it, but we do not call it a virtue in her any more than we call her cruelty to her prey a vice; she is acting unconsciously in either case, knowing no distinction between good and evil.  Fondness, in a word, is not an ethical virtue.  In addition to all its enumerated shortcomings, it is, moreover, transient.  A dog mother will care for her young for a few months with the watchfulness and temporary ferocity implanted in her by natural selection, but after that she will abandon them and recognize them no more as her own.  Sometimes this instinctive fondness ceases with startling rapidity.  I remember once in a California yard, how a hen flew in my face angrily because I had frightened her chicks.  A few days later she deserted them, before they were really quite old enough to take care of themselves, and all my efforts to make her return and let them sleep again under her warm feathers failed.  She even pecked at them viciously.  Some of the lower savages similarly abandon their young as soon as they are able to get along, while those who care for them longer, do so not from affection, but because sons are useful assistants in hunting and fighting, and daughters can be sold or traded off for new wives.  That they do not keep them from affection is proved by the fact that in all cases where any selfish advantage can be gained they marry them off without reference to their wishes or chances of happiness.[39]

UNSELFISH AFFECTION

While the fondness of savages, which has been so often mistaken for affection, is thus seen to be foolish, unconscious, selfish, shallow, and transient, true affection is rational, conscious, unselfish, deep, and enduring.  Being rational, it looks not to the enjoyment or comfort of the moment, but to future and enduring welfare, and therefore does not hesitate to punish folly or misdeeds in order to avert future illness or misfortune.  Instead of being a mere instinctive impulse, liable to cease at any moment, like that of the California hen referred to, it is a conscious altruism, never faltering in its ethical sense of duty, utterly incapable of sacrificing another’s comfort or well-being to its own.  While fondness is found coexisting with cruelty and even with infanticide and cannibalism (as in those Australian mothers, who feed their children well and carry them when tired, but when a real test of altruism comes—­during a famine—­kill and eat them,[40] just as the men do their wives when they cease to be sensually attractive), affection is horrified at the mere suggestion of such a thing.  No man into whose love affection enters as an ingredient would ever injure his beloved merely to gratify himself.  Crabb is utterly wrong when he writes that

“love is more selfish in its nature than friendship; in indulging another it seeks its own, and when this is not to be obtained, it will change into the contrary passion of hatred.”

This is a definition of lust, not of love—­a definition of the passion as known to the Greek Euripides, of whose lovers Benecke says (53):