This argument is refuted by the simple statement that our teeth, if they looked like rusty nails, might be even more useful than now, but could no longer be beautiful.  As for women’s breasts, if utility were the criterion, the most beautiful would be those of the African mothers who can throw them over their shoulders to suckle the infants on their backs without impeding their work.  As a matter of fact, the loveliest breast is the virginal, which serves no use while it remains so.  A dray horse is infinitely more useful to us than an Arab racer, but is he as beautiful?  Tigers and snakes are anything but useful to the human race, but we consider their skins beautiful.

A NEW SENSE EASILY LOST AGAIN

No, the sense of personal beauty is neither a synonyme for libidinous desires nor is it based on utilitarian considerations.  It is practically a new sense, born of mental refinement and imagination.  It by no means scorns a slight touch of the voluptuous, so far as it does not exceed the limits of artistic taste and moral refinement—­a well-rounded figure and “a face voluptuous, yet pure”—­but it is an entirely different thing from the predilection for fat and other coarse exaggerations of sexuality which inspire lust instead of love.  This new sense is still, as I have said, rare everywhere; and, like the other results of high and recent culture, it is easily obliterated.  In his treatise on insanity Professor Krafft-Ebing shows that in degeneration of the brain the esthetic and moral qualities are among the first to disappear.  It is the same with normal man when he descends into a lower sphere.  Zoller relates (III., 68) that when Europeans arrive in Africa they find the women so ugly they can hardly look at them without a feeling of repulsion.  Gradually they become habituated to their sight, and finally they are glad to accept them as companions.  Stanley has an eloquent passage on the same topic (II.  I. F.L., 265): 

“The eye that at first despised the unclassic face of the black woman of Africa soon loses its regard for fine lines and mellow pale color; it finds itself ere long lingering wantonly over the inharmonious and heavy curves of a negroid form, and looking lovingly on the broad, unintellectual face, and into jet eyes that never flash with the dazzling love-light that makes poor humanity beautiful.”

The word I have italicized explains it all.  The sense of personal beauty is displaced again by the concupiscence which had held its place in the early history of mankind.

MORAL UGLINESS

To realize fully what such a relapse may mean, read what Galton says (123) of the Hottentots.  They have