Primitive Love and Love-Stories eBook

Henry Theophilus Finck
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,176 pages of information about Primitive Love and Love-Stories.

Primitive Love and Love-Stories eBook

Henry Theophilus Finck
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,176 pages of information about Primitive Love and Love-Stories.

[40] Stanford-Wallace, Australasia, 89.

[41] See also the reference to the “peculiar delicacy” of his relations to Lili, in Eckermann, III., March 5, 1830.

[42] Renan, in one of his short stories, describes a girl, Emma Kosilis, whose love, at sixteen, is as innocent as it is unconscious, and who is unable to distinguish it from piety.  Regarding the unconscious purity of woman’s love see Moll, 3, and Paget, Clinical Lectures, which discuss the loss in women of instinctive sexual knowledge. Cf.  Ribot, 251, and Moreau, Psychologie Morbide, 264-278.  Ribot is sceptical, because the ultimate goal is the possession of the beloved.  But that has nothing to do with the question, for what he refers to is unconscious and instinctive.  Here we are considering love as a conscious feeling and ideal, and as such it is as spotless and sinless as the most confirmed ascetic could wish it.

[43] The case is described in the Medical Times, April 18, 1885.

[44] Trans.  Asiatic Soc. of Japan, 1885, p. 181.

[45] In the Journal des Goncourts (V., 214-215) a young Japanese, with characteristic topsy-turviness, comments on the “coarseness” of European ideas of love, which he could understand only in his own coarse way.  “Vous dites a une femme, je vous aime!  Eh bien!  Chez nous, c’est comme si on disait Madame, je vais coucher avec vous.  Tont ce que nous osons dire a la dame que nous aimons, c’est que nous envions pres d’elle la place des canards mandarins.  C’est messieurs, notre oiseau d’amour.”

[46] In his Tropical Nature, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, and Darwinism.  In R.L.P.B., 42-50, where I gave a summary of this question, I suggested that the “typical colors” (the numerous cases where both sexes are brilliantly colored) for which Wallace could “assign no function or use,” owe their existence to the need of a means of recognition by the sexes; thus indicating how the love-affairs of animals may modify their appearance in a way quite different from that suggested by Darwin, and dispensing with his postulates of unproved female choice and problematic variations in esthetic taste.

[47] Angas, II., 65.

[48] Tylor, Anthr., 237.

[49] Musters, 171; cf.  Thomson, Through Masai Land, 89, where we read that woman’s coating of lampblack and castor-oil—­her only dress—­serves to prevent excessive perspiration in the day-time and ward off chills at night.

[50] C. Bock, 273.

[51] O. Baumann, Mitth.  Anthr.  Ges., Wien, 1887, 161.

[52] Nicaragua, II., 345.

[53] Sturt, II., 103.

[54] Tylor, 237.

[55] Jesuit Relations, I., 279.

[56] Prince Wied, 149.

[57] Belden, 145.

[58] Mallery, 1888-89, 631-33.

[59] Mallery, 1882-83, 183.

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Primitive Love and Love-Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.