It led Spencer to write en passant (Pr.  Soc., I., Sec. 337, Sec.339) that “absence of the tender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;” and that the “higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes ... do not exist among primitive men.”  It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50) regarding the lowest races that “love is almost unknown among them; and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of affection and companionship.”

PLAN OF THIS VOLUME

These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only to the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians as well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will attempt to demonstrate.  To make my argument more impressive and conclusive, I present it in a twofold form.  First I take the fourteen ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually, whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed gradually.  Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians, etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs and pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual traits which constitute the essence of romantic love as distinguished from sensual passion.  All this will be preceded by a chapter on “How Sentiments Change and Grow,” which will weaken the bias against the notion that so elemental a feeling as sexual love should have undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly instinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.

GREEK SENTIMENTALITY

The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Love will naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity for anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential altruistic traits of Romantic Love—­sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, adoration, and purity.  As a matter of course, the sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coarse thing than an Australian’s, which does not even include kisses or other caresses.  While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is, an affectation of sentiment, differing from real sentiment as adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to secure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and self-sacrifice for the benefit of another.  This important point which I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the Alexandrian period.

IMPORTANCE OF LOVE