THE LAW OF CONSERVATION
Students of the physical sciences discovered in the nineteenth century a
universal law of Nature, always believed by the wisest since the time of
Thales, but never before proven, which is now commonly known as the law
of the conservation of energy. When we say to a child, "You cannot eat
your cake and have it," we are expressing the law of the conservation of
matter, which is really a more or less accurate part-expression of the
law of the conservation of energy. The law that from nothing nothing is
made--and further, though here this concerns us less, that nothing is
ever destroyed--is the only firm foundation for any work or any theory
whether in science or philosophy. The chemist who otherwise bases his
account of a reaction is wrong; the sociologist who denies it Nature
will deny. It was the sure foundation upon which Herbert Spencer erected
the philosophy of evolution; and every page of this book depends upon
the certainty that this law applies to woman and to womanhood as it does
to the rest of the universe. Further, it may be shown that certain less
universal but most important generalizations made by two or three
biologists are indeed special cases of the universal law. There is,
first, the law of Herbert Spencer, which states that for every
individual there is an inevitable issue between the demands of
parenthood and the demands of self; and there is, secondly, the law of
Professors Geddes and Thomson, which asserts that this issue specially
concerns the female as compared with the male sex, the distinguishing
character of femaleness being that in it a higher proportion of the
vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore,
necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual. It
is of service to one's thinking, perhaps, to regard Geddes and Thomson's
law as a special case of Spencer's, and Spencer's as a special case of
the law of the conservation of energy. First, then, somewhat of detail
regarding the law of balance between expenditure on the self and
expenditure upon the race; and then to the all-important application of
this to the case of womanhood--for upon this application the whole of
the subsequent argument depends.
When he set forth, with great daring, to write the "Principles of
Biology," Spencer was already at an advantage compared with the accepted
writers upon the subject, not merely because of his stupendous
intellectual endowment, but also because the idea of the conservation of
energy was a permanent guiding factor in all his thought. Thus it was,
one supposes, that this bold young amateur, for he was little more,
perceived in the light of the evolutionary idea of which he was one of
the original promulgators, a simple truth which had been unperceived by
all previous writers upon biology, from Aristotle onwards. It is in the
last section of his book that Spencer propounds his "law of
multiplication," depending upon what he calls the "antagonism between
individuation and genesis." As I have observed elsewhere, the word
antagonism is perhaps too harsh, and may certainly be misleading, for it
may induce us to suppose that there is no possible reconciliation of the
claims and demands of the race and the individual, the future and the
present. I believe most devoutly that there is such a reconciliation, as
indeed Spencer himself pointed out, and a central thesis of this book is
indeed that in the right expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood,
woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and
richest self-development. Thus one may be inclined to abandon the word
antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio
between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spencerian
terms. This principle has immense consequences--most notably that as
life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used
for the enrichment and development of the individual life, and less for
mere physical parenthood. We shall argue that, in the case of mankind,
and pre-eminently in the case of woman, this enrichment and development
of the individual life is best and most surely attained by parenthood or
foster-parenthood, made self-conscious and provident, and magnificently
transmuted by its extension and amplification upon the psychical plane
in the education of children and, indeed, the care and ennoblement of
human life in all its stages.
This law of Spencer's has been discussed at length by the present writer
in a previous volume,[2] and we may therefore now proceed to its notable
illustration in the case of womanhood and the female sex in general, as
made by Geddes and Thomson now more than twenty years ago. It is
surprising that the distinguished authors do not seem to have recognized
that their law is a special case of Spencer's; but one of them granted
this relation in a discussion upon the present writer's first eugenic
lecture to the Sociological Society.[3]
We must therefore now briefly but adequately consider the argument of
the remarkable book published by the Scottish biologists in 1889, and
presented in a new edition in 1900. The latter date is of interest,
because it coincides with the re-discovery of the work of Mendel,
published in 1865, to which we must afterwards more than once refer; and
the work of the Mendelians during the subsequent decade very
substantially modifies much of the authors' teaching upon the
determination of sex, and the intimate nature of the physiological
differences between the sexes. We have learnt more about the nature of
sex in the decade or so since the publication of the new edition of the
"Evolution of Sex" than in all preceding time. Such, at least, is the
well-grounded opinion of all who have acquainted themselves with the
work of the Mendelians, as we shall see: and therefore that book is by
no means commended to the reader's attention as the last word upon the
subject. The rather would one particularly direct him to the following
prophetic and admirable passage in the preface of 1900:--
"Our hope is that the growing strength of the still young school of
experimental evolutionists may before many years yield results
which will involve not merely a revision, but a recasting of our
book."
--a passage which may well content the authors to-day, when its
fulfilment is so signal.
Yet assuredly the main thesis of the volume stands, and profoundly
concerns every student of womanhood in any of its aspects. It will
continue to stand when the brilliant foolishness of such writers as poor
Weininger, the author of that evidently insane product "Sex and
Character," is rightly estimated as interesting to the student of mental
pathology alone. There has lately been a kind of epidemic citation from
Weininger, whose book is obviously rich in characters that make it
attractive to the ignorant and the many; and it is high time that we
should concern ourselves less with the product of a suicidal and
much-to-be-pitied boy, and more with the sober and scientific work for
which daily verification is always at hand.
We cannot do better than have before us at the outset the authors'
statement of their main proposition, in the preface to the new edition
of their work:--
"In all living creatures there are two great lines of variation,
primarily determined by the very nature of protoplasmic change
(metabolism); for the ratio of the constructive (anabolic) changes
to the disruptive (katabolic) ones, that is of income to outlay,
of gains to losses, is a variable one. In one sex, the female, the
balance of debtor and creditor is the more favourable one; the
anabolic processes tend to preponderate, and this profit may be at
first devoted to growth, but later towards offspring, of which she
hence can afford to bear the larger share. To put it more
precisely, the life-ratio of anabolic to katabolic changes, A/K, in
the female is normally greater than the corresponding life-ratio,
a/k, in the male. This for us, is the fundamental, the
physiological, the constitutional difference between the sexes; and
it becomes expressed from the very outset in the contrast between
their essential reproductive elements, and may be traced on into
the more superficial sexual characters."
A little further on (p. 17), the authors say:--
"Without multiplying instances, a review of the animal kingdom, or
a perusal of Darwin's pages, will amply confirm the conclusion that
on an average the females incline to passivity, the males to
activity. In higher animals, it is true that the contrast shows
itself rather in many little ways than in any one striking
difference of habit, but even in the human species the difference
is recognized. Every one will admit that strenuous spasmodic bursts
of activity characterize men, especially in youth, and among the
less civilized races; while patient continuance, with less violent
expenditure of energy, is as generally associated with the work of
women."
We must shortly proceed to study the origin and determination of sex,
and more especially of femaleness, in the individual, and here we shall
be entirely concerned with the new knowledge commonly called Mendelism,
to which there is no allusion in our authors' pages. Meanwhile it must
be insisted that the reader who will either read their pages for a
survey of the evidence in detail, or who will for a moment consider the
evident necessities imposed by the facts of parenthood, cannot possibly
fail to satisfy himself that the main contention, as stated in the
foregoing quotations, is correct. A further point of the greatest
importance to us requires to be made.
It is that, owing to profound but intelligible causes, the contrast
which necessarily obtains between the sexes in respect of their vital
expenditure is most marked in the case of our own species. It is one of
the conditions of progress that the young of the higher species make
more demands upon their mothers than do the young of humbler forms. In
other words, progress in the world of life has always leant upon and
been conditioned by motherhood. Thus, as one has so frequently asserted
in reference to the modern campaign against infant mortality, the young
of the human species are nurtured within the sacred person--the
_therefore_ sacred person--of the mother for a longer period in
proportion to the body weight than in the case of any other species; and
the natural period of maternal feeding is also the longest known. On the
other hand, the physical demands made by parenthood upon the male sex
are no greater in our case than in that of lower forms; though upon the
psychical plane the great fact of increasing paternal care in the right
line of progress may never be forgotten. But thus it follows that the
law of conservation, asserting that what is spent for self cannot be
kept for the race, and that if the demands of the future are to be met
the present must be subordinated, not merely applies to woman, but
applies to her in unique degree. There are grounds, also, for believing
that what is demonstrably and obviously true on the physical plane has
its counterpart in the psychical plane; and that, if woman is to remain
distinctively woman in mind, character, and temperament, and if, just
because she remains or becomes what she was meant to be, she is to find
her greatest happiness, she must orient her life towards Life Orient,
towards the future and the life of this world to come. Some such
doctrines may help us at a later stage to decide whether it be better
that a woman should become a mother or a soldier, a nurse or an
executioner.