pointed out (302) that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinary mortals.  In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment.  Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent a thinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks could have differed from us only in their ideas about love, and not in their feelings themselves.  “It is incredible,” he remarks in the review referred to,

“that individual women should not at all times have had the power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted respect....  So powerful and instinctive, an emotion can never have been recently evolved.  But our ideas about our emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very much from one generation to another.”

In the next paragraph he admits, however, that “no doubt the way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions themselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;” and in this admission he really concedes the whole matter.  The main object of my chapter “How Sentiments Change and Grow” is to show how men’s ideas regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty, chastity, incest, affect and modify their feelings in relation to them, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objection made to my theory.[313]

Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but dampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung up in them.  Their literature attests that they considered love a degrading, sensual passion, not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment, as we do.  With such an idea how could they have possibly felt toward women as we do?  With the idea firmly implanted in their minds that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they have experienced that emotional state of ecstatic adoration and worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love?  Of necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from such love as they were capable of feeling toward women.  Nor can they, though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of women; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance, neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind which inspires supersensual love.  With boys it was different.  They were educated mentally as well as physically, and hence as Winckelmann—­himself a Greek in this respect—­has remarked, “the supreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female.”  If the healthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthy modern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in regard to the love of women?  The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was so great that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despising women, but preferred masculine women to feminine women.