The choice of a mate.

  • Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario), 1882-1971.
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The choice of a mate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/546 (page VIII)
    Beauty, desirability and health are all relative. In many respects they are, within the same race, or complex of culture-values, synonymous terms. In the sexual mating of modern civilized mankind, however, we are concerned with other factors besides merely aesthetic qualities and a norm of health. We are concerned with a conflict of values, divergences of type, a mixture of races, a graduated scale of morbidity and health, vitiation of instinct, appetite and taste, and neurotic and aberrant features of all kinds, which make the whole question of choice in mating one of great complexity. To lay down hard and fast rules in the present state of know ledge would be daring to the point of recklessness. This does not mean, however, that we may not try to frame certain general principles and attempt the outlining of rules which, although incomplete and inconclusive, will at least put an end to a good many of the more crass errors, and expose some of the mis leading popular superstitions prevailing on the subject. As usual in my work, my inclination has been always to adopt an attitude of reverence towards those customs and judgments of mankind which hail from civilizations that have flourished and endured conspicuously, and to approach with suspicion and scepticism everything that hails from civilizations that have been notably ephemeral or inferior, or from any period of superior civilizations which has been characterized by decline and dis integration. Against the judgments of a civilization in which the plant man has flourished luxuriantly, not even the most self-satisfied fiats of modern science have been able to move me. For it was chiefly this unswerving faith in the wisdom of great civilizations which, twenty years ago, lent me the strength to uphold, against the science of that day, my belief in the closest consanguineous marriages (in fact, in incest) as a regenerative measure—a belief which, as the reader will see, has only recently been confirmed by one of the greatest biologists of our day. I state this in order to give the reader some idea of my method ; for, as I pointed out in the preface to the second edition of my Defence of Aristocracy, if science observed the same principle—that is to say, if scientists always scrupulously com pared their conclusions with the soundest traditions of the most flourishing civilizations—we should not constantly be confronted by the discreditable recantations and contradictions which mark the progress of scientific investigation. viii