are silent on the subject of the best and most suitable subject for the purpose; is it the law-abiding citizen? the restless reformer? or the artist and thinker?  Strange to say, the legend of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness, intuitively conscious of the right way, is to-day accepted even by scientists who are in sympathy neither with Schopenhauer’s nor with any other metaphysic.  It is taken for granted that love can only serve the purpose of the species; the fact that this theory is both metaphysically and scientifically unsound is ignored.  For even leaving the genius of the species out of the question, his intelligent comprehension of the “composition of the next generation” is nevertheless devoutly believed in.  Even Nietzsche, that arch-individualist, was completely under the spell of this dogma, as is proved by many of his utterances, for instance, by the well-known socialistic definition of marriage as “the will of twain to create that which is higher than its creators,” and also by his theory that man is not an end in himself but a bridge to something else.  Nietzsche’s pronouncement that he has not yet found the woman whom he would like to be the mother of his children, echoes the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the superstition of the genius of philoprogenitiveness.  The intrinsic worth of love without any ulterior motive, without a view to pleasure or to offspring, seems to have been unknown to Nietzsche.  Schopenhauer’s hero puts the purport of love not in the actual individual, but in a conception, and annihilates the value of the individual and the unique.  Every great emotion is an end in itself, and whatever we may read into it of “purposes” and “expediencies,” is an invention, and independent of the emotion itself.  The aim of the purely spiritual love of the second stage was not propagation, and yet it was an emotion whose loftiness cannot easily be surpassed.  With the deification of woman love reached far beyond the beloved into infinitude, and the phenomenon of the love-death renders all the supposed generic purpose of love impossible.  But even if we ignored love altogether and admitted the existence of the sexual instinct only, its mysterious endeavour in the interest of the species would still remain pure imagination, and a conception far inferior to that of the winged god of love.  The instinct does not possess a trace of “discretion,” takes no interest in the weal and woe of humanity, but is utterly selfish, seeking its own gratification and nothing else.

The theory which fits so well into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics has, without it, neither sense nor support.  There is no instinct of philoprogenitiveness, but rather a pairing-instinct, and in addition to this a conscious desire for offspring.  The difference between these two instincts is great, for as a rule, the pairing-instinct is not accompanied by a wish for children (that it should be so unconsciously is a theory not worth considering seriously), and the longing for children very frequently exists without any sexual desire; to manufacture an instinct out of those two inherently dissimilar impulses is fantastic metaphysics and not spiritual reality.  The history of antiquity furnishes ample proof of my contention, for in the days of the remote past the sexual impulse had its special domain, as well as the wish for progeny, which was often regarded in the light of a duty.