"In our programme of civilization, we must start out with the conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman, and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother.
"I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively.
"From this general, not from the individual, standpoint, I am trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
"But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it the completed man—the superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day."
CHAPTER IV
THE LAW OF CONSERVATION
Students of the physical sciences discovered in the nineteenth century a universal law of Nature, always believed by the wisest since the time of Thales, but never before proven, which is now commonly known as the law of the conservation of energy. When we say to a child, "You cannot eat your cake and have it," we are expressing the law of the conservation of matter, which is really a more or less accurate part-expression of the law of the conservation of energy. The law that from nothing nothing is made—and further, though here this concerns us less, that nothing is ever destroyed—is the only firm foundation for any work or any theory whether in science or philosophy. The chemist who otherwise bases his account of a reaction is wrong; the sociologist who denies it Nature will deny. It was the sure foundation upon which Herbert Spencer erected the philosophy of evolution; and every page of this book depends upon the certainty that this law applies to woman and to womanhood as it does to the rest of the universe. Further, it may be shown that certain less universal but most important generalizations made by two or three biologists are indeed special cases of the universal law. There is, first, the law of Herbert Spencer, which states that for every individual there is an inevitable issue between the demands of parenthood and the demands of self; and there is, secondly, the law of Professors Geddes and Thomson, which asserts that this issue specially concerns the female as compared with the male sex, the distinguishing character of femaleness being that in it a higher proportion of the vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore, necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual. It is of service to one's thinking, perhaps, to regard Geddes and Thomson's law as a special case of Spencer's, and Spencer's as a special case of the law of the conservation of energy. First, then, somewhat of detail regarding the law of balance between expenditure on the self and expenditure upon the race; and then to the all-important application of this to the case of womanhood—for upon this application the whole of the subsequent argument depends.
When he set forth, with great daring, to write the "Principles of Biology," Spencer was already at an advantage compared with the accepted writers upon the subject, not merely because of his stupendous intellectual endowment, but also because the idea of the conservation of energy was a permanent guiding factor in all his thought. Thus it was, one supposes, that this bold young amateur, for he was little more, perceived in the light of the evolutionary idea of which he was one of the original promulgators, a simple truth which had been unperceived by all previous writers upon biology, from Aristotle onwards. It is in the last section of his book that Spencer propounds his "law of multiplication," depending upon what he calls the "antagonism between individuation and genesis." As I have observed elsewhere, the word antagonism is perhaps too harsh, and may certainly be misleading, for it may induce us to suppose that there is no possible reconciliation of the claims and demands of the race and the individual, the future and the present. I believe most devoutly that there is such a reconciliation, as indeed Spencer himself pointed out, and a central thesis of this book is indeed that in the right expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood, woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and richest self-development. Thus one may be inclined to abandon the word antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spencerian terms. This principle has immense consequences—most notably that as life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used for the enrichment and development of the individual life, and less for mere physical parenthood. We shall argue that, in the case of mankind, and pre-eminently in the case of woman, this enrichment and development of the individual life is best and most surely attained by parenthood or foster-parenthood, made self-conscious and provident, and magnificently transmuted by its extension and amplification upon the psychical plane in the education of children and, indeed, the care and ennoblement of human life in all its stages.