Readers should get “The Idiot” by Fedor Dostoieffsky, an epileptic genius who saw that for those like him, happiness could be got through peace of mind alone, and not in the cut-throat struggle for worldly success.  He projected his stabler self into Prince Muishkin, the idiot, and every one of the six hundred odd pages of this amazing description of a neuropathic nation is stamped with the hall-mark of genius.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXVI

MARRIAGE

    “Between two beings so complex and so diverse as man and woman, the
    whole of life is not too long for them to know one another well, and to
    learn to love one another worthily.”—­Comte.

No neuropath should have children, but marriage is good in mild cases, for neuropaths are benefited by sympathetic companionship, and their sexual passions are so strong that they must be gratified, by marriage, prostitution, or unnaturally.

Bernard Shaw’s sneer—­

    “Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with
    the maximum of opportunity”—­

is justifiable, though the “maximum of opportunity” is better than a maximum of unnatural devices to satisfy and intensify normal and abnormal cravings.

There is a popular belief that an epileptic girl is cured by pregnancy, a state that ought never to occur.

The lack of sex-education causes millions of miserable marriages.  Sexual desire is cultivated out of all proportion to other desires, the will cannot control the desire to relieve an intolerable sense of discomfort, and men eagerly seize the first chance of being able to satisfy these fierce cravings at pleasure.

If sex were treated sensibly it would develop into a powerful instead of an overpowering appetite, and reason would have some say in the choice of a life-partner.

A neuropath needs a calm, even-tempered, “motherly” wife.  For him, gentleness, self-control, sound common sense and domestic virtues are superior to wit or beauty.  Unfortunately, contrary to public belief, people are attracted by their like, not by their opposites.  The sensitive, refined neuropath finds the normal person insipid and dull; the normal person is rendered uncomfortable by the morbid caprices of the neuropath.

There must be no disparity of age, for at the menopause the woman no longer seeks the sexual embrace, and if her husband be young unfaithfulness ensues.  Not only that, but she, knowing, probably to her sorrow, how rarely the hopes of youth mature, cannot take a keen interest in his ambitions like a younger woman, or fire his dying enthusiasm at difficult parts of the way.  If he be his wife’s senior he will be as little able to appreciate her ideas and habits.