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FEMINISM AND SEX-EXTINCTION

OLIVE SCHREINER'S GREAT BOOK

WOMAN & LABOUR

Large Crown 8vo. Cloth.

8s. 6d. net

"The feelings which are behind the various women's movements could not find clearer or more eloquent expression than they do in this remarkable book."

The Daily Mail.

"At last there has come the book which is destined to be the prophecy and the gospel of the whole awakening."

The Nation.

T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd., London.

FEMINISM AND
SEX-EXTINCTION
BY ARABELLA KENEALY

L.R.C.P. (Dublin)

"A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can
a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit."
"Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them."

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
1 ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1920

All rights reserved

FOREWORD

Feminism, the extremist—and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.

It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights, political and social, identical education and training, identical economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and public.

In Woman and Labour, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist objective: "We take all labour for our province." And this is the text of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.

Feminists anticipate—the militant faction with zest—fierce economic encounters between the sexes now that, War ended, our men, having fought their own and woman's battle in the trenches, are returning to reclaim their places in the world of work. Secure in that possession which is "nine-tenths of the law," and armed with their new powers of enfranchisement, it is further anticipated that the usurpers will be able triumphantly to stem the masculine reflux, and to retain, on all hands, their new industrial footing.

By showing that, contrary to Feminist doctrine, the division of Labour into two sexes, so to speak, is as natural and is as indispensable to Human Progress as is the division of Life into two sexes, the purpose of this book is to dissuade women from exploiting a world's misfortunes for their own immediate profit, and to reconcile them, in their profounder and more vital interests and in those of the Race, to surrender freely all the essentially masculine employments into which mischance has cast them.

Human evolution and progress have resulted absolutely from an opposite trend, in inherence and development, of the two sexes, as regards Life and characteristics, aptitude and avocation. The progressive differentiations and specialisations of vital processes and living forms, whereby human character and faculty have been increasingly advanced to higher powers, reach their most admirable culmination in the complex division of Humanity into two genders; each of which is enabled, by way of such complex specialisation, to promote, to intensify and to dignify its own allotted order of qualities. To oppose and frustrate this natural dispensation, whereby Human development is achieved by the two sexes travelling along diametrically opposite lines of Ascent, is to nullify all that civilisation has secured, and to transform the impulse of Progress into one of Decadence.

Nature, marvellously prescient in all her processes, has provided that the sexes, by being constituted wholly different in body, brain and bent, do not normally come into rivalry and antagonism in the fulfilment of their respective life-rôles. Their faculties and functions, being complementary and supplementary (and obviously best applied, therefore, in different departments of Life and of Labour), men and women are naturally dependent upon one another in every human relation; a dispensation which engenders reciprocal trust, affection and comradeship.

Feminist doctrine and practice menace these most excellent previsions and provisions of Nature by thrusting personal rivalries, economic competition and general conflict of interests between the sexes.

Should any reader find in these pages allusions and passages which, without biological or medical knowledge, may not be wholly clear to him, let him remember that these are addressed to such as have dipped more deeply into the subjects dealt with.

The main outlines and implications of the new Hypothesis presented here, of the origin and evolution of Sex, are all that he requires to grasp, in order to follow the argument of the book in its relation to Feminist methods.

Arabella Kenealy, L.R.C.P.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM

"The sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting which has its source in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children."—Spinoza.

I

There is no subject save that of Religion about which so much impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written as has been spoken and written round the Woman Question.

For more than half a century—since Mill wrote his famous Subjection, indeed—it has become an increasing vogue to regard Woman as a martyr; more or less sainted, more or less crushed and effaced beneath the iron-heeled tyrannies, personal, economic, and political, of the oppressor, Man. And it has been in the spirit of this conviction and in fervid endeavours—indignant and chivalrous on the part of the one sex, and still more indignant and but little less chivalrous on the part of the other—to liberate unhappy victims from a barbarous oppression, that most of the impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written, and doughty deeds done.

At the certain cost, therefore, of being stigmatised as a reactionary (severely qualified), I propose to unmask some of these which I believe to be baseless obsessions, and to present a wholly new—and, I hope, a more veracious and inspiring version of the case between the sexes.

To begin with, I assert boldly that the so-called Subjection of Woman, very far from having been a cruel injustice merely, on the part of man, has served, on the contrary, as a blessing and an inestimable benefit not only to herself but to the Race bound up in her. A blessing often rough and painful in its methods, during epochs when all other methods were both rough and painful, attended, too, by wrongs and cruelties; yet, in the main, operating vastly to her well-being and advancement and, in hers, to those of the Race.

Looking back upon the hard and bloody routes of Evolution whereby the human Races have attained to present-day developments, we see our forbears groping blindly, fighting blindly, advancing blindly; stumbling, falling, picking up again; making new departures only hopelessly to lose the road; making new departures, now to find it and trudge on. In all its painful and laborious phases, a terrible and sordid climb. Yet, nevertheless, in its great annals of Ascent, a noble and a wondrous March of Progress.

And whether we are Religionists or Evolutionists—or are sufficiently broad-minded to be both—the history of Life is seen to have been a history of deathless effort, never ceasing, never waning; renewed with every generation; intensified by every further acquisition of new power, as, with every further recognition of new goals and problems, the ever-increasing Purpose and the ever-increasing perplexity and complexity of The Purpose revealed itself at every step. It becomes increasingly clear, moreover, that Creation, or Creative Evolution (to employ Professor Bergson's phrase), has been the resultant of a progressive aggregation of Atomic Matter about some vast immanent Idea, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees materialising in the objective. Very much as bricks are grouped about the pre-conceived plan of a house, and could not be assembled in the building of the simplest tool-hut without predetermination of the site of every brick, and of the relation of every brick to every other.

And in all those past ages of conflict, bringing Order out of Chaos, Progress out of Order, and an ever-increasing domination of blind Energy and Inorganic Matter by Mind and Purpose, the fighting male it has been who, in his conquest of the Earth as in his conquest of other fighting males, both brute and human, has borne the greater heat and burden of the day. Women have striven also—toil has been the crux of their development as of their mates. But men have striven twofold. While women toiled in the security of homes, the sword, the blunderbuss or press-gang, or the equivalent of these, according to the epoch, awaited men and still await them at most street-corners of the arduous male career.

Women have suffered more, psychically; because this way lay their nature and their human lot. Men have suffered more, materially; because here lay theirs. And since advancement comes by suffering, women are reaping to-day the harvest of past travail of their sex, in the higher psychical development which now characterises that sex. During centuries when men were vastly too hard-pressed by the struggle for barest existence to have been aware that they possessed souls, women were privileged to be aware of theirs—by the affliction thereof.

The immediate purpose of this fencing of the women behind the stronger frames, the stronger wills, and stronger brains of fighting males was the Racial one, of course. While men battled with environment and with alien aggressors for their lives and for their food, as for those of the family, the sheltered women were alike the loom and cradle of the Race. As well, they made havens, or homes, for the fighters to return to for sleep and refreshment. They plied a simple, primitive agriculture, practised a primitive healing art, and otherwise evolved The Humanities. But since mortal power is limited, power expended in one direction is power withdrawn from some other. Power spent in battle is power lost to progress. The woman who, with the instinct for home and as shelter for her babes, laid the foundations of Architecture in a hut of mud, was enabled to do this solely by virtue of masculine protection.

It is in peace only that Progress arises, in leisure that The Arts evolve. And woman, walled in by the lives of the males, found leisure of body and mind to pluck flowers for the adorning of her hut, to shape platters of clay, and, later, even for embellishment of these with crude designs. Thus she was the first artist.

The fighting male was—by necessity—destructive. He invented a club. The female was—by privilege—constructive. She invented the needle (a fish-bone, doubtless). And while the male transmitted to offspring his virile fighting and destructive qualities, woman tempered and humanised these by incorporating with them her milder traits and artistries of peace. Lacking the male aggressive and protective faculties, however, increasing in skill and resource with his ever further Adaptation to (and of) environment, woman's gentler and humanising aptitudes would have had neither opportunity for evolution, nor scope for exercise and further sway.

II

I have been reading an account, by a naturalist, of some phases in the life-history of crabs. And it is interesting to find even among creatures so low in the Life-scale (although Darwin regarded these as the most intelligent of crustaceæ) that same instinct of protection of the female which is seen in the higher orders of creation.

A crab, being encased in an unyielding shell, is able to increase its growth only by "casting" its shell and developing one of larger size over its increased bulk. During the interval between casting an old shell and acquiring a new one, the crab in its soft, pulpy condition is readily injured, or falls prey to its natural enemies. To protect itself as well as may be, it shelters in rocky crevices or in other available hiding-places. This shell-casting occurs in both sexes, of course. But the circumstances under which the change is made differ widely in the sexes. For while the male-crab has no protector during his defenceless, shell-less state, his shell is cast a month or more earlier than occurs in the female; after which he feeds up, in order to be in superior fighting trim for her protection during her shell-casting phase. Fishermen describe him as then spreading himself over her as a hen covers her chicks, and in her defence desperately attacking all comers. The result of such protection of the female is that, although males are larger and fiercer, "hen-crabs" are numerous, while males are scarce.

The like is true of nearly every species. The males protect the females. Even the gorilla, savage and most terrible of beasts, lies at night on guard beneath the tree in which his mate and offspring sleep. If need arise, he fights to the death in their defence.

With regard to the chivalrous devotion of male-birds, Olive Schreiner thus comments in Woman and Labour (an example of that I have ventured to describe as the "impassioned fallacy" hurtling round the Woman Question): "Along the line of bird-life and among certain of its species, sex has attained its highest æsthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on earth ... represents the realisation of the highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity."

(This however, less, I fear, to accredit the male-sex with chivalry than to discredit the human male by ornithological comparison!)

* * * * *

One does not profess that such protective rôle of males—beast and bird and crab—is the outcome of sentiment. It is instinctive, subconscious. Nature's purpose being to preserve and to perpetuate species, she achieves this by safeguarding the female. The province of the male in reproduction is but slight and brief. It exacts so little from him as to interfere not at all with those other masculine activities which are the function of his sex.

Whereas, as Professor Lester Ward says, "Woman [and the female of all species] is the Race." Out of her blood and bone and vital powers she evolves and fashions it, nurtures and ministers to it.

III

For the preservation of species, two rôles are essential: the Male rôle of Combat, demanding strength and boldness, resource and fighting-quality, in order to protect and provide for the female and offspring; and the Female rôle of Devotion and Self-surrender, in order to nurture offspring ante-natally, and, after birth, to nurture and to tend its helplessness.

Now all but biologists, perhaps, take it as matter-of-course that Love had its origin in Sex.

Seeing love between the sexes as the strongest and most dominant of the civilised passions, it is natural to infer that it was born of the instinctive attraction between male and female, and that this instinctive attraction, with the growth and expansion of faculty, mental and temperamental, has evolved to the high and tender issues to be found in latter-day romantic passion; theme of poets, novelists, artists; richest and most exquisite of life's emotions; inspiration and motive of the finest human achievements. A passion which, for a space at least, transfigures the natures and ennobles the lives of all but the crass and the sordid.

Nevertheless—Love did not arise out of sex. The sex-relation in primal men and women held no element of affection; no sympathy, tenderness, self-sacrifice, or other attribute of Love. On the part of the female, it was compulsory surrender and the habit of surrender to superior strength, mitigated, doubtless, by a subconscious instinct to secure offspring. In the male, it was impulse as tyrannous and selfish as was the instinct to kill. Like the instinct to kill, a factor in it made for fitness for survival. There was in it, accordingly, an element of instinctive selection. But the selection made for survival-fitness merely in the mate. It owed nothing to sentimental appeal exercised by one female, and lacking in another. The instinct to mate was implanted by Nature for the continuation of species. If its observance contained an element of gratification, it held no more of reciprocity than did the gratification of that stronger lust, to kill, include a consideration of the feelings of the prey, or than greed of any other form of possession extends a grace of reciprocal benefit to the thing acquired.

Modern savages have no conception of sexual love. There are no love-songs, no courtship, no affection in their matings. The males marry mainly in order to secure wives to work for them. And they select strong women because these are best fitted for work. Or they select women who have some or another small possession. Biological instinct is a factor, doubtless, but it is not a factor of sentiment.

In his fine book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Professor Drummond says:

"Probably we have all taken for granted that husbands and wives have always loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted ... in the lower reaches of Human Nature, husband and wife do not love one another ... for the vast mass of mankind during the long ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all but unknown....

"The idea that the existence of sex accounts for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among early races has nothing to do with love. Among savage peoples, the phenomenon everywhere confronts us of wedded life without a grain of love. Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex-relation; it is not an outgrowth of passion. Love is love and has always been love, and has never been anything lower."

Even to-day, despite the evolution of the higher faculties, despite long centuries of inherited habit and tradition, and despite the circumstance that in all the nobler types of men and women the sex-instinct is spiritualised by affection and understanding—Even in this late day of civilisation, the male sex-instinct may be seen still in all its native tyranny and selfishness; seeking gratification in sensuality and cruelty, with callous disregard alike of the welfare as of the suffering of its victim. In the violation of women and children that occurs both in peace and in war, the instinct manifests as an impulse of aggression, and the sex-function as one of brutality or ruthless lust.

IV

Respecting the origin of Mind and Emotion, Charles Darwin said:

"In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself first originated."

And Huxley:

"I know nothing, and never hope to know anything of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected. The two things are on two utterly different platforms, the physical facts go along by themselves and the mental facts go along by themselves."

While Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (the biologist who was working out the theory of Natural Selection simultaneously with Darwin, both unaware that the other was working in the same direction) attributes to a Creative act of God, all the moral and intellectual qualities which have been super-added in man to those lesser and simpler ones he possesses in common with the higher animals. Wallace describes this as a "Divine Influx," and regards it as being wholly distinct and apart from the slow and gradual processes of Natural Selection.

But yet, in point of fact, what was it that inspired and energised the earlier processes, if not this same Divine Influx? The simpler processes must, from their earliest rudimentary beginnings, have been leading up to the later and more complex. And the later and more complex were, surely, continuous with the simpler—since Nature abhors miracles, and works by slow progressive biological sequences.

Nothing shows as more impersonal than a crystal; cold, hard, senseless, motionless. And yet in crystals is the element of Life, even the power of reproduction, showing factors of sex already operative in them. While living bodies, charged with warmth, mobility, sentience, intelligence, have Inorganic Matter for their basis of construction. And that Inorganic elements are very far from being the impersonal things they seem, but are linked by subtle correspondences to living Mind and vital powers, is shown by their effects on living processes and consciousness. Given as medicines, digestion (which is a species of rapid evolution from lower to higher forms of energy) develops such vital inherences within them as prove their apparent impersonality to contain a principle continuous not only with living processes, but with the highest mentality.

Professor Leduc observes in his illuminating book, "The Mechanism of Life," "the ordinary physical forces have, in fact, a power of organisation infinitely greater than has been hitherto supposed by the boldest imagination."

Coralline structures and beautiful shells, fungi, leaves, and plants bearing coloured, flowerlike blooms spring into growth when a formless fragment of calcium salt is dropped into a chemical solution. And these "Osmotic growths," artificially produced, possess far greater complexity of structure and of function than do the simpler living organisms of Nature.

The evidences of a Vast Stupendous Plan, which every further scientific discovery still further emphasises, are slowly forcing from our men of Science the confession that behind the marvellous phenomena their findings reveal, and which they are powerless to explain, must lie a Cause, occult and irresistible, an Impulse, all-pervading, incomprehensible.

Bergson describes an élan vital—a living impetus—determining such phenomena.

In his Presidential address to the British Association at Dublin, in 1908, Professor J. S. Haldane summed up as follows the position of Physiological Science: "The point now reached is that the conceptions of Physics and Chemistry are insufficient to enable us to understand physiological phenomena."

Weismann says: "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature, we must admit a Cause ... inconceivable in its nature, of which we can only say one thing with certainty, that it must be theological."

Drummond says: "Evolution is Advolution,—better, it is Revelation—the phenomenal expression of the Divine, the progressive realisation of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love."

If, then, we admit Life to be the product of a Divine Influx, whereby Inorganic Matter has been, by way of evolutionary processes, increasingly empowered to fructify in living form and faculty, Human Attributes are seen to be the flower of Spiritual seed, which, sown in Life, has germinated; has struck roots of biological function into living flesh and put forth leaves in living traits; has developed in physiological processes and blossomed in powers of Mind and of body. And as the stronger and deeper the grip of its roots in the earth, the taller and nobler the oak towers heavenward, so it must be with human characteristics. The deeper and more firmly the seedling faculties strike roots in living function, the fuller and more potent springs the impulse toward that evolutionary perfection which is the goal of Human Being.

If, however, living processes are the resultant of a Divine Influx, they are Spiritual processes. Life is then a manifestation in Matter, of Spirit. All the developments of Life are Spiritual phenomena, therefore. The imperfection and evil found in living creatures are not attributes of Life. They are crudities of rudimentary organisation, or are failures in or aberrations from the normal development of Life.

V

In the Evolution of Faculty, living traits are seen to have been all the while attaining to higher power by the differentiation and development of special organs to subserve their fuller function, their finer conscious apprehension, and their more complex manifestation on the material plane.

The brain has been specialised thus to serve as the organ of Consciousness; the eye, of Vision; the ear, of Hearing; the hand, of Touch and of manipulation. The lowest organisms possess no such specialised organs of sense or of consciousness. Nor are they equipped with special reproductive organs. They reproduce by cleavage; by budding a small portion of themselves, which, when separated, grows to a mature organism.

With other differentiations and specialisations of Function and Faculty, there has developed—for the all-important racial purpose of creating ever higher and more potent living species—the highly-complex human reproductive system, which, by its close and subtle nervous alliance with the brain, has become the medium and the instrument of a new and irresistible emotion. So that it serves not only for the perpetuation of a complex species, but, moreover, for the attraction, by natural affinity, of the mates best suited to one another.

And in course of evolutionary progress, the emotion of Love has been all the while more and more so leavening and inspiring sex-attraction with its purer and more tender attributes, that human passion has come to combine—in those of higher nature—the flame and energy of physical attraction with the tenderness and devotion of altruistic affection. With the result that human parenthood, thus quickened and spiritualised, has become ever further empowered to evolve more highly intelligised, more beautiful and more efficient types of offspring.

That Passion, pure and simple, has evolved out of the Male sex-instinct is certain. Even in its chivalrous development of romantic passion, are found, in transfigured form, that flame and urgence for possession which manifest crudely and cruelly in the primal male-instinct. Without this virile ardour, indeed, the sex-relation is but a poor and tepid, or a cold and sensual thing.

Yet Passion is not Love.

That meekness and forbearance, humility and self-surrender have been reared in the Female sex-instinct of submission to passion (primarily in aversion and fear more often than in acquiescence) is equally certain. And without these chastening factors to temper, soften and anneal, the sex-relation is a fierce and tyrannous concern. But no more than passion, is submission Love. Neither in passion nor in submission, pure and simple, is there joy of surrender or welding communion.

Nevertheless, since every human faculty must have its roots in living function, and every living function must possess some physical organ in which its processes occur, from what human function sprang the Love that is selfless, altruistic and pitiful; soul and inspiration of the most sacred emotions—self-sacrifice, charity, mercy, devotion, tenderness? In what nursery of Human Consciousness was this fair and gentle blossom sown; to spring, to develop, and to make for gracious growth?

Since, although it has come to lend its purity and sweetness to the Sex-passion, it neither sprang from nor has been reared in sex-instinct, is it a product of Parental Affection? Is it an evolution of the self-negation and the tenderness of parents for their children?

VI

Throughout Nature, the parental instinct is seen as a unique development, detached from and high above all other developments. Demanding, as it does, the complete surrender and self-denying labours of one individual in the interests of another, it differs from and traverses all other dictates. It impels a creature whose every instinct it had been—whose religion of biological survival it had been, indeed—to be wholly self-centred in its every aim and action, all at once to make another creature the focus of its interests and efforts. Where for a scratch, for a glance, the fierce female would have fallen tooth and nail upon another, now she surrenders meekly to the pangs of bringing offspring into life—and straightway licks and suckles the frail being that has riven her. Where she would furiously have driven off, or would have killed, another creature that approached her food, now she gives herself as food for this. Where lesser Fitness for survival on another's part had been signal for making such her prey, now Unfitness in the extremest degree claims her devotion and care.

Superfluous to cite cases of maternal altruism. The mildest and most timid among creatures becomes fierce and courageous in defence of her young. Style it "merely instinct," if you will. It is none the less heroic on the part of every individual that obeys it, and does not obey it blindly and mechanically merely, but employs all her poor wit and resource to suit her heroism to the special circumstance.

Without care and attention from the moment of its birth, the life of an infant would be reckoned in hours. The higher the organism, the more and for the longer period its infancy exacts unceasing devotion and nurture.

Fish and moth and other species of low order are cast off in the egg. Chicks scramble out of the shell.

The higher their grade in the scale of organisation and intelligence, the more helpless and incapable young creatures are to feed and to fend for themselves. Kittens are born blind and helpless, but after a few days they see and crawl about. The elephant-mother suckles and safeguards her baby-elephant for two whole years.

Now, were there no purpose in all this—Were it not that such devotion to offspring serves as impulse and spur to the evolution and development of faculty in parents, Nature, in planning the complex human species, would, surely, have endowed the human infant and child with fuller powers of self-preservation.

Were there other functions and aptitudes the exercise whereof would better stimulate and foster human progress, it is inconceivable that children would be, and would be for so long, the helpless, feckless, dependent mortals that they are.

For ten long lunar months, the human babe is part of its mother; homed in the nest of her body, warmed by her warmth, fed by her blood. She breathes for it, digests for it, assimilates for it, exercises for it. For ten further lunar months, it is dependent upon her for the food by which it lives. For nearly a year, save for an inept power of creeping, with but small sense of direction, it requires to be moved and carried everywhere. For years it must be washed, dressed, combed, laid down to sleep at night, got up in the morning, taken for rides or for walks, played with, bidden, chidden; comforted, warmed, cooled; defended, cherished, instructed—in a hundred ways to be gently and progressively adapted to life, by way of a more or less highly-specialised environment. Even when no longer helpless, it must be provided for in the matters of housing, food, clothing, education. It must be instructed in a means of livelihood, and started on its young career.

Among the poorer classes the child depends upon its hard-worked parents for a period varying between twelve and sixteen years. In the professional classes, the young son and daughter are not fully qualified for independent existence before the ages of twenty-three or twenty-five. In ill-health, in brain defect, and in other incapacities, parents must provide for their offspring for life.

And seeing how the demands of the young, and the response and exactions of the parents multiply and amplify proportionally with the higher evolution of both, we are forced to believe that the small survival-value of the child, owing to its native unadaptedness to environment, is part of The Plan, and that it subserves some high and complex purpose in human development.

VII

An essential obligation of Parenthood is, that, in order to fulfil this duly, the parents require to undergo a wholly new and intrinsic adjustment of faculty. Having arrived already at a complex adaptation to a complex civilised environment, in physique and character, in mentality and habit, now, by a revolutionary reversal of their human progress, they must re-adapt to the simplest of all creatures and conditions—a helpless, puling infant in a cradle.

Where they had had a whole world, perhaps, of intellectual interests and social pursuits to engage them, now they forgather beside a cot and—according as they are human or are not—lose themselves, brain and heart and soul, in the puling, impotent thing. They make themselves eyes and ears, arms and legs for it; carriage, chair and bed. They gaze, entranced, upon the marvel of the opening and shutting of its eyes. It yawns; they tremble lest it dislocate a jaw. It sneezes; now they shudder lest it may have taken cold. It gurgles, and they are transported to a seventh heaven.

Never has either been equally fluttered at their recognition by an exalted personage as both exult when flattered by the flicker of an eyelash that it distinguishes its father from its mother; or either from its nurse. Both perhaps are self-contained and philosophic beings, yet its cry distracts them; scatters their composure to the winds. The inept thing cannot even tell them what it wants. Its cry for food is much the same as is its cry when it requires to be laid down, or lifted up. When its milk is not sweet enough, its inarticulate fury is expressed in notes identical—so far as they can judge—with those of its impotent wrath when a pin-point pricks it.

But whatsoever the cause, to the winds the parental composure is scattered, as hither and thither they scurry, distraught, seeking a reason and a remedy. And this, of course, had been their tyrant's purpose. He had meant to strike panic in his parents' hearts. He was vexed or empty, or was otherwise uneasy. And behold the penalties of those who suffer him to be vexed or empty, or otherwise uneasy!

And whether they are rough, hard-working persons who have neither time nor taste for fuss and nonsense; whether they are the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Archbishop, Sir Isaac and Lady Newton, or the Emperor and Empress of Japan, it is all the same to Baby. No other uses have they in his absurd judgment than to obey his slightest gurgle.

And the wonder of the business is that they too—provided they be normal, wholesome-minded, natural-hearted persons—are of similar opinion. Even a Professor of Archæology must feel a twinge of some emotion when his first baby cuts its first tooth. King Lion himself suffers it with patience when his cub scratches his royal countenance, or gets its milk-teeth into his prize-bone.

The whole face of the earth is transformed by the Baby, indeed. And how much it is transformed for the better! It is not too much to say that it is humanised, redeemed. The most grudging of curmudgeons murmurs only a little to surrender his place at the fire to The Baby. The thirsty thief forbears to drink his infant's milk.

In his great story, The Luck of Roaring Camp, Bret Harte has shown, and has shown as probable, the uplifting and regenerating influence that "The Luck"—its mother a sinner, its father, Heaven alone knew who!—exercised upon a rough community of vicious men.

"It wrastled wi' my finger," says one in an awed whisper. To cover sentiment he adds, "the durn'd little cuss!" But carefully he segregates the member sanctified by the tiny, satin touch, from the other fingers of his wicked hand.

CHAPTER II

INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE SEX-CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE

"The most beautiful witness to the Evolution of Man is the Mind of a little child.... It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or Lucretius, that Maternity, bending over the hollowed cradle in the forest for a first smile of recognition from her babe, expressed the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a living witness to Ascent."—Professor Drummond.

I

Tracing the attribute of Love to its source in the parental function, it becomes clear that this function cannot be dismissed thus in a phrase.

There are two parents. And the parts played by these, respectively, not only differ widely in their nature, but they are signally disproportionate in their share of the labours involved. For while the male bears the brunt of the struggle with environment, for his own and for survival of his mate and offspring, upon the female falls the biological stress of pregnancy and lactation, and the material cares of upbringing.

The reproductive function of the male is but slight and cursory. With the female lies the tax of havening the embryo before birth, of nurturing it with her blood and substance, of suffering the drain it makes upon her vital energy, the burden of its weight; with, finally, the anguish and the dangers of delivery. And having come through all this, the subconscious and involuntary sacrifice is replaced by further—but now voluntary sacrifices. She not only continues to feed it with her living substance, but she employs brain and wit and bodily effort in tending, safeguarding and rearing it.

Meanwhile the sire—among the lower creatures, at all events—detaches himself with lordly indifference from any portion in these later, as he went free of the earlier obligations. He shares his prey with her and with their young. He defends them from the natural enemies of all. Sometimes he condescends to play for minutes with his cubs. But excepting among birds, the male parent takes little or no part in the upbringing of his family.

As with Love, so with Fatherhood, we take it as matter-of-course that this sprang and has evolved to present developments directly out of natural instinct. But as Love did not evolve out of the sex-instinct, neither did father-love evolve from a paternal instinct inherent in the lower animals and in primal man.

Of this, Professor Drummond says:

"The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no Fathers, ... while Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still wanders in the forest, a savage and unblessed soul.

"This time for him is not lost. In his own way he also is at school, and learning lessons which will one day be equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle; and these robuster elements—strength, courage, manliness, endurance, self-reliance—could only have been secured away from domestic cares.... The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem to attack.... If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent.... When we leave the Birds and pass on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile; and among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in case the father eats them."

In place of saying, therefore, that Love sprang in, and has developed from the exercise of the parental function, we must say that Love—in all its higher aspects—sprang and has developed in the maternal function.

But since every attribute, in order to be conscious and realised, is not only rooted but is reared in living function—out of what living function did Mother-love evolve? In the exercise of what vital processes has it been fostered and furthered?

In so far as these involve sacrifice of self in the interests of the child, the maternal ante-natal processes are processes of self-surrender. But these, when once incurred, are subconscious and involuntary. The prospective mother has no choice but to submit to physiological exactions.

And only a few women—those in whom maternal love is deep beyond the average—feel affection for their infants before birth.

Since love must have an object upon which to exercise its faculties and lavish its devotion, it is not, therefore, until the babe is in the mother's arms that the Love-attribute begins to function. And then the primal fount of all conscious and voluntary human selflessness and sacrifice springs afresh in the individual when, in yearning toward the helpless being in her arms, she wells with tenderness and gives herself to be its life.

In the altruistic tender yearning of the mother to her babe, whereat her blood transforms itself to milk, Human Love first sprang and functioned consciously.

This is my Body which is given for you.... This is my Blood ... which is shed for you.

Says Goethe, "There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation." He might have added "and on a great biological function." Every act of voluntary sacrifice, every impulse of compassion, mercy, tenderness, devotion, has had its inspiration and its source in this which is discredited by some as being a merely physical, and is despised, accordingly, as being an inferior process; this mystical transmutation of the mother's blood to milk, and the self-forgetting yearning wherein she yields herself as food for offspring. By the evolution, upon ever higher planes of consciousness, of this primarily instinctive sacrifice, not only Motherhood but Fatherhood too, and the Love-passion between the sexes have been fructified and purified, and uplifted down the ages. Other acts of devotion arise out of maternal ministry. But this is the intrinsic source of all.

Travelling up through all the rudimentary phases of development, simultaneously and side by side with the male fierce methods for the Survival of Fitness, there was evolving in the female, subconsciously and secretly, this sacramental impulse which was to inaugurate a new era—an era wherein charity and ruth were to be born as response to the claims of Unfitness.

The first woman who, of her free-will, gave her breast to her babe was the Mother of all the Humanities. She it was who prepared the way for the coming of Christ. By her, Love entered first into human consciousness.

And by countless generations of such willing tender sacrifice upon the part of mothers, human love has climbed out of the darkness of blind subconscious instinct into the Light of a great transfiguration.

It is weighty evidence of the evolutionary impulse inherent in the function of Lactation, that the development of this maternal trait engenders species so far higher in organisation and morale than those of creatures unequipped to suckle offspring, as to set the Mammalia in a class by themselves in the van of progressive advance. The higher organisation and morale of such result not only from the self-surrendering instinct in the mothers of species, but doubtless also from the superior nutrition promoted in the developing tissues of the young of species, by the highly-individualised food elements which are secreted by the maternal living cells.

The vital significance of this new potence in blood to transform itself to milk for sustenance of offspring is emphasised by the fact that the Mammalia are warm-blooded creatures. While that this new quickening of Life by the altruistic parental instinct originates in the female shows her as medium of that Divine Influx inspiring Creative Evolution, and evolving faculty by way of living function.

II

The question now arises: If Love and the higher affections had their origin in the maternal function, how happens it that man, in whom this capacity is absent, and who is devoid, moreover, of an inherent paternal instinct, has come, notwithstanding, to possess these higher affections?

One may answer off-hand, with the lightness of the tyro, that these have been transmitted to him by maternal inheritance.

But complex biological problems are not thus easily explained. Nature works by processes, not by implications. And the physical functions and the mental attributes of the sexes are so dissimilar, and have, with evolution, so diverged by ever further accentuation, that we must seek for definite biological processes by way of which the male has become endowed with, and whereby his primal characteristics have been transformed by the evolution in him of the maternal instinct—under guise of the wholly new and alien trait of Fatherhood.

A study of Evolution shows the differentiation and intensification of Sex-characteristics to have been the main feature in Human advance, and to have been progressively achieved by incalculable centuries of increasing differentiation and intensification of two opposite orders of impulse and faculty.

In savages and in all the less civilised races, the personal and temperamental differences between the sexes are but slight, and last for no longer than a few years of life. As with other faculties, Sex-differentiations become ever further intensified and more complexly defined as development rises in the scale. Man becomes more man. Woman, more woman. Most notable during the period over which the human organisation sustains its maximum of condition, these Sex-characteristics take longer to arrive at their perfection, and are longer and more fully sustained in the higher races and organisms than is the case with the lower. Then, with that degeneration of tissue which sets in with on-coming age, the old man becomes womanish, the old woman mannish.

It cannot be doubted that human perfection reaches its climax in the accentuation of the differences between the Sex-characteristics, physical and mental, of the one sex from those of the other. The best types of men differ far more from the best types of women than inferior men and women differ from one another. In body and in attribute, the sexes are complementary and supplementary. And their dissimilarities are the measure of their complementary and supplementary values.

Their attraction to one another, their interest and happiness in one anothers' company, are proportional to the degree in which members of one sex supply for members of the other, sentiment and qualities lacking in their own. Mannish women and womanish men are alike incapable of experiencing and inspiring the love-passion, which charms and transfigures life for true man and true woman. These unfortunate, imperfect neuter-persons, because of the deficiency in them of normal sex attributes and impulse, are shut out from the richest and sweetest, most sacred emotions of Humanity—precisely as persons of defective brain are debarred from the richer and fuller appreciations and joys of consciousness.

And yet, apart and distinct from, although at the root of this abnormal neuterdom, wherein the traits of one sex are so antagonised by those of the other that the finest powers of both are nullified—normally, all men possess latent in them the qualities of Woman; all women have latent in them the qualities of Man. Otherwise, this third Neuter-gender—mannish women and womanish men—could not have come into being.

In crises of life and under other abnormal conditions, the dormant characteristics of the one sex are seen to emerge in members of the other, and to become dominant. A woman, in the face of danger, develops the strength, the courage and the material resource of a man. A man, when put to it, reveals the gentleness, patience and psychical resource of a woman. And in neither is this substitution of alien traits imitative, merely. That it is vital and intrinsic is shown by the fact that not only mental characteristics, but the body itself becomes transformed. If the circumstances—exposure to danger, to hard and rough physical labours or to mental exactions which are the normal of the male—continue for long, woman's physique, equally with her attributes, becomes increasingly virile of mode.

A kindred metamorphosis occurs in men. When called upon to exercise for any length of time the functions of a woman, beside a sick bed, for example—or, to state it otherwise, when the male in him no longer receives the stimulus of the natural male rôle and activities—man's virile qualities decline. He becomes emasculate.

So too in disease. With the vital powers at low ebb, man's virility ebbs low. He grows soft and sensitive, uncontrolled and emotional, loses energy and initiative; lapses in outlook and temperament from the masculine normal. In abnormal states of physical development, men are puerile or womanish.

Women, as result of like abnormal undevelopment, or after operative removal of reproductive organs (propter quos est mulier) become mannish of type. In extreme cases the figure changes to a strong and sturdy maleness, the voice drops to gruffness; manners and speech become terse and abrupt, the jaw squares; even moustache or beard may develop. Such women lose, perhaps, every womanly characteristic; refinement of form, mental delicacy and sensitiveness, emotion, subtlety. They lapse to the biological grade, not of cultured, but of rough working men. In lesser degrees of sex-extinction, such as are seen in many of our modern girls, de-sexed by masculine training, the subjects are boyish merely; lean, active, restless, hipless, breastless, lacking all those fair, delicate artistries of face and form, as likewise the complex sensibility and emotionalism which are the higher characteristics of their sex.

III

These and other singularities of the phenomenon indicate that man has, so to speak, a woman concealed in him; woman has a man submerged in her. The case suggests the little Noah and his wife of the toy weatherglass. Under some conditions the man in woman emerges temporarily. Under some conditions the woman in man reveals herself. But the emergence in the one sex of the characteristics of the other, when appreciable and permanent, is abnormal and unpleasing, and is obviously degenerative.

Man is at his best when the woman in him is dominated by his natural virile traits. Woman is at her best when the man in her is sheathed within her native womanliness. This way, each is a highly evolved and a finely-specialised creation.

Nevertheless, such possession, in latency, of the qualities of the other, not only enhances for members of both sexes the potence of their own, inspiring and enriching these, but it engenders more perfect sympathy and understanding between them. The woman in man endues him with intuitive apprehension of the Woman-nature; of its needs and modes, its disabilities, its sufferings and aspirations. The man in woman informs her of the intrinsic values of his sterner calibre, and thus lends her patience with his impatiences, moves her tenderness and care for him in his rougher, more arduous lot, wins her admiration of his enterprises and ambitions. Moreover, the man in her strengthens and intelligises her mental fibre, stiffens and renders more stable and effective her more pliant will and softer, more delicate aptitudes.

While she, in her turn, endows him with her intrinsic mentalities.

Masculine intellection, pure and simple, is initiative, vigorous, enterprising; analytical, logical, critical; its outlook rational and concrete, its disposition just and honest. Capable in the degree of its virility, of strenuous and sustained endeavour, of keen concentration and close application; taking nothing for granted, but questioning and demanding proof of all things, it is an admirable executive agent of Mind. Per se, however, it is rational and deductive, judicial and judicious, rather than inspirational and creative. The blending with it of the Woman-faculty in him quickens his male brain by contributing the emotional element; endues it with intuitive sensibility, fructifies it with female creativeness.

Thus it blossoms in Imagination—a new talent, which his natural intellectual energy and executive ability enable him to raise to highest issues in Inductive Science and the creative Arts.

Sex, with its phenomena of the characteristics of both sexes blended but, nevertheless, distinctive in the totally dissimilar constitution of members of both, presents an enigma which all the thinkers of all the ages have left unsolved.

What is its significance—what its explanation? How has it been possible—without miracle, but by way of biological sequences of form and process, of function and faculty—for the divergent characteristics, physical and mental, of the two sexes to have developed in both, not only without either order of characteristics (normally) neutralising those of the other, but, on the contrary, with both orders ever further intensifying their differences in the sex to which they belong?

By hereditary transmission. True! But by what precise means? Because Nature achieves her results always by the continuous operation of unerring Law and intensifying processes, not by eccentricities or deviations. When she seems to us to skip at random, it means that we have missed some intermediate footprints linking her progressive sequences in a long unbroken train.

This problem of human duality, physical and psychical, has baffled not biologists only, but philosophers, religionists and seers. It fills both life and literature with puzzles, paradoxes, incongruities. It has been the source of perpetual misapprehension, misconception, maladministration, personal and ethical.

It lies at the root of the whole Woman question. It has supplied the motive—and has made the mischief of the Feminist propaganda and practice.

Because, in view of the masculine qualities latent in women, allied with the circumstance that masculine powers are those most profitable and effective on the plane alike of physics and of economics, it has seemed an inevitable conclusion that these dormant male potentialities were powers lying idle; virgin soil which, tilled and cultivated, would yield fruitful harvest. And this for the benefit not of woman solely, but of Humanity at large. Strangely enough, the converse proposition has not presented itself. A pity! For it might have brought enlightenment. Because it presents itself outright in the form of a patent absurdity.

Suppose a Man's Movement which should have had for aim the cult in males of their potential woman-qualities! Not for an instant could the project have found footing as being rational, its ends desirable, or as improving upon Nature. Everywhere is pity or contempt for the effeminate man. He is regarded as a poor creature, neither one thing nor the other; as little the peer of true man as he is notably an unworthy counterfeit of woman.

Yet how is this? Is it that we admit the male-sex to be so vastly and intrinsically superior to the female that we are not satisfied for half only, but demand that the whole human species shall be male? Nevertheless, since masculine qualities, although undeniably present, are normally latent in women, they must be inferior in power and calibre to these same qualities in men. Otherwise, in place of remaining in latency, they would assert themselves like men. Woman's inferior masculine powers, even when developed to the full, can equip her, therefore, to be no more than inferior male; "lesser man" merely, in place of being "diverse"—the highly-differentiated, finely-specialised being for which Nature would seem to have been shaping in her, during untold æons of progressive differentiation.

IV

The prevailing notion is that these masculine potentialities dormant in women are powers common to both sexes, which have been blighted in the one by long generations of educational and vocational disabilities precluding exercise and outlet for them. Or that they are powers which have been dwarfed by long "subjection" of the sex in maternal and domestic functions mainly.

Consulting Biology, we find that such artificial repression of Faculty in the mother (even were artificially-repressed faculty transmissible as such) could in no way have limited itself, in succeeding generations, to inheritance by daughters. On the contrary, the more we learn of the laws of Heredity, the more it is seen that Faculty descends from mother to son, rather than from mother to daughter. And yet, despite the sex-disabilities, personal and social, which are now condemned as having precluded the mothers of earlier eras from developing their masculine abilities, such mothers transmitted masculine characteristics in ever-increasing degree to successive generations of male offspring.

Whereupon another seeming paradox confronts us. Namely, that the sons of those earlier women, in whom masculine inherences were permitted to remain dormant, were notably more virile of body and mind than are the sons of latter-day emancipated mothers who have sedulously cultivated and have fully exercised their male proclivities.

And now upsprings a further momentous consideration: Is this cause and effect? Were the sons of women in whom the potential male had remained abeyant, more virile of body and brain than are the sons of women who have cultivated masculine characteristics, solely and absolutely because the mothers in the latter case had misappropriated to their own uses powers that belonged by right of heredity to sons? While those other mothers, by retaining such in latency, preserved them as a rich inheritance for male heirs. Is it similar, indeed, to the cases of a mother who realises and expends for her own purposes her sons' financial patrimony, and of a mother who, expending the interest alone thereof, retains the capital intact; and is enabled thus to pass it on as heritage? Is the power held latent in one generation the potential of the generation following?

It may be asked: Why should woman forgo possession and exercise of faculties available to her, in order to transmit these to sons? One might answer as in respect of that other patrimony. If it be true that she holds these powers in trust merely, they are not hers to spend. To expend them is to despoil her sons; to make paupers and bankrupts of them, humanly speaking. Further, since daughters inherit from the father, the male entail woman forbears to realise and to exploit for her own uses returns to her sex in the person of her grand-daughter—by paternal inheritance. For the able father is the parent of the able daughter.

Thus Nature works with the eternal justice of eternal reciprocity between the sexes; making them all the while more complexly diverse, but nevertheless more closely interdependent. So that one sex can neither progress nor can it regress by itself; but draws the other onward with it, or drags it back. Thus, the bread of human heritage consigned to the stream of posterity by one sex, for equipment and furtherance of the other, returns to the hand of the sex that consigned it.

If this be so—and I hope to prove it so—the woman who develops the potential male in her defrauds of its lawful racial and personal entail not only the opposite sex, in the person of her son, but she defrauds of its dower her own sex too, in the person of her grand-daughter.

Of the interesting and important biological processes underlying the mystery of the Dual-Sex constitution and its manifold phenomena, I am about to present a wholly new and—I venture to believe—a wholly true and convincing elucidation.

Natura simplex est, said Newton, et sibi semper consonans. (Nature is simple and always agrees with herself.) Bewilderingly multiple in her phenomena, she is superbly simple in her principles. By the operation of her one great Law of Gravitation, she sustains the mighty Solar systems—and brings the apple to the ground. By the extension, counterpoise and co-operation of one Primal Cosmic Energy—with its dual impulses, Centripetal and Centrifugal—she has generated all the diverse marvels of a Universe. And in view of her simplicity of Principle, it is conceivable that the Duality of Sex may be an extension into Life of that same principle of Duality which characterises the vaster Cosmic phenomena.

If this be true, Man and Woman are the complex resultant of infinitely many and varied evolutionary differentiations and associations of the two modes of Primal Energy. If so, the principle of Sex must have existed before Matter; must have been inherent in Creation before Creation began to evolve. And if so, Evolution would seem to have had for its purpose the ever further and fuller manifestation of these dual and contrary inherences in terms of Life and Sex. While, to judge by effects, it has had for its means such ever more intimate and intricate co-operations of these as have resulted in the progressively diverse and complex developments found to-day in Human Life and Human Sex-Characteristics.

CHAPTER III

THE MYSTERY OF SEX AND SEX-TRANSMISSION

"The idea that the female is naturally and really the superior sex seems incredible, and only the most liberal and emancipated minds, possessed of a large store of biological information, are capable of realising it."—Professor Lester Ward.

I

Those happy persons who do not perplex themselves concerning the intrinsic causes behind all physical phenomena see it as only "natural" that two parents of opposite sex should produce offspring of both sexes.

And yet it is not only a great mystery, but, on the face of it, it is an anomaly that a child who may possess an admixture of all the physical and mental characteristics of its two parents, bears, nevertheless, the sex and the sex-characteristics of one only. Sex, male or female, breeds true in nearly every case; the rare exceptions merely emphasising the rule. The mystery deepens when we realise that every individual is a product of countless such admixtures of the qualities, throughout countless generations, of countless forefathers and foremothers. And although such a man or woman may hark back to any one, or more, of the traits of his or her innumerable forbears, he or she, nevertheless, "breeds true" in the factors of sex and sex-characteristics.

Long and closely biologists have pondered these many and involved problems. How is it, they inquire, that an embryo bred of two parents of opposite sex develops the sex of one only of these? How is it that the mother, who belongs to one sex only, produces—and produces in about equal number—offspring of both? The phenomenon is expressed, biologically, in the term, "sex-limited factor"—an incalculable something in the embryo which limits its sex to the sex of one only of its parents. But the "something," and the method of this sex-limitation have remained enigmas.

Sex is regarded by the new Mendelian school of biologists as that which is known as a "Mendelian factor." And to follow the argument to its conclusions, a few simple words about the Mendelian theory of Heredity are essential to those unacquainted therewith.

* * * * *

About forty years ago, a German monk, Mendel by name, was struck by the facts that in his bed of edible peas certain plants grew tall, while others remained dwarf; that the blossoms of certain plants were white always, while those of others were always coloured. He made a number of experiments in crossing the plants, with a view to discovering the law of inheritance by way of its operation in hybrid varieties. Briefly, the results of his experiments—which have since been repeated and confirmed by many later observers—were as follows:

There are plants that are tall and can transmit only Tallness to offspring. There are plants that are dwarf and can transmit only Dwarfness to offspring. So too, there are plants of white blossom or of coloured blossom that can transmit, respectively, only White or Coloured blossoming to offspring.

When a Tall is crossed with a Dwarf plant, however, or a Coloured with a White plant, strange to say, the hybrid offspring of this cross shows one only of these opposite traits, to the exclusion of the other. No intermediate, or mixed, forms are produced.

Thus, a Tall crossed with a Dwarf produces only Talls. Plants of Coloured flower crossed with those of White flower give only Coloured flowering varieties. A yellow and a green-seeded cross produce only yellow-seeded plants.

In the cross between plants of opposite traits, one set of traits appears thus, exclusively, in the hybrid offspring. These traits—because they dominate growth and development—Mendel styled "Dominant." While those traits which are dominated by the other and opposite traits and do not appear in offspring, he styled "Recessive."

On further breeding, a new and stranger thing happens, however. Because when such hybrids—plants bred of parents that had borne, respectively, "Dominant" and "Recessive" characteristics, but with the parental Dominant traits so overpowering the Recessive traits of the other parent that these latter are submerged and concealed—When these hybrids are crossed with other hybrids like themselves, both the Dominant and the Recessive traits of the original parents reappear in offspring. The tall hybrids resulting from the cross between Tall and Dwarf plants, when crossed with other tall hybrids of similar origin, produce both Tall and Dwarf plants. So with Colour, and with the other so-called "Contrasted Traits."

It becomes evident, therefore, that although the Dominant traits of Tallness and Colour overpower in the growth and development of the second generation of plants, the Recessive traits of Dwarfness and Whiteness, these latter traits are submerged only, and are neither impaired in their values, nor destroyed. In the third generation, under different conditions of mating, the original Recessive, and submerged, traits re-appear, and reveal themselves in offspring-plants as the Dwarfness or the Whiteness that had characterised their grandparents.

Mendel assumed that such hybrid plants—offspring of a Dominant and of a Recessive parent—produce two varieties of sex-cells, or gametes, and that one order of cells contain the Dominant traits of the Dominant parent, while the other order contain the Recessive traits of the Recessive parent.

But any individual sex-cell, or gamete, cannot (according to his view) bear both Dominant and Recessive traits. The Dominant traits and the Recessive traits of the respective parents he regarded as being segregated, absolutely, in one or in the other set of sex-cells produced by hybrid varieties. And of these, the cells bearing Dominant traits are able to transmit Dominant traits only to offspring; while the cells bearing Recessive traits transmit Recessive traits only to offspring.

II

Now, Biology shows that plants and living creatures develop from a single microscopic cell, formed by the union of two half-cells, of which each half was contributed by one of the two parents.

Clearly then, a hybrid plant is one that has sprung from the union of two half-cells, one of which bore the Dominant traits of one parent, while the other bore the Recessive traits of the other parent. But because Dominant traits overpower Recessive traits in development, the cross between a tall plant and a dwarf plant produces tall offspring only—Tallness being a Dominant trait which overpowers the Recessive trait of Dwarfness. So too, the cross between a plant bearing coloured and a plant bearing white flowers produces offspring bearing coloured flowers only—Colour being Dominant over the Recessive Trait of Whiteness.

But because the Recessive traits of Dwarfness and of Whiteness were only overpowered in the plant-development, by the Dominant traits of Tallness and Colour, but were neither lost nor impaired in stock, hybrid plants that had shown only Dominant traits in growth and constitution, produce, nevertheless, two sorts of sex-cells for plant-reproduction: cells that bear the Recessive traits of the one parent, and cells that bear the Dominant traits of the other parent. So that in the fertilisation of one another by such hybrids, cells bearing Dominant traits mate with other cells bearing Dominant traits, and produce plants of pure Dominant type—Tall or Coloured, like one of the grandparents. While cells bearing Recessive traits mate with other cells bearing Recessive traits, and produce plants of pure Recessive type—Dwarf or White, like the other grandparent.

It is seen, therefore, that in plants, when a cell bearing Dominant traits mates with one bearing Recessive traits, the Dominant characteristics so overpower the Recessive that these latter lie latent, and concealed, in the resulting plant. But when a cell bearing Recessive traits mates with another cell bearing Recessive traits, the resulting plant (its growth and development not over-ridden now by the more assertive Dominant traits) is able to develop its Recessive characteristics.

* * * * *

These interesting and significant laws of plant-heredity and constitution, discovered by Mendel in peas, have since been found by many expert observers to hold true as regards other species of plants; as too in poultry, in mice, and in rabbits, and moreover, in the hereditary transmission of human characteristics.

In Heredity and Variation, Dr. Saleeby points out that in the mating of a black with a white rabbit, some of the offspring will be black like one parent, some white like the other, and some grey—a blend of the colours of both parents.

In the last case, the Dominant trait of Blackness, derived from one rabbit-parent, blends in the fur of the rabbit-offspring with the Recessive trait of Whiteness, derived from the other rabbit-parent; a grey rabbit resulting. But that the Contrasted Traits come to no more than a temporary and partial compromise during the life of such a rabbit-individual, without either of the traits losing its intrinsic characteristic—Blackness and Whiteness, respectively—is proved by the fact that these grey rabbit-offspring, on further breeding, produce not grey rabbits, but black rabbits and white rabbits; proving that the Black trait and the White trait in them remained distinct and segregated, neither altering its character in the least degree.

It is as though one should take a spoonful of black pepper and a spoonful of white salt, and thoroughly mix them. A drab "pepper-and-salt" mixture will result. But neither pepper nor salt will have changed its colour or its properties one iota. Could they be separated out again, each would be precisely as it had been before mixing. So it is with the Dominant and the Recessive traits in living organisms. They commingle intimately, but each retains its original and intrinsic quality.

All the diverse and beautiful varieties of vegetation and the loveliness of flowers, in form and colour, result from multiple associations in hybrid-plants, of those which are known as the "Contrasted Traits" of parent-stock.

III

The lay reader need not perplex himself with the problems and phenomena of Mendelism.

All he requires to remember are its three leading principles. Firstly, that in the world of Life, plant and animal, living attributes are divided into two contrasting orders. Secondly, that of these two orders of so-called "Contrasted Traits" ("Contrasting Traits" would be a fitter phrase), the two groups are as absolute and opposite in character and in significance as are the plus and the minus signs of Algebra, the Positive and the Negative potentials of Electricity, the conditions of Light and Darkness, of Blackness and Whiteness, of Heat and Cold. Thirdly, that the Dominant order of traits are paramount over and extinguish the Recessive order of traits.

To sustain her equilibrium by a counterpoise of dual and contrary factors, physical and vital, Nature must preserve these factors absolute and unchangeable as the constitution and the opposite attraction of The Poles. But in order to produce her countless progressive variations of form and attribute, physical and vital, she assembles these contrary factors in countless progressively complex combinations, co-operations and correlations.

It is conceivable, therefore, that the infinite gradations and variations of form and attribute found in the world of living creatures are, as in the world of plants, phenomena of the ever further differentiation and more complex combination, in the hybrid offspring of two parents, of two orders of Contrasting Traits, transmitted by the respective parents.

In all their multiple associations and diverse developments, however, the two Sets of Traits remain unchanged, precisely as do the individual elements of chemical combinations. Variations in species result, accordingly, not from change in the essential traits, but from changes in the modes and the degrees of the commingling of these in organisms; and in the modes and degrees of their ever more complex associations in such.

Tallness, being an impulse toward extension, can never be Dwarfness, which is an impulse toward contraction. Black can never be White. Square can never be Round. Yet two opposite traits, both influencing development, may come to a mean, or poise, in an individual organism; as is seen in the grey offspring of a black rabbit mated with a white rabbit. But it is a counterpoise merely of contrary factors. The traits of Blackness and Whiteness remain absolute and unalterable.

If now, the reader has grasped these leading principles of Plant-biology, he is in a position to follow the new application of them to Human Biology which I now venture to present.

Without going into details of physiology, it may be stated that the principles of reproduction are so identical in plants and living creatures as wholly to justify argument from one to the other. The only differences are in degrees of structural complexity as organisms rise higher in the scale of development, and demand, accordingly, more complex organs and functions for the more perfect manifestation of their characteristics; as also for the transmission of these to offspring. It may be repeated, however, that Mendelian law is found to hold good in humans, both in the hereditary transmission of normal characteristics and in the hereditary transmission of the abnormal traits of disease and degeneracy.

Increasing complexities, structural and functional, are indispensable to the presentment of the attributes of the higher species, Man. But such complexities are, nevertheless, continuous with and have sprung out of the simplicities of lower and rudimentary organisms, precisely as the branches and leaves and flowers of a plant are continuous with and have sprung out of its roots. A vital and important biological detail (to be considered later) is that plants are not, as living creatures are, differentiated into a right and a left-side, identical in construction. Another is that plants are self-fertilising.

With the lower animals, plural births are the rule. And in these, the still crude and imperfect differentiations of the Contrasting Traits allow of piebald and other modes of chequered colour and amorphous construction.

The higher the organism, the more complex are the biological requirements for its pre-natal development, as for its post-natal nurture. The functions of Parenthood, both physiological and psychological, are always evolving to higher and more complex issues, therefore, as the species to be reproduced and nurtured becomes more complex. In human births, single offspring is the normal. Twin births are comparatively rare. And that these are abnormal is shown by twins being below the average always in health or in faculty; usually in both.

IV

As already mentioned, Sex is regarded by the large and ever-increasing order of the adherents of Mendel as a "Mendelian factor." But in applying Mendelian truth to humans, I venture to think the applications have not been carried to their ultimate and most momentous conclusions.

Because, given the keynote to the Principle of Duality in the phenomenon of the Contrasting Traits found manifesting in plant-heredity and constitution, the duality of the Human Sexes, with their respective orders of Contrasting characteristics, suggests itself as being analogous.

Human attributes, physical and mental, are seen, like those of plants, to group themselves into two distinct categories, the Male and the Female sex-characteristics, primary and secondary. And these, though wholly contrary in nature and in trend, are found—precisely as occurs in plants—linked together in the hybrid offspring of the two parents from whom they were, respectively, derived; blending in a temporal unity, but remaining, nevertheless, unchanged in their essential differences; coming to means and counterpoises in individual organisations, yet nevertheless preserved distinct and unalloyed in these, as is shown by their emergence, unaltered, in offspring of opposite sexes.

As a hybrid plant is the product of two parents characterised by opposite traits—Tallness and Dwarfness, for example—so, I submit, a human creature is the hybrid offspring of two parents characterised by opposite traits—Maleness and Femaleness, with the Sex-traits differentiating one sex from the other.

And at once a solution of the many baffling presentments and problems of Sex presents itself—of the enigma of man with Woman potential in him, of woman with Man potential in her; a key to the mysterious Duality of human biology and psychology, with its conflict of battling impulses, its harmonies of blending attributes, its innumerable and diverse developments in proportions, in means, in extremes; in normalities, eccentricities, deviations and reversions. And the analogy between the two orders of Traits—in Plant-life at the lower end of the scale of species, and in Human life and psychology at the higher end—suggests that the ever-increasing complexity of organisation and faculty which has characterised Evolutionary Progress, has had for aim, as it has had for method, the ever further differentiation and more perfect segregation, but, nevertheless, the ever closer and more intricate association of the contrary factors of Maleness and Femaleness.

In the lower organisms—plant and animal—the two groups of Traits are but crudely differentiated as characteristics distinguishing one sex from the other. In such lower organisms, Sex-development is merely rudimentary; the first foreshadowings in Life of two intrinsic orders of Essential Attribute, the progressive evolution whereof reveals two contrary trends in physiological and psychical inherences.

Like Light and Darkness, Heat and Cold, Sex is a phenomenon of Dual states which manifest by way of relativity. Without Maleness, Femaleness has no significance—no existence, in fact. And the converse. And in the lower and rudimentary forms of existence, in proportion to their degrees of undevelopment, the dual states of Sex are but faintly defined. The very lowly forms are bi-sexual and self-fertilising. While the first and simplest mode of reproduction is by cell-division merely; the principle of Sex, with its dual factors, functioning, but not yet differentiated into dual forms.

The evolution of Species and the evolution of Sex have been so absolutely co-incident in biological progress, indeed, that we are forced to perceive them as cause and effect; or, rather, as one and the same thing. And the evolution of Sex has meant, of course, the ever further divergence and the more complex specialisation, in form and in function, of the characteristics of the one sex from those of the other.

V

On still closer consideration, it appears, moreover, that the evolution of Sex has meant pre-eminently the evolution of the female sex—the slow and gradual emergence and development, in species, of female characteristics, as, in course of Evolution, these have freed themselves and have risen ever further into evidence from long subjection by the stronger, fiercer, more assertive—in a word, the Dominant—traits of the male.

(A conclusion as singularly interesting, I think, as it is instructive, in view of modern Feminist doctrine and aims, which make, not for the culture and the ever further evolutionary development of the Woman-traits in woman, but, on the contrary, for a reversion to earlier cruder states of the subjection in her of her Woman-traits by those male Dominant ones, which, as the hybrid offspring of a male and of a female parent, every female creature inherits from her father, together with the Woman-traits she inherits from her mother. There is seen here the irony that woman has, by long ages of biological development, released herself from sociological subjection by the male, only voluntarily to set the Woman in herself in far worse psychological subjection to the male in herself.)

In the new and profoundly interesting light thrown by Mendel on some previously unsolved problems of heredity, the reason for the long subjection of woman, biological and sociological, becomes clear.

Because, given the key-notes of Tallness and Colour as Dominant traits, one identifies these, at once, as traits of Maleness; the greater stature of male creatures and the richer colour of their fur and plumage in the lower species pointing unmistakably thereto. Dwarfness (or lesser stature) and Whiteness (or lesser colour) are Recessive, and are obviously Female traits. The plant of Dominant type, though still bi-sexual, is making for a male genus; the Recessive type is making for a Female genus. White creatures are so feminine in general effect that it seems an anomaly when they are males. The converse is true of black creatures. The black horse is stubborn and restive; the white, gentle and submissive.

White poultry are prolific in egg-production; white cattle are good milkers—a female characteristic. Jersey cows are both small in size and pale of colour.

The male sex stands presumably for Dominance. And his positive, or objective, traits overpowering the negative, or subjective, traits of Recessiveness, prevail accordingly in early biological development.

The female sex stands for Recessiveness. Her less assertive traits yield and recede into the background before those of the Dominant male. In stature, in strength, and in colour, and in the allied mental attributes, he holds the foreground in form and in function. The reason being that his rôle in Life is adaptation to environment.

The male, therefore, in his masculine rôle of Adaptation, with his Dominant traits making fiercely for the survival and for the ever further development of physical fitness—until physical fitness, or Adaptation, had attained due degrees of ascendancy—was long lord of Creation; the female, his vassal. And this not only in life and in action, but too in the personal characteristics of both sexes. During æons before the Recessive female-traits were able to come into evidence as definite traits, they functioned as negations, merely; submerged and over-ridden in all female creatures by the Dominant male-traits they had inherited from their sires.

Primal physical development may be said, thus, to have derived its first impulse from those fierce and fighting male-proclivities which characterised it in the epoch of that early savage struggle with environment whence Species emerged. Only with further evolutionary progress, do the female traits manifest as personal characteristics, secure survival, and find increasing exercise and sway.

The tigress is only less fierce, less strong, and less savage than the tiger. Primal woman was only less fierce, less strong, and less savage than the male. It is only, indeed, in the maternal function and relation that the female traits of both tigress and primal woman awake, and find justification, impulse, and scope for development. And while the material progress which has led to modern Civilisation resulted from Adaptation to, and of, environment, and derived its impulse from the male proclivities of strength, assertiveness and intelligence, the moral progress thereof may be said to have derived its impulse from the evolution of the female sex-characteristics. Because the evolution of Woman-traits has meant the ever further tempering and counterpoising of the fiercely active and aggressive male propensities, by the more passive and self-surrendering qualities of the female.

Judging the respective characteristics of the sexes by their widely-differing rôles in the most important of their co-operative living functions, the parental one—the sole function wherein the sexes of lower organisation co-operate, indeed—the respective attributes of Dominance and Recessiveness manifest clearly in these. The province of the male being to fight for mate and young, providing food, defending life—in order to fit him for this struggle for racial survival, his traits of strength and stature remain long paramount, alike in development and function, over those of the female, as regards his own organisation and that of his offspring, both male and female. The province of the female being to surrender her powers to the nurture of offspring before birth, and, after birth, mildly to suckle and to tend its helplessness, Nature equips her to these ends; inhibiting, or negativing, strength and fierceness in her by the traits of Recessiveness.

Tigress or savage woman, her struggle with the rough conditions of primal existence is only less fierce and less strenuous than her mate's. It demands the positive male-qualities (which manifest first in stature, strength and pugnacity) only less in degree than does his, therefore. The negative female qualities which, manifesting first in passivity and surrender, detract from her fierceness and activity, would have made for extinction of species had they not been defended by those of her fighting mate, as too by the male-traits she herself had inherited from her fighting father. They could only evolve, accordingly, precisely in proportion as they were sheltered behind the male dominant powers. The tiger shelters his tigress only during her maternal phases, however. Her cubs brought forth, suckled, reared, and thrust into the jungle to fend for themselves, she must fight her own battles for food and existence. And her brief maternal phases being all too short for more than the scantest development of female traits—which derive their fullest impulse in their exercise as mother-traits—she remains a tigress merely, and produces tiger offspring merely, because only tigerishness secures survival in her domain of life and attribute.

With the further advance of progressing species, savage woman has evolved from savage brute to savage woman by way of such increasing shelter and protection by her Dominant mate as have permitted the slow and gradual evolution of the Recessive Woman-traits in her; and thereby the evolution of the Woman-sex. Her maternal phases and the unfitnesses of these become ever more prolonged and incapacitating; her offspring demands ever longer periods of suckling, devotion and care, as both she and it rise higher in the scale of organisation. Thus, Sex has evolved in the male by response to the ever-increasing claims upon him, by the female and by offspring, of his traits of protective chivalry and intelligent effort. And Sex has evolved in the female by response to the ever-increasing claims by offspring upon her, of her traits of devotion and ministry.

The evolution of the Woman-attributes has been rendered possible only by that protection accorded by the male to the female as the due of her maternal unfitnesses; securing thus for her and for offspring a more privileged and kindlier environment. Environment which, evoking less of fight and physical stress, enabled her inherent milder, self-surrendering Recessive traits to emerge, to unfold, and to function increasingly in life and heredity.

And in the degree of her advancing evolution, the male evolved. Because, just as in her earlier hybrid constitution, the Dominant male-traits she had inherited from her father, submerging the Recessive female-traits she had inherited from her mother, made her, for long æons, more male than she was female, so now, with their progressive evolution, the Recessive female-traits not only made her ever more woman, but, transmitted in ever fuller measure to her sons, increasingly tempered, modified and humanised, the masculine fierceness and combativeness of these. Whereby were substituted arts of peace and civilisation for those of war.

Thus, with advancing Evolution, the female sex-characteristics have engendered, in both sexes, qualities of quietism and subordination, to temper those of force and aggression; amenities of gentleness, forbearance and affection, to soften assertiveness, turn the edge of strife, and fructify intelligence. Thus, human civilisation has been fostered and furthered.

In the hybrid creature that every man and woman is, are grouped two sets of Contrasting Traits, or Sex-characteristics: traits Dominant, or male, and traits Recessive, or female. And in the complex human hybrid, these traits, ever increasing in complexity of constitution and further diverging in trend, are associated in ever more close and complex poise and counterpoise as both become more intensified and intelligised.

Man is a hybrid in whom the male Dominant traits derived from his father prevail in impulse and development over the female Recessive traits derived from his mother. Woman is a hybrid in whom the maternal Recessive traits prevail in impulse and development over the male Dominant traits she has inherited from her father.

The Woman-traits (which, as said, reach their highest culmination in mother-traits), become in man paternal traits; modified mother-instincts which move him not only to love, in addition to providing for and protecting offspring, but, transfiguring all his other characteristics, move him to philanthropy, amity, tolerance and altruism in his dealings with his fellow-creatures.

CHAPTER IV

ONE SIDE OF BODY IS MALE, THE OTHER SIDE IS FEMALE

"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,

Your heart anticipate my heart,

You must be just before, in fine,

See and make me see, for your part,

New depths of the Divine!"

Robert Browning.

I

On further applying the Principle of Duality, as operating in organisation and heredity, strangely interesting and significant developments appear.

Because, with the ever further evolution of Form and Faculty as organisms have risen higher in the scale of life, the bodies of living creatures are seen to have become further differentiated into two sides; a right and a left. Anatomically, these two sides appear identical in structure and in function, although contrary in incidence to one another. Each is incomplete and impotent without the other. Nevertheless, paralysis and other diseases show that each is, as it were, an entity totally distinct from the other. One side may be wholly helpless and insensitive while its fellow remains sound and efficient.

Complementary and supplementary each to the other, both are, in a sense, complete. Further and closer comparison of function shows, however, that although they co-operate in action, they are by no means identical in power or aptitude.

The right half of the body is, for both sexes, the active and executive half; quicker and stronger, and in all ways more efficient on the plane of physics.

The left half is, relatively, passive and inert, is responsive, mainly, to the initiative and requirements of the right half, by which its powers are overshadowed in every form of direct activity.

As with the two sides of the body, so it is with the two halves of the brain, which are at the same time the agencies of mentality and the centres for recording the sensations and for directing the movements of the two sides of the body. The brain-half which controls the right side is known as "the Leading half." It is the agent in concrete intellection, as in physical activity.

While, so far as biologists and psychologists have been able to discover, the other half of the brain is negative in function—a blank, as regards concrete intelligence and nervous or muscular initiative. In disease, it has sometimes been found to undertake, and to perform feebly and imperfectly, sundry of the duties of its active "Leading" partner. But inert and inadequate in muscular action, it is negative in intellection. It has been observed, however, that patients in whom this brain-half is diseased show signs of moral deterioration. Yet whatsoever its functions—and the fact that it does not atrophy nor degenerate in the marvellous structure and complexity which characterise brain-constitution shows that it functions duly—its operations are totally dissimilar to, and are, moreover, wholly overshadowed by those of its active, intelligent partner.