Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

It is the master paradox that at his first appearance the lord of the earth should be the most helpless of living things. Consider a new-born baby. “Unable to stand, much less to wander in search of food; very nearly deaf; all but blind; well-nigh indiscriminating as to the nature of what is presented to its mouth; utterly unable to keep itself clean, yet highly susceptible to the effects of dirt; able to indicate its needs only by alternately turning its head, open-mouthed, from side to side and then crying; possessed of an almost ludicrously hypersensitive interior; unable to fast for more than two or three hours, yet having the most precise and complicated dietetic requirements; needing the most carefully maintained warmth; easily injured by draughts; the prey of bacteria (which take up a permanent abode in its alimentary canal by the eleventh day)—where is to be found a more complete picture of helpless dependence?”[42] How comes it that this creature is to be lord of the earth, and a member of the only species which succeeds in continually multiplying itself?

Motherhood and intelligence.—We have maintained that the vital character which is of supreme survival-value for man is his intelligence, and this, as we know, is his unique possession. It is very largely for intelligence, therefore, that race-culture or eugenics proposes, if possible, to work. But if there be certain conditions which must be complied with before intelligence can possibly be evolved, eugenics will come to disaster should it ignore them. These conditions do exist, and have hitherto been entirely ignored by all students of this question. Let certain great facts be observed.

Why is the human baby the most helpless of all creatures? Since it is to become the most capable, should it not, even in its infant state, show signs of its coming superiority? What is the meaning of this paradox?

The answer is that, so far as physical weapons of offence and defence are concerned, these have disappeared because intelligence makes them superfluous or even burdensome. But the peculiar helplessness of the human infant depends not upon its nakedness in the physical sense but upon its lack of very nearly all instinctive capacities. It is this absence of effective instincts which distinguishes the baby from the young of all other creatures. Why should its endowment in this respect be so inferior?

It is because of the fact that, if instinct is to give rise to intelligence, it must be plastic. A purely instinctive creature reacts to certain sets of circumstances in certain effortless, perfect and fixed ways. The reactions are the whole of its psychical life. They need no education, being as perfectly performed on the first occasion as on the last, and in many instances being performed only once in the whole history of the creature in question. But, on the other hand, they are almost incapable of education, and even in the cases where they lack absolute perfection at first, they only require the merest modicum of opportunity in order to acquire it. Perfect within their limits, they are yet most definitely limited. They never achieve the new, they are utterly at fault in novel circumstances, and they are wholly incapable of creating circumstances.

A creature cannot be at once purely instinctive and intelligent. An instinctive action is simply a compound reflex action, a highly adapted automatism: now automatism and intelligence are necessarily inversely proportional. It is possible for an intelligent creature to acquire automatisms, which are popularly described as instinctive. They are not instincts, however, but the acquired equivalents of instincts: “secondary automatisms.” If they are used to replace intelligence, the individual, in so far, sinks from the human to the sub-human level. Their proper function is to leave the intelligence free for higher purposes more worthy of it than, say, the act of dressing oneself.

In order that an intelligent creature should be evolved it was necessary that instinct should become plastic. Intelligence could not be superposed upon a complete and final instinctive equipment. You cannot determine your own acts if they are already determined for you by your nervous organisation. The incomparable superiority of intelligence depends upon its limitless and creative character, in virtue of which, as Disraeli puts it, “men are not the creatures of circumstances: circumstances are the creatures of men.” But whilst intelligence can learn everything, it has everything to learn, and the most nearly intelligent creature whom the earth affords thus begins his independent life almost wholly bereft of all the instruments which have served the lower creatures so well, whilst, on the other hand, he is provided with an utterly undeveloped, and indeed, at that time non-existent, weapon which, even if it did exist, he could not use. Hence the unique helplessness of the human baby: one of the most wonderful and little appreciated facts in the whole of nature—effectively hidden from the glass eyes of the kind of man who calls a baby a “brat,” but, to eyes that can see, not only the master paradox from the philosophical point of view but also a fact of the utmost moment from the practical point of view.

The evolution of motherhood.—It directly follows that motherhood is supremely important in the case of man. It is the historical fact that its importance in the history of the animal world has been steadily increasing throughout æonian time. The most successful and ancient societies we know, those of the social insects, which antedate by incalculable ages even the first vertebrates, could not survive for a single generation without the motherhood or foster-motherhood to which the worker females sacrifice their lives and their own chances of physical maternity.

The development of maternal care may be steadily traced throughout the vertebrate series—pari passu with the evolution of sexual relations towards the ideal of monogamy, which is ideal just because of its incomparable services to motherhood. But whilst motherhood is of the utmost service for lower creatures, tending always to lessen infant mortality—if it may be so called—and to increase the proportion of life to death and birth, it is of supreme service in the case of man because of the absolute dependence upon it of intelligence, the solitary but unexampled weapon with which he has won the earth. Hence in breeding for intelligence we cannot afford to ignore that upon which intelligence depends. Even if we could produce genius at will, we should find our young geniuses just as dependent upon motherhood as the common run of mankind. Newton himself was a seven months' baby, and the potentialities of gravitation and the calculus and the laws of motion in his brain could not save him: motherhood could and did.