Varia

Marriage and the Will to Power.—Marriage I once defined as the indulgence of a habit,1 or, I might better have said, of many habits, sexual and economic, physical and psychical. But although this psychological conception of marriage is to my mind closer to life than the ecclesiastic or the legalistic, its reaction against the definitions of church or state is too extreme.

Law, civil or canon, is an expression of habit, to be sure, rather than a discipline, a ratification or justification of habit; the marriage law-results from the marriage habit. And it is of great importance alike to scientists and to publicists to keep this sequence clear. There is, nevertheless, another aspect of marriage law not to be overlooked. Law did not create or establish marriage; the social contract theory applies as little to that relationship as to other institutions; there was no initial contract; but marriage has ever been an expression of collective interest and an outcome of collective action. I mean there were—and are—desire and impulse on the part of those in control of the group to determine the sex life of its members. It is, I take it, a manifestation of their will to power. The desire and impulse are: analogous, I suggest, to those expressed in those primitive practices. whose aim is to control reproduction in nature at large. I refer to totemic and phallic practices and to many of the rites of nature cults.

In the institution of marriage as in totemism or phallicism the natural sex life of the individual is disregarded or disregarded as; much as possible, and the will of the group, often an impertinent and fantastical will, asserted. Infant betrothal and marriage, marriage by purchase, seasonal marriage, marriage according to seniority, prescribed widowhood or, for reasons other than mourning, prescribed continence, these are some of the crasser illustrations one may cite of the group's disregard of, or obliviousness to, the realities of the life of sex.

The establishment of a