For the great majority of mankind at least it can be held that life
resolves itself quite simply and obviously into three cardinal phases.
There is a period of youth and preparation, a great insurgence of
emotion and enterprise centering about the passion of Love, and a third
period in which, arising amidst the warmth and stir of the second,
interweaving indeed with the second, the care and love of offspring
becomes the central interest in life. In the babble of the
grandchildren, with all the sons and daughters grown and secure, the
typical life of humanity ebbs and ends. Looked at thus with a primary
regard to its broadest aspect, life is seen as essentially a matter of
reproduction; first a growth and training to that end, then commonly
mating and actual physical reproduction, and finally the consummation
of these things in parental nurture and education. Love, Home and
Children, these are the heart-words of life. Not only is the general
outline of the normal healthy human life reproductive, but a vast
proportion of the infinitely complex and interwoven interests that fill
that outline with incessant interest can be shown by a careful analysis
to be more or less directly reproductive also. The toil of a man's
daily work is rarely for himself alone, it goes to feed, to clothe, to
educate those cardinal consequences of his being, his children; he
builds for them, he plants for them, he plans for them, his social
intercourse, his political interests, whatever his immediate motives,
tend finally to secure their welfare. Even more obviously is this the
case with his wife. Even in rest and recreation life still manifests
its quality; the books the ordinary man reads turn enormously on love-
making, his theatre has scarcely ever a play that has not primarily a
strong love interest, his art rises to its most consummate triumphs in
Venus and Madonna, and his music is saturated in love suggestions. Not
only is this so with the right and proper life, but the greater portion