Evolution needs more than mothers! It is not enough to live, not enough to reproduce one's kind: we have to change, progress, improve—and instinct is no help here. Instinct is nothing but inherited habit. It always dates a long way behind us. It is never any guide in new conditions or a incentive to betterment. Instinct holds us in chains to the past; or it would if it could.
In human life—especially in modern human life—conditions change so rapidly that we have scant time to form individual habits, much less develop instincts. What we have left are very old ones, prehuman or savage in origin and mostly applying to physical relations. Suppose we recognize these early assistants, regard them with respect as once useful, and lay them where they belong—on the shelf.
Instinct is no guide to proper food to-day: we have to use our brains and learn what is right to eat. It is no guide to proper clothing—as witness the unhealthy, uncomfortable, unbeautiful garments we wear. It is no guide to success in any kind of human industry, business, science or art. These things have to be learned: they do not come "by instinct." It is no suitable guardian of our behavior, either in public or private: all good manners and established government are achieved at considerable expense to "our natural instinct." And assuredly our instincts are not reliable as leaders in education, religion or morality.
Why then, seeing the inadequacy of instinct in all these lines, are we so sure of its infallible guidance in the care of babies? A modern human mother has far less instinct to guide her than her arboreal ancestors: the real advantage her babies profit by are obtained through the development of the father—in reason, in knowledge, in skill, in the prosperity and progress of the world he makes.
He prepares for his children a Home, a School, a Church, a Government, a Nation: he provides them all manufactured articles—each last and least dish, utensil, piece of furniture, tool, weapon, safeguard, convenience, ship, bridge, plaything, jewel. He makes the world.
Into this world of reason, knowledge, skill, training and experience comes the baby, richer in each generation by a new and improved father. He is born and cherished, however, by the same kind of mother, bringing to her tremendous task no new tool worthy of the time, but merely the same old dwindling, overworked "maternal instinct."
The children of today need mothers of today, and they must begin to supplement their primitive impulse by the very fullest, highest, richest powers of the human intellect and the human heart—the real human heart, which cannot be satisfied until every child on earth is more than mothered.
LOVE'S HIGHEST
Love came on earth, woke, laughed and began his dominion.
Strong? Just the Force of Creation. Glad? Merely Joy of Existence.
Love cast about for Expression—for work, which is Love in Expression,
And the fluctuant tissues of life began burgeoning, blooming and
fruiting.
Up through dim ages laughed Love, flowing through life like a fountain,
Pouring new forms and yet newer, filling each form with new passion,
Playing with lives like a juggler, life after life, never dropping;
Till a new form was developed: Humanity came: it was daylight.
Love laughed aloud, rose in splendor, offered up hymns of thanksgiving.
"Now I have room for expression! Here is a vehicle worthy!
Life that is lovelier far than all these poor blossoms and creatures;
Life that can grow on forever, unlimited, changeful, immortal.
Here I can riot and run through a thousand warm hearts in a moment,
I can flash into glories of art! I can flow into marvels of music!
I can stand in Cathedrals and Towers, and sit splendid, serene, in fair
cities!
These exquisite, limitless beings shall radiate love from their faces,
Shall uphold it with emulous arms, and scatter it wide with their
fingers,
Shall build me, through ages and ages, new forms and new fields of
expression!
I have worked through the mosses and grasses till the world was all
sweetened with roses,
Warm-clothed with the soft-spreading forests, and fed with ripe wheat
and red apples;
I have worked with fur-children and feathered, till they knew the
delights of my kingdom;
I have shown, thousand-fold, throughout Nature, my
Masterpiece—Glory—the Mother!
Now love shall pour like the sunlight, shall cover the earth like the
ocean,
Love encompassing all, as the air does, not only in fragrance and color,
Not only in Nature and Mothers, but now, in this Crown of Creation—
Latest fruit of the Tree Everlasting, this myriad-featured fulfillment—
With unlimited force I shall fill them, in unnumbered new voices be
uttered,
By millions and millions and millions they shall pour out their love in
their labor,
And the millions shall love one another.