To this increasing purpose there will come, I suppose, an end—an inscrutable end. Yearly the evidence makes it more probable that in a sister world we are gazing upon the splendid efforts of purposeful, intelligent, co-ordinated life to battle against planetary conditions which threaten it with death by thirst. How long intelligence has existed upon Mars, if intelligence there be, no one can say; nor yet what its future will be. It would seem probable that our own fate must be similar, but it is far removed. And though the Whole may seem wanton, purposeless, stupid, we are very little folk; we see very dimly; we see only what we have the capacity to see; and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the wisest of us. So also there are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered. We are the shapers, the creators, the parents of those events. The still, small voice of the unborn declares our responsibility. There may be no reward. What does reward mean? Who rewards the sun, or the rain, or the oak, or the tigress? But there is the doing of one's work in the world, the serving of the highest and most real purpose that may be revealed to us. That is to be oneself, to fulfil one's destiny, to be a part of the universe, and worthy to be such a part. And though it be even unworthy for us to suggest that at least posterity will be grateful to us, such a thought may perhaps console us a little. At any rate, to those who worship and live for the past, we may offer this alternative: let them work for what will be. Perhaps the reward will be as real as any that the worship of what is not can offer. And, reward or no reward, it is something to have an ideal, something to believe that earth may become heavenly, and that, in some real sense which we can dimly perceive, we may be part—must be part, indeed—of that great day which is in our keeping, and which it is our privilege to have some share in shaping. Thus we may repeat, and thrill to repeat, with new meaning, the old but still living words, Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi sæculi—"I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."
CHAPTER III
THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD
In due course we shall have to discuss the little that is yet known and to discuss the much that is asserted by both sides, for this or that end, regarding the differences between men and women. By this we mean, of course, the natural as distinguished from the nurtural differences—to use the antithetic terms so usefully adapted by Sir Francis Galton from Shakespeare. Our task, we shall soon discover, is not an easy one: because it is rarely easy to disentangle the effects of nature from those of nurture, all the phenomena, physical and psychical, of all living creatures being not the sum but the product of these two factors. The sharp allotment of this or that feature to nature or to nurture alone is therefore always wholly wrong: and the nice estimation of the relative importance of the natural as compared with the nurtural factors must necessarily be difficult, especially for the case of mankind, where critical observation, on a large scale, and with due control, of the effects of environment upon natural potentialities is still lacking.
But here, at least, we may unhesitatingly declare and insist upon, and shall hereafter invariably argue from, the one indisputable and all-important distinction between man and woman. We must not commit the error of regarding this distinction as qualitative so much as quantitative: by which is meant that it really is neither more nor less than a difference in the proportions of two kinds of vital expenditure. Nor must we commit the still graver error of asserting, without qualification, that such and such, and that only, is the ideal of womanhood, and that all women who do not conform to this type are morbid, or, at least, abnormal. It takes all sorts to make a world, we must remember. Further, the more we learn, especially thanks to the modern experimental study of heredity, regarding the constitution of the individual of either sex, the more we perceive how immensely complex and how infinitely variable that constitution is. Nay more, the evidence regarding both the higher animals and the higher plants inclines us to the view, not unsupported by the belief of ages, that woman is even more complex in constitution than man, and therefore no less liable to vary within wide limits. On what one may term organic analysis, comparable to the chemist's analysis of a compound, woman may be found to be more complex, composed of even more numerous and more various elementary atoms, so to say, than man.
And if these new observations upon the nature of femaleness were not enough to warn the writer who should rashly propose, after the fashion of the unwise, who on every hand lay down the law on this matter, to state once and for all exactly what, and what only, every woman should be, we find that another long-held belief as to the relative variety of men and women has lately been found baseless. It was long held, and is still generally believed—in consequence of that universal confusion between the effects of nature and of nurture to which we have already referred—that women are less variable than men, that they vary within much narrower limits, and that the bias towards the typical, or mean, or average, is markedly greater in the case of women than of men. A vast amount of idle evidence is quoted in favour of a proposition which seems to have some a priori plausibility. It is said—of course, without any allusion to nurture, education, environment, opportunity—that such extreme variations as we call genius are much commoner amongst men than women: and then that the male sex also furnishes an undue proportion of the insane—as if there were no unequal incidence of alcohol and syphilis, the great factors of insanity, upon the two sexes. Nevertheless, observant members of either sex will either contradict one another on this point according to their particular opportunities, or will, on further inquiry, agree that women vary surely no less generally than men, at any rate within considerable limits, whatever may be the facts of colossal genius. Indeed, we begin to perceive that differences in external appearance, which no one supposes to be less general among women than among men, merely reflect internal differences; and that, as our faces differ, so do ourselves, every individual of either sex being, in fact, not merely a peculiar variety, but the solitary example of that variety—in short, unique. The analysis of the individual now being made by experimental biology lends abundant support to this view of the higher forms of life—the more abundant, the higher the form. So vast, as yet quite incalculably vast, is the number of factors of the individual, and such are the laws of their transmission in the germ-cells, that the mere mathematical chances of a second identical throw, so to speak, resulting in a second individual like any other, are practically infinitely small. The greater physiological complexity of woman, as compared with man, lends especial force to the argument in her case. The remarkable phenomena of "identical twins," who alone of human beings are substantially identical, lend great support to this proposition of the uniqueness of every individual: for we find that this unexampled identity depends upon the fact that the single cell from which every individual is developed, having divided into two, was at that stage actually separated into two independent cells, thus producing two complete individuals of absolutely identical germinal constitution. In no other case can this be asserted; and thus this unique identity confirms the doctrine that otherwise all individuals are indeed unique.
It is necessary to state this point clearly in the forefront of our argument, both lest the reader should suppose that some foolish ideal of feminine uniformity is to be argued for, and also in the interests of the argument as it proceeds, lest we should be ourselves tempted to forget the inevitable necessity—and, as will appear, the eminent desirability—of feminine, no less than of masculine, variety.
Nevertheless, there remains the fact that, in the variety which is normally included within the female sex, there is yet a certain character, or combination of characters, upon which, indeed, distinctive femaleness depends. It may in due course be our business to discuss the subordinate and relatively trivial differences between the sexes, whether native or acquired; but we shall encounter nothing of any moment compared with the distinction now to be insisted upon.