Finck : Primitiz'c Love and Love-Stories 109 The author then proceeds to offer a psychological analysis of love, and finds fourteen distinct ingredients, seven of which are egoistic and seven altruistic. The latter are sympathy, affection, gallantry, self-sacri- fice, adoration, purity and admiration of personal beauty. Each of the fourteen elements receives a detailed treatment, and its presence or ab- sence among primitive peoples is illustrated from ethnological data. While the egoistic ingredients of love have changed, it is in the emergence of the leading altruistic ingredients, such as sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, that romantic love, as it exists among the most highly de- veloped moderns, differs from anything found among primitive peoples, or even the classical nations of antiquity. One cannot refrain from wondering, much as in the case of Kant's categories, how it happens that there are just fourteen of these ingredients, that there is this perfect balance in the two groups, and whether a more searching analysis might not show that there are other essential elements, or that some of those given are reducible to still more elementary forms. The student who has endeavored to trace the historical evolution of moral sentiments will find no a //V(?r/ difficulty in the general features of Mr. Finck's theory. He will rather be inclined to view it with favor. For modern historical and anthropological studies have ruthlessly de- stroyed the sentimentality of the Rousseau type, which looked upon the " noble savage ' ' as the embodiment of all the elemental virtues of human nature. The more the light of actual knowledge has been turned upon his life the more clearly has it been seen that Hobbes's terms more truth- fully characterize it, — "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The book may well be recommended to those who still accept intuitionalism in morals. It should prove a specific in all except those hopeless cases in which the facts are made to fit a cherished theory. Mr. Finck's general position is, I think, well sustained. As against the platitudes which have declared that "love is always the same," it seems abundantly vindicated. Love could always be "the same " only if human nature were so. And, despite all the maxims, human nature has not always been the same. It is rather a thing of growth and change, capable of assuming radically different forms in different environments. In the past it has often manifested itself in contradictory ways, develop- ing in one place a mode of life and a set of ideals the direct antithesis of those found in another. And, as for the future, " It doth not yet appear what we shall be." The point at which the author seems to me chiefly to err is in expounding his theory somewhat too summarily, — in not giv- ing his statement of it sufficient elasticity to fit all the complex facts of history and of human experience. If his view is correct there surely must have been a beginning of the higher, the romantic, form of love. It did not spring up suddenly as a new element in life, but was closely linked to what went before. It seems unnatural that there should have been absolutely no manifestation of it prior to the dawn of the modern era. Is it not far more reasonable to suppose that for its beginnings, imperfect and crude as they may have been, one must look to the later classical
