system; “the former is the outward expression of the best that lies in the sexuality of man; the latter is a creation in which religious and moral superstitions have played a most important part, not always to the benefit of individual and social health.”

We must, therefore, guard against the tendency to think that there is anything rigid or formal in the natural order of monogamy.  Some sociologists would even limit the naturalness of monogamy still further.  Thus Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907), while accepting as natural under present conditions the tendency for monogamy, mitigated by more or less clandestine concubinage, to prevail over all other forms of marriage, considers that this is not due to any irresistible influence, but merely to the fact that this kind of marriage is practiced by the majority of people, including the most civilized.

With the acceptance of the tendency to monogamy we are not at the end of sexual morality, but only at the beginning.  It is not monogamy that is the main thing, but the kind of lives that people lead in monogamy.  The mere acceptance of a monogamic rule carries us but a little way.  That is a fact which cannot fail to impress itself on those who approach the questions of sex from the psychological side.

If monogamy is thus firmly based it is unreasonable to fear, or to hope for, any radical modification in the institution of marriage, regarded, not under its temporary religious and legal aspects but as an order which appeared on the earth even earlier than man.  Monogamy is the most natural expression of an impulse which cannot, as a rule, be so adequately realized in full fruition under conditions involving a less prolonged period of mutual communion and intimacy.  Variations, regarded as inevitable oscillations around the norm, are also natural, but union in couples must always be the rule because the numbers of the sexes are always approximately equal, while the needs of the emotional life, even apart from the needs of offspring, demand that such unions based on mutual attraction should be so far as possible permanent.

It must here again be repeated that it is the reality, and not the form or the permanence of the marriage union, which is its essential and valuable part.  It is not the legal or religious formality which sanctifies marriage, it is the reality of the marriage which sanctifies the form.  Fielding has satirized in Nightingale, Tom Jones’s friend, the shallow-brained view of connubial society which degrades the reality of marriage to exalt the form.  Nightingale has the greatest difficulty in marrying a girl with whom he has already had sexual relations, although he is the only man who has had relations with her.  To Jones’s arguments he replies:  “Common-sense warrants all you say, but yet you well know that the opinion of the world is so contrary to it, that