Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until we die.

It is to go, and not to get, that is the glory. To be content is to have no ideal beyond the real; we were better dead and nourishing grass. It is part of the whole structure of life, as we can read it, whether in the animal or in the vegetable world, but pre-eminently in ourselves, that the very body of the individual is constructed as for purpose; nay more, as for the purposes of the future. Every little baby girl that is born into the world bears upon her soft surface signs and portents—not merely promise, but the promise of provision—for the life of the world to come. At her very birth she teaches us that she is not created for self alone, but for what will be. Running through the whole body—and this the more markedly the higher the type of life—we find organs, tissues, functions, co-ordinations existing not for the present, but for the life of the world to come. When, some day, the social organism is as rightly constructed as the body of any woman, or even, in some measure, of any man, when it is similarly dedicated to the real future, and as resolutely turned away from any worship of what no longer is, then heaven will be nearer to earth.

It is quite clear that the supreme choice for any individual or institution or nation is between unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday. No one who concerns himself in the current political controversies, as, for instance, that thing of unspeakable shame which is called the "education question," will doubt that the present and the future are constantly being sacrificed to the past. It may be that the spirit of a trust is being grossly violated; but, rather than infringe the letter of it, the life of to-day and to-morrow must suffer: thus do the worshippers of dead yesterday—the most lethal idol before which fond humanity ever prostrated itself.

If it be our duty to do—not "as though to breathe were life"—and if nature indicates the future as that which we are to serve, what evidence have we, or what likelihood, that such service is worth our while? Of course, such a question as this may be answered in some such terms as those of the further question, What has posterity done for us? And it is interesting, perhaps, to consider that, so far as we can judge the attitude of our ancestors towards ourselves, their chief interest in us seems to have been as to what we should think of them—"What will posterity say?" They left their records, as we leave our records, for posterity to discover. With singular lack of judgment, as I think, we bury examples of our newspapers for posterity to discover: these are amongst the things which I should rather not have posterity discover. But this is no right outlook upon the future. It is not a question of what posterity can do for us. Posterity is here within us. The life of the world to come is in our keeping. We carry it about with us in all our goings and comings. It is at the mercy of what we eat and drink, at the mercy of the diseases we contract. Its fate is involved when we fall in love with each other, or out of love with each other; it is we ourselves. Just as the father who perhaps is losing his own hair may like to see how pleasantly his children's hair is growing, and finds consolation therein; just as, indeed, all the hopes of the parent become gradually transferred from self to that further self, those further selves, which his children are, so we are to look upon the future as our continuing self. To ask, What has posterity done for us? should be looked upon as if one should say, What have my children done for me? The parallel is indeed a very close one: and it is pointed out by the fine sentence from Herbert Spencer, which should be known to all of us—"A transfigured sentiment of parenthood regards with solicitude not child and grandchild only, but the generations to come hereafter—fathers of the future, creating and providing for their remote children."

We may grant that there is no money in posterity. The germ-plasm has infinite possibilities; but, so long as it remains germ-plasm, it can write no cheques in our favour. If you serve the present, the present will pay; posterity does not pay. If you write a "Merry Widow," the present will pay; if you write an "Unfinished Symphony," you will be dust ere it is performed. If you create that which will last forever, but which makes no appeal to the transient tastes of the moment, you may starve and die and rot, because the future, for which you work, cannot reward you. Life is so constructed that only in our own day, and not always now, is the mother—even Nature's own supreme organ of the future—rewarded for her maternal sacrifice. Nature does not trouble about the fate of the present, because she is always pressing on and pressing on towards something more, higher, better. The present, the individual, are but the organs of her purpose. We are to look upon ourselves as ends in ourselves; but we are also means towards ends which we can only dimly conceive, but towards which we may rightly work, and the service of which, though by no means freedom in the ordinary sense, is yet of that higher kind, that perfect freedom, which consists in the development of all the higher attributes of our nature. For it is in our nature to work and to feel and to live for the life that will be. That, as I say, is because living creatures are so constructed.

Huxley said that if the present level of human life were to show no rising in the future, he should welcome the kindly comet that should sweep the whole thing away. None of us is content with things as they are. If we are, better were it for us to be nourishing the grass and serving the things that will be in that way, if we cannot in any other. What promise, then, have we that things as they will be are worth working for? We live now in an age to which there has been revealed the fact of organic evolution. From the fire-mist, from the mud, from the merely brutal, there have been evolved—such is the worth of Nature's womb—there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals; splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by natural processes, there can grow a St. Francis, surely our dim notions of the potencies of Nature must be exalted. The forces that have erected us from the worm, are they necessarily exhausted or exhaustible? Who will dare to set limits to the promise of Nature's womb? I mean, in a word, that the history of evolution is a warrant for the idea that we ourselves, even erected men and women, are but stages to what may be higher. We look with contempt upon the apes, but time must have been when "simian" would have been as proud an adjective as "human" is to-day: and human may become superhuman.

Many passages might be quoted to show that our expectation of future progress is well based, and I will content myself with a single excerpt from the final page of the masterpiece of which all the civilized world was lately celebrating the jubilee. Says Darwin: "Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."

The quotation will suffice to remind us that, if we are to serve the life of the world to come in the surest way, we must become Eugenists, accepting and applying to human life Nature's great principle of the selection of worth for parenthood and the rejection of unworth. We must modify and adapt our conceptions of education thereto. We must make parenthood the most responsible thing in life. We must teach the girl—aye, and the boy too—that the body is holy, for it is the temple of life to come. We must perceive in our most imperious instincts Nature's care for the future, and must humanize and sanctify them by conscious recognition of their purpose, and by provident co-operation with Nature towards her supreme end. We could spare from education, perhaps, those fictions concerning the past which are sometimes called history, were they replaced by a knowledge of our own nature and constitution as instruments of the future.

Let us grant even, for the argument, that nothing more is possible than mankind has yet achieved. There remains the hope that that which human nature at its best has been capable of may be realized by human nature at large. In their great moments the great men have seen this. That last sentence is, indeed, a paraphrase from a remark at the end of Herbert Spencer's "Ethics." Ruskin—to choose the polar antithesis of the Spencerian mind—declares that "there are no known limits to the nobleness of person or mind which the human creature may attain if we wisely attend to the laws of its birth and training." Wordsworth asks whether Nature throws any bars across the hope that what one is millions may be. Take it, then, that nothing more is conceivable in the way of mathematics than a Newton, or of drama than an Æschylus or a Shakespeare, or of sacrifice than a Christ. These, then, are types of what will be. They demonstrate what human nature is capable of. What one is, why may not millions be? Here is an ideal to work for. Here is something real to worship, to dedicate a life to. It is not merely that we can make smoother the paths of future generations—which George Meredith declared to be the great purpose and duty of our lives—but that, as Ruskin suggests in the foregoing quotation, we may raise the inherent quality of those future generations, so that they can make their own ways smooth and straight and high. It is our business, I repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred thing in life. True, it now follows, according to physiological law, upon the satisfaction of certain tendencies of our nature, which in themselves may be gratified, and even worthily gratified, without reference to anything but the present; yet these tendencies, commonly reviled and regarded with contempt—at least overt contempt—exist, like most of our attributes, for the life of the world to come. And that in which they may result, the bringing of new human life into the world, is the most tremendous, as it is the most mysterious, of our possibilities.

The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles, the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. This dependence of the future upon the present in the world of life is an almost unrealizable thing. Life could not have persisted upon such conditions had not Nature from the first, and increasingly up to our own day (for it is the human infant that is the most helpless, and the longest helpless), had not Nature, I say, persistently constructed the individual, in all his or her attributes, as a being whose warrant and purpose lay yet beyond. We are organs of the race, whether we will or no. We are made for the future, whether we will, whether we care, or no. We are only obeying Nature, and therefore in a position to command her, in dedicating ourselves and our purposes, our customs, our social structures, to the life of the world to come. We shall be there. Our purposes and hopes, the flesh and blood of many of us, will be there. Posterity will be what we make it, as we, alas! are what our ancestors have made us.