Books: Sex Seer

MARRIAGE AND MORALS—Bertrand Russell—Horace Liveright ($3).

The Thesis. Bertrand Russell displays present-day laws and ideas about sex as an extraordinary potpourri* obtained from savages, ascetics, Roman lawyers, Manichaean heretics, Teuton romanticists. All of them, says he, are based upon the idea of indissoluble connection between coition and conception, which is practically no longer true. Showing the disastrous effects of this makeshift state of affairs, he then considers various other possibilities, from the standpoint of the state, the child, the adult. His own proposal goes a step further than companionate marriage—as the family is of importance chiefly to the child, a man and woman should not be considered bound until her first pregnancy.

Much of this has been said before, but Marriage and Morals is valuable for being at once fundamental and clear, unbiased and persuasive. Author Russell tries to go to the root of each of his ideas, to explain asceticism, romanticism. He takes nothing for granted, not even that parents are beneficial for their children. He writes as a humanist, defending the happiness of man against many moral prejudices, advocates his changes lucidly and wittily.

Sample epigrams: “Jealousy and love are both instinctive emotions, but religion has decreed that jealousy is a virtuous emotion to which the community ought to lend support, while love is at best excusable.”

Of Saint Paul’s view of marriage as a preventive of fornication: “It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.”

The Author. Bertrand Russell is heir presumptive to an earldom, but he shares with his famed sister-in-law£ the honor of making people forget his title and remember his work. He is known for books on mathematics, philosophy, sociology, education. He formerly held a fellowship at Cambridge, but was deprived of it during the War for his writings against conscription, for which he was for a time imprisoned. He says of himself: “I like the sea, logic, theology, heraldry, the first two because they are inhuman, the others because they are absurd.”

*French: “rotten pot.”

£Elizabeth, Countess Russell and von Arnim, authoress of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Enchanted April, known to the public as “Elizabeth.”