Lucka’s book will probably not please the advanced feminists, but the delicate, although perhaps involuntary homage to her sex which is implied in his theories ought to rouse a feeling of gratification in the heart of every right-feeling woman.  The very limitations and restrictions which he lays upon her raise and glorify her.  For while man has been the “Odysseus wandering through heaven and hell, passing from the bestial to the divine to return again and become human, woman has always been the same, unchangeable and without problems.  That which he has set up to-day as his highest erotic ideal, the blending of sexual and spiritual love, has been her natural endowment from the beginning.  Never perfect, he falls into error and sin where she cannot err, for her instinct is Nature herself, and she knows not the meaning of sin.”

Schopenhauer’s “instinct of philoprogenitiveness” has to-day become an article of faith with the learned and the unlearned.  This sub-conscious instinct for the service of the species which, in love, is supposed to rise to consciousness, and whose purpose is the will to produce the best possible offspring, is conceded by scientists who reject not only Schopenhauer’s metaphysic, but metaphysic in general.  Even Nietzsche, that arch-individualist, has proved by many of his pronouncements, and most strikingly by his well-known definition of marriage, that he has not escaped its fascinations.  “Schopenhauer ignores all phenomena which are not in support of his myth,” says Lucka, who denies this instinct of philoprogenitiveness and would substitute for it a “pairing-instinct.”  “The experience of others,” he argues, “not our own instinct, has taught us that children may, not necessarily must, be the result of the union of the sexes.  Into the mediaeval ideal which reached its climax in metaphysical love, the idea of propagation did not enter.  Moreover, the desire for children is frequently unaccompanied by any sexual desire, and therefore to manufacture an instinct of philoprogenitiveness is fantastic metaphysic, and is entirely opposed to intellectual reality.  This was well understood in the long period of antiquity which strictly separated the sexual impulse and the desire for children.”

Lucka distinguishes three great stages in the evolution of love.  In vivid and fascinating pictures he unfolds the erotic life of our primitive ancestors, basing his statements on accepted authorities.  The sexual impulse in those remote days, unconscious of its nature and far-reaching consequences, was entirely undifferentiated from any other powerful instinct.  Every woman of the tribe belonged to every male who happened to desire her.  As is still the case with the aborigines of Central and Northern Australia, the phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth were attributed to witchcraft.[1] The concept of father had not yet been formed; the family congregated round the mother and saw in her its natural chief; gynecocracy