SOURCE: "Knowledge and Morals," in Scientific American Supplement, Vol. LXXV, No. 1946, April 19, 1913, pp. 246-47.

In the following essay, Watts excoriates Key for what he considers her unscientific approach.

Ellen Key, the famous Swedish writer, in her masterpieces Love and Ethics and Love and Marriage, claims that to the loveless marriages, to the narrow, medieval conventionalism of society that condones such marriages and places the ban of social ostracism upon the unfortunate woman who through love has become a mother out of wedlock, and at the same time gives social recognition to the man, the fellow participator in the crime, and to those individuals who console themselves with the baser substitutes for love, to all of these are due the distorted social conditions and evils of the present day.

She furthermore claims that, inasmuch as sex instinct is the primal force in life about which all other forces revolve...