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It will not prevent all divorces and matrimonial disharmonies, but already the biological teaching is helping and some day the social-ethical problems will be understood and then most intelligent men and women will understand the fundamental principles for permanent and harmonious monogamic marriage.
In every group of people there is one whose paranoid temperament must be reckoned with, who is distrustful, conceited and disruptive. Often they are high-minded, perhaps devoted to an ideal, and if they convince others of their wrongs they increase the social disharmonies by creating new social wars, large or small according to their influence, intelligence and other circumstances.
The social person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre. On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric. What are the chief disharmonies? I mean, of course, glaring disharmonies, for no one is of harmonious development, with intelligence, emotions, instincts, desires, purposes in cooperation with each other.
Likewise, there will be dishonesty and murder and preventable diseases and all other human troubles in spite of education; but the advancement of learning has slowly and progressively reduced the sum total of all the disharmonies of life until now civilized people are largely free from many of the original or barbaric conditions.
Desires grow with each acquisition, the capacity for satisfaction diminishes with every gratification, novelty disappears and with the growth of taste little disharmonies offend deeply.
Man is a bundle of disharmonies, as the great Eli Metchnikoff pointed out, physically, psychologically and sociologically. When these disharmonies are within average limits we do not notice them; when they are greater in degree they bring about conduct that at once claims attention.
The answer to the riddle of all their disharmonies! Let Corydon have her baby and then he might have his books! As he pondered, there came to him the words of the old doctor "She wants that baby!" So before he reached home, his mind was made up. Cost what it might, she should have the baby. But he would not tell her his reason that must be a secret between himself and Mother Nature.
This I propose to consider in more detail in the next chapter, on some character types, but it will be of use to sketch the great disharmonies. Character is dynamic, and a fundamental disharmony, even if not noticeable early in life, may progress to the point of disruption of the personality.
But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the purpose they do not meet.
A complete list of these disharmonies would fill a volume indeed, Metchnikoff, in his "Nature of Man," has filled half a volume with describing some of the instances of physiological disharmony, and then has not exhausted the list.
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