somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or
later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or
woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a
lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find
dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love
again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the
Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor
idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
one another in the particular places and the particular societies they
happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the
world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at
Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number
are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike
him in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort
(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the
actual wife of his final selection.

Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen or
fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the
human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one
stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and
choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large
part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). It
is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such
minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a
universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why
should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely
for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complex
life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.
Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that