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The emotions as physical reactions have not changed in ages of evolution. We have the same bodies as sounding boards on which the external impressions reverberate, the same bodies practically that men had five thousand years ago. But the number and variety of external experiences has multiplied in geometrical ratio. The result is that, while intellectually we are men of 1923, emotionally we may be cave men or apes. With the products of modern civilization, the material advances and complications, the means of intercommunication, of graphic representation and of the transformation of natural resources we are, as Robinson says in The Mind in the Making, merely monkeying. In spite of numerous sporadic beginnings in the line of social use of the results of modern scientific advancement we are as a race making almost no progress in the direction of fine living.

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This is no more clearly evident in any other sphere of life than in marriage. With all the intellectual progress made by humanity up to the first quarter of the twentieth century marriage is still looked upon by many men merely as an opportunity for either legitimized procreation or unlimited sensual self-gratification. A man puts as much intellect into his vocation as he is capable of. Into his marriage he puts not intellect, but the emotions of the ancestral ape. Even in his sublimated war of business he knows that a consideration of the other fellow is in the end a winning card, and the word “service” has come into prominence as advertising material. But in his marriage he uses the same crassly selfish methods he has used for thousands, perhaps millions of years.