well, but we shall get no valid rules until we see clearly that life
has other ways by which the future may be served. There are laws to be
made and altered, there are roads and bridges to be built, figuratively
and really; there is not only a succession of flesh and blood but of
thought that is going on for ever. To write a fruitful book or improve
a widely used machine is just as much paternity as begetting a son.

The last temporary raft of a logical moral code goes to pieces at this,
and its separated spars float here and there. So I will confess they
float at present in my mind. I have no System--I wish I had--and I
never encountered a system or any universal doctrine of sexual conduct
that did not seem to me to be reached by clinging tight to one or two
of these dissevered spars and letting the rest drift disregarded,
making a law for A, B, and C, and pretending that E and F are out of
the question. That motherhood is a great and noble occupation for a
good woman, and not to be lightly undertaken, is a manifest thing, and
so also that to beget children and see them full grown in the world is
the common triumph of life, as inconsequence is its common failure.
That to live for pleasure is not only wickedness but folly, seems easy
to admit, and equally foolish, as Saint Paul has intimated, must it be
to waste a life of nervous energy in fighting down beyond a natural
minimum our natural desires. That we must pitch our lives just as much
as we can in the heroic key, and hem and control mere lasciviousness as
it were a sort of leprosy of the soul, seems fairly certain. And all
that love-making which involves lies, all sham heroics and shining
snares, assuredly must go out of a higher order of social being, for
here more than anywhere lying is the poison of life. But between these
data there are great interrogative blanks no generalization will fill--
cases, situations, temperaments. Each life, it seems to me, in that
intelligent, conscious, social state to which the world is coming, must