our children, if we considered nothing but the highest mental and physical welfare of these children.
The reasons for the actual matrimonial choices of society are complex, beauty being only a minor consideration. For the student of social psychology the investigation of the other factors is of absorbing interest, but here I may say merely that the predominance of these factors is a calamity. As a physiological psychologist, I must repeat what the poets have sung: the glorification of beauty and its exaltation as the primary ideal, which ought to reign in human life. Of all the divinities in the Greek pantheon, the most glorious are not Zeus and Hera, not Ares and his Aphrodite Pandemus, but Apollo and Aphrodite Urania, the life-giving queen of heaven.
It will be noticed that I have omitted moral qualities from the composition of the beautiful individual and have ignored the physical characters which connote these qualities. In this I have been consistent, and am in perfect agreement with common usage. Beauty may be proud, cruel, deceitful, immoral, wicked; and yet it may still be beauty. Cleopatra was capable of almost any crime you can think of, and Thaïs was no modest violet; but history tells us that they were of wonderful beauty. “Handsome is as handsome does” is true only in a qualified way.
