Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of
bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind--a superiority so
marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate
philosophers who were married men. The bachelor's very capacity
to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom
from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex--in other words, of his
greater approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He
is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the
business an equipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert
Spencer, until he was fifty, was ferociously harassed by women of
all sorts. Among others, George Eliot tried very desperately to
marry him. But after he had made it plain, over a long series of
years, that he was prepared to resist marriage to the full extent of his
military and naval power, the girls dropped off one by one, and so
his last decades were full of peace and he got a great deal of
very important work done.




21.


The Effect on the Race


It is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of men
are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superiority
dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities of
lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion that