Love is capricious; but even now it is confined within certain limits. It is held wicked to indulge it beyond them; and such is the force of public opinion that it seldom occurs beyond them. A marriage in which husband and wife bear some particular taint may well produce children some of whom are seriously deformed in mind or body. Such marriages should be regarded as a kind of incest. In time they will be prevented by public opinion, which should be aided by legislation. At first, no doubt, there will be many tragedies of revolt against custom and law. It may be held that love exists not merely for the perpetuation of the race, but is an end in itself, the spiritual union and beatitude of individual men and women. The noble type of love which can claim to be a spiritual end in itself has evolved from something less noble. If it be wisely controlled now, in time humanity may be capable of an emotion far more intense and far more divine.

The work that is to be done is not merely negative. Not only must we prevent unsuitable marriages. Not only are the diseases and weaknesses of humanity to be purged away. When the phenomena discovered by Gregor Mendel have been more deeply studied, it may be possible to begin the great positive work of cultivating and fixing the existing desirable qualities of humanity. Perhaps sometime there may appear some entirely new and highly desirable character. This also must be accentuated and fixed, in the manner that favourable "sports" have been fixed by horticulturists. To perform all this it will be necessary in some way to encourage particular classes of marriages. In the present condition of sentiment this seems impossible. We can but hope that in time every man will be naturally inclined to find a wife well suited to himself for the sake of his children.

As yet we are very far from this. But, having stumbled for a long time in the valleys, at last we have arrived at an eminence from which the right way can be seen leading upwards into the mists. It may be that after much labour and many catastrophes in time there will arise a splendid race of men, far wiser than we can hope to be, and far greater hearted.

Thoughts on the Modern Spirit Unpublished and undated, but in a corrected final typescript, "Thoughts on the Modern Spirit" contains Stapledon most thoughtful speculations on the intersection of literary experiment and philosophical inquiry. More clearly than anything else he wrote, this essay suggests the extent of (and boundaries of) Stapledon's affinity with the modernist movement. The prominence of Alfred North Whitehead in the essay reflects an extensive study of Whitehead's work, especially Science and the Modern World, Stapledon undertook as a postdoctoral participant in Liverpool University's Philosophy Seminar in 1927- 1928. The allusion to Noel Coward's song "Dance Little Lady," from the 1928 play This Year of Grace, suggests that the essay may have been written just after the Seminar, probably before Stapledon began serious work on Last and First Men in the late summer of 1928. His absorption in that project may explain why he never made an attempt to publish "Thoughts on the Modern Spirit." It remains an intriguing guide to his mind and art in the period when he achieved his first literary and philosophical successes.

THOUGH THE MODERN SPIRIT knows many moods, two are distinctive of it: complete disillusion, and zestful but wholly detached admiration of a world conceived as indifferent to human purposes. Many no doubt still retain their confidence in man's importance, and in his prospects here or hereafter, but for good or ill this faith is not a factor in the characteristically modem spirit. Nor is it among these optimists that we may find the most active growing-points of thought to-day. Not that faith itself stands condemned as in every possible sense false, but only that the faithful, having never allowed themselves to be drenched and impregnated with disillusion, cannot understand the spiritual problem of our age. Just because, or insofar as, their faith is intact, it is also infertile.

Our problem may be described as the task of outgrowing both the naive optimism of an earlier age and the naive disillusion of to-day. The problem is urgent, not because disillusion is unwholesome, but because already there are signs that the pendulum is beginning to swing once more in the direction of faith; and unless we can integrate faith and disillusion in some new mood which will preserve whatever is sound in each, we shall merely slip back into our old naive optimism, for no better reason than that we begin to tire of disillusion. In psychological terms, humanity is prone to a dissociation of faith and disillusion, and a consequent "alternation of personalities." Our task is to organise these two sentiments as a stable attitude appropriate to all that we know of reality. And this is to be achieved only in the direction of the second and more rare mood of the modem spirit, namely that disinterested admiration which enlightens our disillusion and perplexes our intelligence.

For the modem kind of religious experience, or if it be preferred the modem substitute for religious experience, is itself the unexpected outcome of disillusion.