in general? What is our debt to the perpetuation of the race? It
probably consists in producing as many children as we have breasts--so
that if one dies the other may live. If these two children were always
faithfully produced, what would become of nations? Thirty millions of
people would constitute a population too great for France, for the
soil is not sufficient to guarantee more than ten millions against
misery and hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of
throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of
travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of
marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only
profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now
demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness
of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our
existence. Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the
other hand, refuses absolutely to grant the excess which our
imagination sometimes craves in love. It is, therefore, the last of
our needs, and the only one which may be forgotten without causing any
disturbance in the economy of the body. Love is a social luxury like
lace and diamonds. But if we analyze it as a sentiment, we find two
distinct elements in it; namely, pleasure and passion. Now analyze
pleasure. Human affections rest upon two foundations, attraction and
repulsion. Attraction is a universal feeling for those things which
flatter our instinct of self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise
of the same instinct when it tells us that something is near which
threatens it with injury. Everything which profoundly moves our
organization gives us a deeper sense of our existence; such a thing is
pleasure. It is contracted of desire, of effort, and the joy of
possessing something or other. Pleasure is a unique element in life,
and our passions are nothing but modifications, more or less keen, of
pleasure; moreover, familiarity with one pleasure almost always