too novel to be accepted at once. Ramdohr, for
instance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself that
Rousseau is right. Yet, on the preceding page he himself had written
that "it is unreasonable to speak of love between the sexes among
peoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humane
consideration."


LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING

All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind
struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The
greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a
history, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of
looking upon it as a simple feeling.