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The Century of the Child
By
Ellen Key
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, February, 1909
Reprinted, December, 1909
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The present translation is from the German version of Frances Maro,
which was revised by the author herself.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS PARENTS 1
II. THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK 63
III. EDUCATION 106
IV. HOMELESSNESS 191
V. SOUL MURDER IN THE SCHOOLS 203
VI. THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE 233
VII. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION 284
VIII. CHILD LABOUR AND THE CRIMES OF CHILDREN 316
The Century of the Child
CHAPTER I
THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS PARENTS
Filled with sad memories or eager hopes, people waited for the turn of
the century, and as the clock struck twelve, felt innumerable undefined
forebodings. They felt that the new century would certainly give them
only one thing, peace. They felt that those who are labouring to-day
would witness no new development in that process of change to which they
had consciously or unconsciously contributed their quota.
The events at the turn of the century caused the new century to be
represented as a small naked child, descending upon the earth, but
drawing himself back in terror at the sight of a world bristling with
weapons, a world in which for the opening century there was not an inch
of free ground to set one's foot upon. Many people thought over the
significance of this picture; they thought how in economic and in actual
warfare all the lower passions of man were still aroused; how despite
all the tremendous development of civilisation in the century just
passed, man had not yet succeeded in giving to the struggle for
existence nobler forms. Certainly to the question why this still is so,
very different answers were given. Some contented themselves with
declaring, after consideration, that things must remain just as they
are, since human nature remains the same; that hunger, the propagation
of the race, the desire for gold and power, will always control the
course of the world. Others again were convinced that if the teaching
which has tried in vain for nineteen hundred years to transform the
course of the world could one day become a living reality in the souls
of men, swords would be turned into pruning hooks.
My conviction is just the opposite. It is that nothing will be different
in the mass except in so far as human nature itself is transformed, and
that this transformation will take place, not when the whole of humanity
becomes Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to the
consciousness of the "holiness of generation." This consciousness will
make the central work of society the new race, its origin, its
management, and its education; about these all morals, all laws, all
social arrangements will be grouped. This will form the point of view
from which all other questions will be judged, all other regulations
made. Up to now we have only heard in academic speeches and in
pedagogical essays that the training of youth is the highest function of
a nation. In reality, in the family, in the school, and in the state,
quite other standards are put in the foreground.
The new view of the "holiness of generation" will not be held by mankind
until it has seriously abandoned the Christian point of view and taken
the view, born thousands of years ago, whose victory has been first
foreshadowed in the century just completed.
The thought of development not only throws light on the course of the
world that lies behind us, continued through millions of years, with its
final and highest point in man; it throws light, too, on the way we have
to travel over; it shows us that we physically and psychically are ever
in the process of becoming. While earlier days regarded man as a fixed
phenomenon, in his physical and psychical relations, with qualities that
might be perfected but could not be transformed, it is now known that he
can re-create himself. Instead of a fallen man, we see an incompleted
man, out of whom, by infinite modifications in an infinite space of
time, a new being can come into existence. Almost every day brings new
information about hitherto unsuspected possibilities; tells us of power
extended physically or psychically. We hear of a closer reciprocal
action between the external and internal world; of the mastery over
disease, of the prolongation of life and youth; of increased insight
into the laws of physical and psychical origins. People even speak of
giving incurable blind men a new kind of capacity of sight, of being
able to call back to life the dead; all this and much else which it must
be allowed still belongs simply to the region of hypothesis, to what
psychical and physical investigators reckon among possibilities. But
there are enough great results analysed already to show that the
transformations made by man before he became a human being are far from
being the last word of his genesis. He who declares to-day that human
nature always remains the same, that is, remains just as it did in
those petty thousands of years in which our race became conscious of
itself, shows in making this statement that he stands on the same level
of reflection as an ichthyosaurus of the Jura period, that apparently
had not even an intimation of man as a possibility of the future.
But he who knows that man has become what he now is under constant
transformations, recognises the possibility of so influencing his future
development that a higher type of man will be produced. The human will
is found to be a decisive factor in the production of the higher types
in the world of animal and plant life. With what concerns our own race,
the improvement of the type of man, the ennobling of the human race, the
accidental still prevails in both exalted and lower forms. But
civilisation should make man conscious of an end and responsible in all
these spheres where up to the present he has acted only by impulse,
without responsibility. In no respect has culture remained more backward
than in those things which are decisive for the formation of a new and
higher race of mankind.
It will take the thorough influence of the scientific view of humanity
to restore the full naïve conviction, belonging to the ancient world,
of the significance of the body. In the later period of antiquity, in
Socrates and Plato, the soul began to look down upon the body. The
Renaissance tried to reconcile the two but the effort was unfortunately
not serious enough. Boldness it did not lack, but its effort was not
successful in carrying out a task which Goethe himself said must be
approached both with boldness and with serious purpose. Only now that we
know how soul and body together build up or undermine one another,
people are beginning to demand again a second higher innocence in
relation to the holiness and the rights of the body.
A Danish writer has shown how the Mosaic Seventh Commandment sinks back
into nothing, as soon as one sees that marriage is only an accidental
social form for the living together of two people, while the ethically
decisive factor is the way they live together. In morality there is
taking place a general displacement from objective laws of direction and
compulsion to the subjective basis from which actions proceed. Ethics
become an ethic of character, a matter dealing with the constitution of
the temperament. We demand, we forgive, or we judge according to the
inner constitution of the individual; we do not readily call an action
immoral which only in an external point of view does not harmonise with
the law or is opposed to the law. In each particular case we decide
according to the inner circumstances of the individual. Applying this
point of view to marriage, we find in the first place that this form
offers no guarantee that the proper disposition towards the relation of
the two sexes is present. This can exist as well outside of as within
marriage. Many noble and earnest human beings prefer for their relation
the freer form as the more moral one. But as the result of this, the
significance of the Seventh Commandment is altered, that states
explicitly that every relationship of sex outside of marriage is
immoral. People have commenced already to experiment with unions outside
of marriage. People are looking for new forms for the common life
between man and woman. The whole problem is being made the subject of
debate.
In this respect humanity occupies a field of discovery. People are
seeing more and more what a complicated subject the whole relation of
sex is, how full it is of dangers to the happiness of man. New
observations are being constantly made both in regard to the
significance of this relation for individuals and for posterity. To
bring light gradually into this chaos is supremely important for
humanity, and literature should therefore have the greatest possible
freedom in this sphere,--just the opposite to the tendencies of the
present day that would limit this freedom. While I fully agree with what
has been said I should like to state that the greatest obstacle to the
free discussion of this theme is still the Christian way of looking at
the origin and nature of man. His only possible escape from the results
of the fall is made to consist in his belief in Christ; for with this
point of view, there came into Western Europe, by means of Christianity,
the opinion that everything concerning the continuation of the race was
impure; to be suppressed if possible, and if this could not be done,
that it must at least be veiled in silence and obscurity. For
Christianity, eternal life, not life in the world, is ever the
significant factor. The dualism of existence it tries in the first place
to remove by asceticism, not by attempting to ennoble the life of human
impulses. This standpoint still continues to be popular in our days, as
is shown in its victories through legislation directed against the nude
in art and in literature.
The Christian way of looking at the relation of the sexes as something
ignoble, alone capable of being made holy by indissoluble marriage, has
had great direct influence on man's development during a certain period
of time. It has caused progress in self-mastery, which has elevated the
life of the soul. Modesty, domesticity, sincerity, have been promoted by
it; these along with innumerable other influences have developed the
impulse to love. If these emotions disappeared from love, it would not
be human, but only animal.
But allowing that the individual love between every new pair of human
beings always requires seclusion and reserve; allowing too that personal
modesty always remains an achievement wrought by mankind,
differentiating man from the animal world, it is still true that this
kind of spirituality, which passes over in silence and shame all the
serious questions connected with this subject, or treats them as
occasions for ambiguities calling forth joking and blushes, must be
rooted out.
Each one from earliest childhood should on every question asked about
this subject receive honest answers, suitable for the especial stage of
his development. One should be in this way completely enlightened about
one's own nature as man or woman, and so acquire a deep feeling of
responsibility in relation to one's future duty as man or woman. One
should be trained in habits of earnest thought and earnest speaking on
this subject. In this way alone can there come into existence a higher
type of sex with a higher type of morality.
But at the time when Bjoernsen in _Thomas Rendelen_ brought up the
question of training youth to purity through intelligence of nature's
laws, I objected to his book on the ground that like the purity sermons
of Christianity his efforts were rather directed to the mastery of
natural impulses than towards their ennoblement. I showed that Bjoernsen
certainly brought up two new points of view, that of bodily health, and
that of the ennobling of sex. He did not, as Christianity does, stress
the spiritual and personal side of the question. These new points of
view of his were significant, because they united the just egoism of the
individual with the combining altruism produced by the feeling of
solidarity. The great purpose of Bjoernsen's book was to transform
inherited characteristics as they are related to man's attitude towards
morality. So he proposed to create a sound and happy new generation, in
which the sufferings of present day sexual discord should be brought to
an end. For this purpose he wished the collaboration of the schools.
They were to communicate the knowledge of human beings as members of
sex, and to instruct their scholars how, as human beings, they should
protect themselves and their posterity.
I objected at that time to this plan, showing that the school was not
the place to lay the foundation for such knowledge. It should be slowly
and carefully communicated by the mother herself; the school should only
give a theoretical basis. More defective still, I found the question of
chastity handled essentially and solely as a question of bodily purity,
as a negative not a positive ideal. I maintain that only erotic idealism
could awaken enthusiasm for chastity. The basis for such idealism must
be found in stories, history, and belles-lettres. Information derived
from physiology is, in this respect, very inadequate, unless the
imagination and the feeling are moved in the same direction. Neither
imagination nor feeling can be helped by natural science and bodily
exercises alone, and just as little by Christian religious instruction.
No, we must on the basis of natural science attain, in a newer and
nobler form, the whole antique love for bodily strength and beauty, the
whole antique reverence for the divine character of the continuation of
the race, combined with the whole modern consciousness of the soulful
happiness of ideal love. Only so can the demand for real chastity save
mankind from the torments which sexual divisions and degradations now
bring with them. It is profoundly significant that in the world of the
past, divinity was associated with woman on the ground of observations
concerning the continuation of the race; while in Christianity, woman
became divine as the Virgin Mother. Through heathen and Christian
thought, reunited and ennobled, the woman will receive a new reference
for herself as a sexual being. Antique and modern love, the love of the
senses and the love of soul, will, united and ennobled, induce human
beings, men and women alike, to adore again Eros the All-powerful.
To diminish the significance of love, to oppose it as a lowering
sensualism, does not mean the elevation of mankind; it means, on the
other hand, working for its debasement. For as lowering as sexual life
would be if it were continued in man accompanied by a feeling of shame
as a characteristic of animal life, it would be just the same if it were
regarded as a degrading duty, reluctantly carried out for the
preservation of the species.
Antiquity stood higher than the present day, for example when Lycurgus'
laws asserted that a people's strength lies in the breast of blooming
womanhood. Accordingly in Sparta, the physical development of the woman
was watched over as well as of the man, and the age of marriage was
determined with reference to a healthy offspring. Higher, too, stood
Judaism in relation to the conception of the seriousness of bearing
children. This conviction expressed itself in the strictest hygienic
legislation known to history. Jewish, like other Oriental legislation,
depended, in relation to sexual morality as in relation to diet, on
sharp-sighted observations of natural law and disease. The foundation to
a new ethic in these questions cannot be laid, until men begin with Old
Testament shrewdness and Old Testament seriousness to handle the life
questions which the idealism of Christianity has indeed spiritualised
but at the same time debased.
This new ethic will call no other common living of man and woman
immoral, except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring, and
produces bad conditions for the development of their offspring. The Ten
Commandments on this subject will not be prescribed by the founders of
religion, but by scientists.
Up to the present day, partly as a result of a perverted modesty in such
things, science has only been able to offer incomplete observations on
the physical and psychical conditions for the improvement of the human
type in its actual genesis.
Ontogeny is really a new science in our century, introduced by Von
Leeuwenhock, de Graaf, and others. It was founded in 1827, by von Baer.
The differences of opinion and the discovery of different theories are
very far from being ended. Purely scientific points of view are being
combined with social, physiological, or ethical ones. It is maintained
that by changing the diet of the mother the sex of the child can be
determined. Attempts have been made to show that about three fifths of
all men of genius were first-born children.
People are studying what influence the age of parents has on the child;
extreme youth of parents seems unfavourable for the offspring as well
as extreme age. The first child of a too youthful mother is often weak,
and besides ordinarily the joys of motherhood are not desired, because
she feels that physically and psychically a child is too great a burden
to her, who herself is only a child. The conditions of a strong,
well-nourished offspring require the postponement of the marriage age
for women. In northern countries it should be established, if not by law
at least by custom, at about twenty years. This is all the more
necessary because then the young woman can have behind her some years of
careless youthful joy, an undisturbed self-development, and will also
have reached the physical development necessary for motherhood. While
twenty years should be regarded as the earliest period of marriage it
should actually be often postponed some years still for the well-being
of the woman, the man, and the children, and married life as a whole, in
which most conflicts arise because women have decided about their fate
before their personality was definitely formed, before their heart was
able to find its choice. The love of the man chooses and the young girl
often confuses the happiness of being loved with the happiness of
loving, an experience which later on is gone through in a tragic way. To
the many questions which are related to heredity and natural selection,
belongs one which notices the significance of nature's purpose to cause
strong opposites to exert upon one another the strongest attraction.
This attraction often during married life changes into antipathy; it
almost results in impatience against the characteristics which
originally had so deep an attraction. Nature in this case seems to wish
to reach its end with the greatest lack of consideration for the
happiness of the individual. So often the contradictions of parents seem
really to be moulded in full in the child. Occasionally these
contradictions are expressed as a deep discord, but in both cases there
often arises an exceptional being. To attain correct results in this
case, belongs to the numerous still open possibilities.
Differences of opinion are most apparent in the theory of heredity,
where there is a struggle between Darwin's view, that even acquired
characteristics are inherited, and Galton's and Weissmann's conviction
that this is not the case. In connection with this stands, also, the
question of the marriage of consanguineous relations; some regard these
marriages as dangerous, _per se_, for the posterity; others only as
dangerous from the point of view that the same family trait is often
found in both parents, and so becomes strongly impressed on the
children. For example, congenital shortsightedness of both parents
develops into blindness of the children, their stupidity becomes idiocy,
their melancholy, insanity.
The Occident has gradually abolished the Oriental marriage law to which
Moses gave validity, while other Oriental legislators, for example,
Manes and Mohammed, are still followed to a great extent. In China, too,
similar prohibitions have a binding power. Here and there the feeling of
the significance of heredity has vaguely appeared in some Occidental
writers. Sir Thomas More, like Plato, required a physical examination
before entering into marriage. It was not until the nineteenth century
that the question of the rights of the child in this respect began to be
noticed. It was Robert Owen who in one way awakened the general right
feeling in favour of children, by investigations begun in 1815. They
showed that children under eight years old were forced to work by blows
from leather whips, to work from fifteen to sixteen hours a day, with
the result that a fourth or fifth of them ended as cripples. Another
Englishman, Malthus, published in 1798 an essay on the _Principle of
Population_, and directed the attention of society to the conditions
which had caused him to write his work. He pointed to the deficiency of
food supply produced by over-population and the obstacles it offered to
legitimate marriages. Again, these conditions, he showed, resulted
partly in great mortality among children, partly in the murder of
children. Malthus saw the significance of selection and the danger of
degeneration. With perfect calmness of conscience he met the storm he
had evoked. Personally a blameless and tender hearted man, Malthus, as
all other reformers of moral ideas, had to allow the shameless
accusations of corruption and immorality to pass over his head. Harriet
Martineau, who advocated Malthus's views, had the same experience. When
she wrote her novels on this subject she knew very well to what she was
exposing herself; but this remarkable woman, who died unmarried and
childless, was at an early period of her life filled with a feeling for
the holiness of the child. When nineteen years old, at the time of the
birth of a small sister, she fell on her knees and devoutly thanked God
that she had been allowed to be the witness of the great wonder of the
development of the human being from the beginning. The same feeling
caused her in her novels to expound the duty of voluntary limitation of
population. She was pained by the thought of the fate endured by
children, when they were so numerous that their parents were unable to
maintain and educate them. This part of the subject of the right of the
child called forth in all countries books for and against it. Everywhere
the question is discussed. I shall briefly handle the differences of
opinion about other sides of the right of the child.
In Francis Galton's celebrated work, _Hereditary Genius_, almost all has
been said that is required to-day from the point of view of the
improvement of the race. Galton, as early as the seventies, opposed
Darwin's view that acquired characteristics were inherited. In this
respect he had a fellow-champion in the German Weissmann, who on his
side was opposed, among others, by the English Darwinian Romanes.
Galton invented from a Greek word a name for the science of the
amelioration of the race, Eugenics. He showed that civilised man, so
far as care for the amelioration of the race is concerned, stands on a
much lower plane than savages, not to speak of Sparta which did not
allow the weak, the too young, and the too old to marry, and where
national pride in a pure race, a strong offspring, was so great that
individuals were sacrificed to the attainment of this end. Galton, like
Darwin, Spencer, A. R. Wallace, and others, has brought out the fact
that the law of natural selection, which in the rest of nature has
secured the survival of the fittest, is not applicable to human society,
where economic motives lead to unsuitable marriages, made possible by
wealth. Poverty hinders suitable marriages. Besides the development of
sympathy has come into the field as a factor which disturbs natural
selection. The sympathy of love, chooses according to motives that
certainly tend to the happiness of the individual, but this does not
mean that they guarantee the improvement of the race. And while other
writers hope for a voluntary abstinence from marriage in those cases,
where an inferior offspring is to be expected, Galton, on the other
hand, is in favour of very strict rules, to hinder inferior specimens of
humanity from transmitting their vices or diseases, their intellectual
or physical weaknesses. Just because Galton does not believe in the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, selection has the greatest
significance for him.
On the other side, he advocates using all means to encourage such
marriages, where the family on both sides gives promise of distinguished
offspring. For him, as later for Nietzsche, the purpose of married life
is the production of strong, able personalities.
Galton makes it plain that civilised man, by his sympathy with weak,
inefficient individuals, has helped to continue their existence. This
tendency on its own side has lessened the possibility of the efficient
individuals to continue the species. Wallace, too, and several others,
have on different occasions declared that men in relation to this
question must have harder hearts, if the human race is not to become
inferior. The moral, social, and sympathetic factors, they say, which in
humanity work against the law of the survival of the fittest, and have
made it possible for the lower type, to continue and to multiply in
excess, must give way to new points of view where certain moral and
social questions are concerned. So the natural law will be supported by
altruism, instead of as now being opposed by this sentiment.
Spencer's thoughts contain a great truth. They have been quoted in just
this connection. He says: We see the germ of many things that later on
are developed in a way no one now suspects. Profound transformations are
worked in society and its members, transformations which we could not
have hoped for as immediate results, but which we could have looked for
in confidence as final consequences. The effort to find natural laws
which cause racial progress or deterioration is one of these germinal
ideas. As to scientific investigation in this field, we can apply
another maxim of the same thinker, one often overlooked by science. "The
passion to discover truth must be accompanied by the passion to use it
for the welfare of mankind." But science must really reach universally
accepted conclusions before we can expect humanity to begin seriously
its self-purification; but it is certain to come then. When we read in
ethnographical and sociological works what restrictions in marriage are
imposed by savage people on themselves, and religiously obeyed on the
ground of superstitious prejudice, we have a right to hope that
civilised men will one day bow before scientific proofs. This hope is
not too optimistic.
Wallace pleads not for such absolute regulations as Galton, in order to
prevent the marriages of the less worthy and to encourage the marriages
of the superior types of humanity. He perceives that the problem is
tremendously complicated. One thing is, that the personal attraction of
love is extremely essential from the point of view of the improvement of
the race. If human beings could be bred like prize cattle, it is not
likely that a superior type of humanity would be produced. In the Middle
Ages, the human race deteriorated, Galton said, because the best fled to
the monasteries and the worst reproduced themselves. But if Galton's
strict requirements had to be carried out in every case before a
marriage could be allowed, not only would marriage lose its deepest
meaning, but the race also would lose its noblest inheritance.
But even with a strict limitation of Galton's principles and with a wise
limitation of his requirements, science has already shown the truth of
so many of the first, that the significance of the last, taken as a
whole, must be granted. We know that in the inherited tendencies of
children, often another form is taken from that which appears in their
parents. Of three hundred idiots, one hundred and forty-five had
alcoholic parents. Epilepsy, too, is often produced by the same cause.
It is known that apparently sound individuals are often attacked at the
same age by a disease to which their parents were subject. On the other
hand, there are fortunately proofs that individuals endowed with power
of will can resist certain dangerous inherited weaknesses. In the
discussion on this subject, it should also be justly brought out, that
it is possible for the unsound tendency of one parent to be neutralised
in the case of children, by the soundness of the other. But this result,
as well as the many other questions involved, as I have shown above, are
far from being established.
The question as to the inheritance of mental diseases has been
especially examined by Maudsley. In this case, too, nervous and psychic
diseases of the parents often change their character in the children. He
requires medical testimony before marriage, and asks that the appearance
of mental diseases after marriage shall form a legitimate ground for
divorce. And he hopes that a pure descent, in a new sense of the word,
will be as important for the marriages of the future, as for
aristocratic marriages in early times. One of Maudsley's statements is
so interesting that it should be mentioned here. Fathers, he says, who
have directed their whole energy towards attainment of wealth, have
degenerate children; for this sort of nerve strain undermines the system
as infallibly as alcohol or opium. If this statement be true, we would
add another point of view to the many already existent, that show how
hostile to life is our best social order, which aims at power and gain.
It proves how necessary is that transformation of existence which will
make work and production serve a new end. Each man should claim to live
wholly, broadly, and in a way worthy of humanity. He should be able to
leave behind him a posterity provided with all capacities for a similar
life. When this day dawns people will regard, as a terrible atavism,
that expression on the face of a child, which an artist of the present
day has preserved in a picture of a boy represented as a future
millionaire.
I will mention now from literary sources, some of Nietzsche's work on
this subject. Although this author did not base his ideas of the
"superman" directly on Darwin's theories, yet they are, as Brandes has
lately shown, the great consequences of Darwinism, that Darwin himself
did not see. In no contemporary was there a stronger conviction than in
Nietzsche that man as he now is, is only a bridge, only a transition
between the animal and the "superman." In connection with this,
Nietzsche looked upon the obligations of man for the amelioration of the
race as seriously as Galton, but he expressed his principles with the
power of poetic and prophetic expression, not with scientific proof.
Literature on this subject is increasing every day; different opinions
press one another hard. As long as this is the case, there is every
reason to observe the warning of the German sociologist Kurella, who
says that we must reckon with social as well as with anthropological
factors if we wish to prevent the degeneration of the human species. A
vital point in his position is, that it is a matter of indifference
whether the Darwinian theory of the transmission of acquired
characteristics, or its contrary is victorious. The former is the theory
of an unchangeable germ plasm transmitted by the parents to the
children; so that better types can only originate through a new
combination of the characteristics of father and mother, and also by
natural selection in the struggle for existence. We must be careful
before beginning to act in a social and political way on the basis of
anthropological motives. He finally lays down with perfect justice, that
the material to be gathered from the works of Spencer, Galton, Lombroso,
Ferri, Ribot, Latourneau, Havelock Ellis, J. B. Haycraft, Colajanni,
Sergi, Ritchie, and others, must be systematically worked over. The
sociologist must be zoölogist, anthropologist, and psychologist before
his plans for civilising man, and for elevating the human race could be
carried out.
As to intellectual characteristics it has been maintained that
exceptionally gifted men have mostly inherited their characteristics
from the mother. This fact has in our day, so very much increased the
interest taken in the mothers of famous men. This truth is supposed to
hold good for a son, but if the daughter is gifted, her talent is held
to come from the father. Another and certainly a better founded
phenomenon seems to be this: That when in a family characteristics find
their culmination in a world genius, this genius either remains
childless or his children are not only ordinary, but often
insignificant. It may be that nature has exhausted her power of
production in these great personalities, or as is often assumed, the
creative power of genius in an intellectual direction, diminishes the
creative power in the physical direction.
Along with the question of heredity stands that of the development of
races. In the beginning of the _Origin of Species_ Darwin showed how
essential pure descent is for the production of a noble race. This
theory is appealed to by a modern anti-Semitic writer, who represents
the Jew as a typical example of pure race, an idea which one of the most
conspicuous representatives of Judaism, Disraeli, has also expressed in
the following words: "Race is everything; there is no other truth, and
every race which carelessly allows mixed blood, perishes." Yet other
specialists consider some racial mixture as highly advantageous to the
offspring.
Professor Westermark has offered a good reason for the significance
attached to beauty in the case of love, and therefore its importance for
the race. He has shown how man has conceived physical beauty to be the
full development of all of those characteristics which distinguish the
human organism from the animal, and which mark sex distinctions, and,
most of all, race distinctions. He thinks individuals with these
characteristics are best suited for their life work. Accordingly it is
the result of natural selection that exactly those individuals are found
most beautiful and are most desired, who first as human beings best
fulfil the general demands of the human organism, as sexual beings
fulfil those of their sex, and as members of the race are best suited to
the conditions which surround them. In the struggle for existence, those
are overcome, who are descended from human beings, whose instincts of
love are directed to individuals badly adapted to that struggle; while
those who are victorious are children happily so adapted. In this way,
taste has developed by which, what is best adapted to environment
appears as the highest beauty. This is equivalent to health, the power
to resist the attacks of the external world. While every considerable
deviation from the pure type in sex and race, has a lesser degree of
adaptability; that is of health, and also of beauty.
Another writer has used the foot as an example of this principle. The
small, high-arched foot with the fine ankle is always, he says,
regarded as the most beautiful. But such a foot is only combined with a
fine, strong, and elastic bony structure. Such a foot besides has, by
its great elasticity, a considerably higher power of bearing weight than
the flat foot. The high-vaulted foot, in walking and jumping, increases
the activity of the lungs and the heart. This again makes the walk
elastic, strong, and easy, agile and stately. These traits, for the same
reason as the beauty of the foot itself, are looked upon as a racial
sign. This physical power and ease influence the mind, and produce
self-confidence, and so increase the feeling of superiority and the joy
of living, marks of distinction in human beings.
Whether the illustration in this special case holds good or not, it
proves nothing against the truth of the theory on which it rests, and
which is gradually becoming prevalent; the view I mean, according to
which souls and bodies are mutually developed through adaptability to
their surroundings.
So it is necessary not only to investigate what conditions give the best
selection, but also what external ones strengthen or weaken the
characteristics found in natural selection. We must again see the
importance of bodily exercise. Painful experiences have taught us to
prevent the consequences of overstrain, over-exertion in competitive
imbecility, and mania for sport. Such results have specially shown
themselves to be harmful for women in respect to motherhood. Sport and
play, gymnastics and pedestrianism, life in nature and in the open air,
a regenerated system of dancing, after the model of the Swedish peasant
dances, will be most excellent bases for the physical and psychical
renewal of the new generation.
In plans concerning this renewal, people have pointed to the influence
of art; it has been shown how Burne-Jones created the new English type
of woman. It was formed by an adaption to the quiet, distinguished
style, by a process that went slowly on. This was the type regarded by
him as the model one. It is maintained that we only need to see a pair
of young English girls in front of one of his pictures, in order to
notice how not only the faces but the expressions show a resemblance.
The artist has impressed his trait on youth before it was conscious of
it. Before these forms they grew up, they have seen them in their
picture books, they have been dressed in clothes cut in the fashion of
the master's pictures. There is another reason. Mothers of the present
day are supposed to have passed on to their children the Burne-Jones
type in the same way in which the charm of the Greeks was influenced by
the beauty of their statuary. In antiquity it was believed, even in
other details, (for example, in attaining the much-longed-for blonde
hair) that this end could be secured by observing the proper directions.
As to the significance of external influences of this kind on mothers,
there is too little material still to build up conclusions. On this
point, learned men also disagree. I have only, therefore, incidentally
mentioned this factor among others. All should be established before we
can get a final and certain insight into the conditions of human birth.
In the absence of scientific knowledge I can only refer to the
literature and comprehensive investigations commenced in the preceding
century, that throw light on the riddle of man's coming into the world.
Many of these matters are still involved in obscurity. But man's spirit
is resting on the waters; gradually a new creation will be called forth
from them.
In connection with this, must be discussed the development of new ideas
of law in these spheres. Heathen society in its hardness, exposed weak
or crippled children. Christian society on the other hand, has gone so
far in its mildness, that it prolongs the life of the child who is
incurably ill, physically and psychically, even if he is misshapen and
so becomes an hourly torment to himself and his surroundings. Yet
respect for life is still not strong enough in a social order, which
keeps up among other things, the death penalty and war, that one can
without danger suggest the extinction of such a life. Only when death is
inflicted through compassion, will the humanity of the future show
itself in such a way, that the doctor under control and responsibility
can painlessly extinguish such suffering. On the other hand, this
Christian society still maintains the distinction between legitimate
children and the children of sin, a distinction which more than anything
else has helped to obstruct a real ethical conception of the duties of
parents. Every child has the same rights in respect to both father and
mother. Both parents have just the same obligation to every child. Until
this is recognised there will be no basis for the future morality of
the common life between man and woman. Some day society will look upon
the arrangements of the love relation as the private affair of
responsible individuals. Those who are lovers, those who are married
will regard themselves as completely free, and will also be so regarded.
Binding promises in respect of emotions, demands of exclusive possession
over personality, have already come to be regarded by fine feeling and
fully developed human beings as a relic of erotic sentiments on a lower
plane. These sentiments were the outcome of desire for mastery, vanity,
cruelty, and blind passion. People are beginning to see that perfect
fidelity is only to be obtained by perfect freedom; that complete
exchange of individuality can only take place in perfect freedom; that
complete excellence can only come into being in perfect freedom. Each
must cease to try to force and bend the emotions, opinions, habits, and
inclinations of the other towards him- or herself. Each must regard the
continuance of the feeling of the other as a happiness, not as a right.
Each must regard the possible cessation of this feeling as a pain, not
as an injustice. Only in this way can there arise between the two souls
such pure, full, freedom that both can move with absolute independence,
and complete unity.
Freedom is no danger to fidelity. The kind of fidelity required by the
church and by the law has certainly been a notable means of education.
But the method, as it is, is opposed to the end. For it has produced the
feeling of possession. This has led to loss of respect in the worship of
love. The requirements based on force have awakened hostility in soul
and sense; the fear of public opinion has produced all sorts of
dishonesty between man and wife, between them and the world. When the
bonds of compulsion fall away feeling will be strengthened. For when the
external supports of fidelity are wanting, the power required for it
will come from the inner life. Although human beings will be exposed
always to the possibility of serious mistakes about themselves and the
object of their love; although time can always change human beings and
their emotions; although, even in a marriage which has resulted from
mutual love, conditions can arise which make Nietzsche's ideal
legitimate, that it is better to break up the marriage than to be broken
up by it; yet on the whole freedom will encourage fidelity, which itself
will always have a support through the experience of its psychological
and ethical value.
It is not through a series of lightly entered into and lightly dissolved
connections that one is prepared for the happiness of great love.
Voluntary fidelity is a sign of nobility, because it assumes the will to
concentrate about the centre of life's meaning; because it signifies the
unity with our own proper innermost ego. This is as true of fidelity in
love as of all other kinds of fidelity. Only when love is the practical
religion of the work-day, and the devotion of the holiday, when it is
kept under the constant supervision of the soul, when it brings with it
a constant growth, (why should not the fine old word "sanctification" be
used) of personality, is love great. Then it comes into possession of a
higher right than some earlier union, because it then means really
fidelity and nothing else towards our own highest ego. But where it does
not have this character, it does not possess this right. It is then a
petty emotion even when it is made pardonable by great passion. The
children which issue from temporary unions are often as imperfect as
their origin. Great love is, as a young doctor once said, only that
which grips so deeply, that after its loss one no longer feels as a
whole, but as a half of a whole. Yet nature has protected itself against
annihilation by giving the possibility of love more than once. But what
nature's ideal is cannot be doubted. The race which would come into
existence, provided young men and women were given the possibility of
uniting when the first love took possession of them,--that love which is
the deepest,--this race would be sound and strong, different from what
our own race is now. But when young people love now they seldom have the
means for union, and when they have the means, then that which leads
them to the marriage union is not the deepest feeling they have ever
felt, but only an impulse, which, even if real, is still only a
substitute.
Such a transformation of the conditions of society and of the individual
view of the true worth of life will enable young men and women, between
the ages of twenty and thirty, to found their own home and under simple
conditions, to secure their happiness. Here would be one of the most
essential foundations for the origin of a new race, which would have the
ancient feeling for the hearth as an altar, and would have the life of
love as the service of a divinity. Only through such a transformation
might it be expected that the deepest misery of society, prostitution,
could be restrained. Only after such a transformation could we with full
right require from our youth that self-mastery which is the best
pre-condition of the sound development of the new generation.
As things are at present, it is certain that just as there are really
immoral, unmarried mothers, so there are others deeply moral, who would
be mothers with a great pure love to the father of their child, but who
for various reasons should not be united with them in legal marriage.
And even if the contraction of marriage were simplified, such motherhood
on the part of single women, should continue to exist.
Bjoernsen, when he gave lectures in Norway on sexual morality,
maintained the view that the woman who wished for motherhood, but who
was not adapted in her opinion for marriage, should be fully entitled to
the first, without the last being regarded as necessary, on condition
that she was willing to fulfil to the child her maternal duties. This
idea certainly has a future. In Germany there was a well-known case in
which a fully mature woman, not a mere girl, saw shortly after her
marriage that the temperaments and conditions of both parties to the
marriage would make it an unhappiness for both. She separated,
therefore, brought her child into the world unmarried, educated it
publicly and with self-sacrifice. Now she has along with the peace which
comes from work and the happiness of motherhood, the possibility of
fulfilling her duty also as daughter, while married life would have
destroyed this for all parties. This is one of the many cases out of the
great collection of life, that shows how foolish is that requirement of
society to press human nature, in its manifold types, into one mould,
with a sphere of duty arranged in the same way for all.
But the sphere of duty, an ever-widening one, is the sphere which
embraces the right of the child. Yet its lines will be drawn in the
future bounded in quite a different way from now. It will then be looked
upon as the supreme right of the child that he shall not be born in a
discordant marriage. Above everything, therefore, marriage must be free.
This means that the two parties can freely separate after mutual
agreement. In entering into marriage and in dissolving it, only certain
duties towards the children are to be assumed. Such legal provisions
might well be superfluous even in this case; in others, they might be
important. But in none are they to become an obstacle to the development
of this relation to the children. On the other hand, the compulsory
marriage laws of to-day, as well in relation to divorce as to the
guardianship given the man, have become obstacles to the higher
development of the common life of man and woman.
The vigorous drawing together of the bonds of marriage will not protect
children from growing up in a destroyed home. This protection will be
secured by deeper earnestness in entering upon marriage, but above all
by a deeper sense of responsibility to the children themselves. This
will make it possible for the parents who see themselves deceived in
their married happiness to keep a peaceful resignation, a high
character, as they continue to live together, if they feel that this is
the best solution of the conflict, for the children who are already
born. But this resolution does not mean the continuance of real married
life, but parenthood alone. Only so can it be really useful to the
children that the marriage should not be dissolved. The parents, who are
profoundly and finally alienated must not bestow life on any new being.
Marriages lightly entered into are many; lightly entered into divorces
are few, at least where there are children. It is not the prescriptions
of the law, but those of blood which work as a restraining influence
here even at the present day. The decisive sentence is not spoken by
society but by the children. But these deep motives are just as decisive
in the case of a free union as in the case of a legal one; if the father
or the mother is only kept with the children by compulsion, the children
have not much to lose. The important thing for unwritten duties, duties
which largely can not be determined by law, is to awaken the conscience
of fathers and mothers in order to create a better morality. Perhaps for
this, new legislation is necessary for the present. Certainly antiquated
legal conceptions should be done away with; they have done good duty as
a past training for morality. Now they stand in the way of the higher
morality. The man or the woman who plays the rôle of seduction, spoiling
the life of a young woman or a young man, or disturbing the peace of a
happy marriage, this type of character, is being treated with
ever-increasing contempt. The more one learns to distinguish the
heartless play of masculine or feminine desire for conquest, the
selfish soulless claims of the senses, from those of love, the more does
the conception of morality become equivalent to the feeling of
responsibility towards the new generation.
The gratification of natural impulses, which act contrary to the real
profound intention of nature, is what destroys individuals and peoples.
But as has been said, these devastations cannot be successfully
restrained by the extermination of man's material nature.
It is a favourable symptom when a poet opposes the mastery of material
nature, apart from the feeling of responsibility. But it is harmful when
this sensuousness is made, as Tolstoi does, equivalent to the conception
of love. Love must not be debased to simple sensuousness, nor must it be
etherealised to a simple spiritual quality, if the human race is to be
freed from the debasing mastery of impulse. This happens, as I have
often shown before, and in an earlier part of this work as well, by the
elevation of sensuousness to love. I mean by this that the spiritual
unity of beings, the indulgence of tenderness, the sympathy of souls,
the community of work, and the happiness of comradeship, will be as
really decisive factors in the lofty emotions of love, and in the charm
of love, as the attraction of the senses. This wealth in the elements of
mutual dependence is what keeps fidelity in love both inwardly and
outwardly. This soft current of the soul's depths keeps the sensuous
charm fresh; while mere relation, both legal marriage and free union,
very soon exhausts happiness and leaves behind ennui, if love has
contained only sensuous attraction, and not that mutual feeling of
dependence, which involves the union of the soul and the sense, and
which unites the spirit and the sympathies.
The duty and responsibility towards the children will be all the more
strict as society learns to regard it as one of its principal duties to
hinder all thoughtless and undeserved suffering.
The morality of the future will not be found in sacrificing to the
holiness of the family so-called illegitimate children, who are often by
nature richly endowed, but who by the prevailing legal system receive
such treatment, that they often become what they are called, and so are
filled with vengeance against society and the perverse conceptions of
law whose victims they are. Child murder, phosphorous poisonings,
"angel-making"--all these are connected with these perverse legal ideas.
But all of these results are still less pernicious than those which
society draws upon itself through those "disgraced" children, who go to
ruin not physically but psychically. In them, there are not only
frequently good powers lost, but socially destructive powers developed.
When the whole of Europe shuddered over the murder of the Empress
Elizabeth, one fact above every other seemed to me terrible. The
murderer confessed, "I know nothing of my parents."
The time will come in which the child will be looked upon as holy, even
when the parents themselves have approached the mystery of life with
profane feelings; a time in which all motherhood will be looked upon as
holy, if it is caused by a deep emotion of love, and if it has called
forth deep feelings of duty.
Then the child, who has received its life from sound, loving human
beings and has been afterwards brought up wisely and lovingly, will be
called legitimate, even if its parents have been united in complete
freedom. Then will the child, who has been born in a loveless marriage,
and has been burdened by the fault of its parents with bodily or mental
disease, be regarded as illegitimate, even if its parents have been
united in marriage by the Pope at St. Peter's. The shadow of contempt
will not fall on the unmarried tender mother of a radiantly healthy
child, but on the legitimate or illegitimate mother of a being made
degenerate by the misdeeds of its forefathers.
In a much discussed drama called _The Lion's Whelp_, there occurs the
following dialogue between an older and younger man:
THE OLDER MAN: The next century will be the century of the child,
just as this century has been the woman's century. When the child
gets his rights, morality will be perfected. Then every man will
know that he is bound to the life which he has produced with other
bonds, than those imposed by society and the laws. You understand
that a man cannot be released from his duty as father even if he
travels around the world; a kingdom can be given and taken away,
but not fatherhood.
THE YOUTH: I know this.
THE OLDER MAN: But in this all righteousness is still not
fulfilled--in man's carefully preserving the life which he has
called into existence. No man can early enough think over the other
question, whether and when he has the right to call life into
existence.
This dialogue has supplied me with a title for this book. It is the
point of departure of my assertion, that the first right of the child
is to select its own parents.
What here must be first considered is the thought constantly being
brought out by Darwinian writers, that the natural sciences, in which
must now be numbered psychology, should be the basis of juristic science
as well as of pedagogy. Man must come to learn the laws of natural
selection and act in the spirit of these laws. Man must arrange the
punishments of society in the service of development; they must be
protective measures for natural selection. In the first place this must
be secured by hindering the criminal type from perpetuating itself. The
characteristics of this type can only be determined by specialists. But
the criminal must be prevented from handing on his characteristics to
his posterity.
So the human race will be gradually freed from atavisms which reproduce
lower and preceding stages of development. This is the first condition
of that evolution by which mankind will be able to let the ape and tiger
die. Then comes the requirement that those with inherited physical or
psychical diseases shall not transmit them to an offspring.
As to this type of heredity opinions are still very much divided. Great
authorities are in conflict with one another on the question of
tuberculosis. Some contend that it is hereditary, others declare that it
is only transmitted by infection. Accordingly when a child is born of a
tuberculous mother, and is taken away from her, there is no danger for
the child. Views are also divided on the subject of cancer. Regarding
other diseases, however, there is complete certainty. Legislation has
already interfered in the case of epilepsy, although the law in practice
is not always applied. But in the case of syphilis, alcoholism, and many
kinds of nervous complaints, diseases which afflict children most
certainly, in various ways, legislation has yet done nothing.
There is an old axiom that we are obliged to thank our parents for life.
Our parents, I know from my own experience, can themselves have been the
heirs of bodily and mental health, resulting from the fact that maternal
and paternal ancestors all made early, right, and happy marriages. But
generally, parents must on their part, ask the children's pardon for the
children's existence.
It makes no difference, whether we talk with people sunken in necessity
or crime, or with those suffering from nervous and other diseases, or
finally with people who are spiritually maimed. In most cases we are
convinced that the main cause of their condition as indicated by them,
goes back to their birth, or to the time of their childish
consciousness. Sometimes their parents have been too young or too old,
their fathers or mothers invalids. Sometimes they are the offspring of
intemperance. Again their mother may have been overburdened by the
torment of work, or by a large family of children; or they may have
received their life in marriages concluded without love, or after the
cessation of love. They have been unwelcome, or born under feelings of
revulsion, bearing in their blood the germ of discord or disgust of
life. Numerous abnormal tendencies, among them misanthropy in women, can
be traced back to these causes. Finally they have been brought up in a
home where they have suffered from the burden of bad examples, or
conflicting influences.
So strong has the conviction of the meaning of heredity become that
young men, who have themselves borne a burden, imposed by generations of
one character or another, have begun to see that it is their duty
rather to abstain from marriage than to transmit their unfortunate
inheritence to a new generation. I knew a woman in whose family on her
father's and mother's side, mental disease was inherited. Therefore,
though healthy herself, she refused to marry the man she loved. I know
of another who broke her engagement, because she was convinced that the
man whom she loved was a drinker, and she did not want to give her
children such a father. It is especially on this point that women sin in
marrying from ignorance, because they do not know that epilepsy and
other diseases, especially alcoholism, are often caused because the
child has had a drunkard for a father. A young woman could have no more
certain test for the continuance of her feelings for a man, than whether
she feels exalted joy or tormenting distress, at the thought of seeing
his characteristics transmitted to their child.
Men sin against the coming race not only by excessive drinking, but in
other respects where the results are still more destructive.
Besides the conscience of men must begin to awaken. This will express
itself partly in the requirement to abstain from marriage when they know
that they have to transmit a bad inheritance, partly in other spheres
of morality as in the following examples:
A young man, himself a physician, thought he was healthy when he
married. He discovered his mistake and found himself confronting the
choice of wronging his wife or separating from her. As they were deeply
in love, the only possible way was separation. He chose death which he
inflicted on himself in such a way that his wife thought it was caused
by accident.
Another man acted in the same way after he had been married several
years and had three children; he found out that he was his wife's
half-brother.
But these incidents as the one before mentioned, where women are
concerned, are notoriously only isolated examples. It will require the
development of several generations before it will be the woman's
instinct, an irresistibly mastering instinct, to allow no physically or
psychically degenerated or perverted man to become the father of her
children. The instinct of the man is far stronger in this direction, but
it is dulled too by an antiquated legal conception, according to which
the woman must subject herself as a duty to requirements against which
her whole being revolts. In this respect a woman has only one duty, an
unmistakable one, against which every transgression is a sin, namely
that the new being to which she gives life, must be born in love and
purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete
common will, in a complete common happiness. Until women see this as a
duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by beings, who in a moment
of their existence have been robbed of the best pre-conditions of their
life's happiness and their life's efficiency. Occasionally they show
plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or of discord.
Occasionally they seem for a long time to be healthy and powerful
specimens of humanity, until in some critical moment they go to pieces
through an insufficient supply of physical and psychical vitality caused
by their very origin.
As to marriages between healthy and active individuals, legislation can
do nothing. Ethics alone can exert an influence for betterment. Children
must be taught from their earliest years about their existence and their
future duties as men and women. So mothers and fathers together can
impress on the conscience of the children not any abstract conception
of purity, but the concrete commandment of chastity in letters of fire.
So they will keep their health, their attractiveness, their
guilelessness, for the being they are to love; for the children who from
this love will receive their life.
The impulse to preserve the species, it is true, makes human beings low,
small, or laughable; as poets like Maupassant, Tolstoi, and others have
depicted from quite different points of view; but it only does so when
the impulse appears without relation to the end given it in nature, or
when this end is attained without consideration for the production of an
offspring qualified to live. The kind of love which disturbs life is
that which diminishes the value of an individual as a creator of life.
This type of love really degrades human beings, is immoral from the
standpoint of the modern view, which wills life to be, but above all,
wills the progress of life to ever higher forms.
Young people must therefore learn to reverence their future duties.
These they altogether miss, if they squander their spiritual and bodily
obligations, in unions formed and dissolved thoughtlessly, without any
intention of fidelity, without the worth of responsibility. But they
must also know that it is a still greater transgression of their duty if
the life of a child is called forth with cold hearts and cold temper,
whether this happens in a marriage based on worldly motives or one
maintained on moral grounds in which the previously existing discord is
transmitted to a new being.
Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive, by the consciousness of
numerous breaches of faith, towards their youthful dreams, their ideal
convictions, are often precisely those, who in their children, struggle
against the pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong feelings, its
higher aims. They often teach that love as a rule ends after marriage,
that marriages can be made without love. This is a process of thought
resembling the conclusion that a vessel can quite well go into the sea
with some defect, since it is possible in any event that it will be
damaged. They speak of the impurity of the senses, of the advantages of
a marriage based on friendship and reason, of the calming power of duty.
All of these are chilly processes of reason by which souls, filled with
the warmth of life, are killed. Daughters must be helped by their
mothers, wisely and delicately, in order to be protected from hasty
acts, in order to distinguish with open eyes, when their feelings
themselves are uncertain. It must be branded upon their souls and their
nerves that they will be fallen beings if they give themselves from
other reasons than from reciprocated love. Under these convictions
alone, will there be a great transformation of present ethical
standards. Men think that they can do with marriage what they will; that
they can enter upon it with any kind of motive; they think that they
must marry from feelings of duty, to fulfil some given engagement, or to
atone for some fault; that they have the right to enter upon a marriage
without love because they long for home life. While these things are
regarded as legitimate, men stand on the same ethical level as the
person who commits murder because he has first stolen, or has stolen
because he was hungry. The great crime against the holiness of
generation is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the most
sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where innumerable secret influences
order the destiny of a new generation.
While children continue to be born in the cold atmosphere of duty, or in
the stormy atmosphere of discord, while people continue to regard such
marriages as moral, while people can transmit to their children all
kinds of intellectual mutilation and bodily unsoundness, and their
parents continue to be called honorable, so long will the world be
without the slightest conception of that morality which will mould the
new mankind.
This morality has still more exalted precepts. To-day it seldom happens
that a young girl enters marriage in ignorance, but in my generation I
know cases where the ignorance of the bride resulted in insanity. In
another case this ignorance led to thoughts of suicide; in a third, the
child was regarded with coldness by its mother; in the fourth, the child
had abnormal psychic qualities. Still it is not sufficient for the ideal
beauty of marriage and the harmony of the child that the woman knows in
general what is before her. A young man said once to me that most
marriages are spoilt at the very beginning, because the man brings with
him the point of view and the habits of those degraded women, from whom
he has received his initiation into love; frequently he annihilates
forever the tenderest element in his relation to his wife. He damages
the most beautiful factor in their mutual feelings. Man must learn to
have reverence and patience, and I know men who have shown these
characteristics really because they saw that their wives gave, as is not
unfrequently the case, their souls and their hearts before their senses
were awakened. Only the constant close association taught them to desire
a completed marriage. A child should receive life only through this
common impulse. Many children are born, as it is, in legalised
prostitution, in legalised rape. Yet there is wanting in the consciences
of many women and men, the slightest shadow of religious reverence, of
æsthetic feeling before the greatest mystery of existence. And yet we
continue in the name of morality to veil for youth the nakedness of
nature and we neglect to inspire their feeling of devotion towards their
own being as the shrine in which the mystery of life must some day be
fulfilled.
In this mystery there are still hidden fields only penetrated by the
intuition. Here and there a profound poet has surmised the innumerable
affinities or repulsions which under changing spiritual and material
dispositions with altering opinions, condition the life of love in
modern human beings, the mystic influences which sometimes forever,
sometimes partially, can change the deepest feeling. All these mystic
influences, the tender woof of all these fine threads, will then be a
part of the living fabric of the child. These secret processes explain
the great differences between children of the same parents,--children
who externally are born and brought up in quite similar conditions.
In all these promptings of instinct, in all these categorical
imperatives of the nerves and the blood, human beings must be at the
same time obedient listeners and strict masters. On this depends the
future happiness of love, and with it a happier future race.
The people of to-day live under inherited morals and newly acquired
transgressions of morality. Both must be conquered before soul and sense
in love can become inseparable, or in other words, before this unity is
recognised as the only possible moral basis of the relation between man
and woman.
Talented men, as well as one-sided advocates of women's rights, think
that the development will take quite a different course, after the low
impulse which is at the basis of love has been laid bare and
scientifically analysed. They say that the superior person will satisfy
the impulse shamelessly and animally, without any emotional decoration;
or he will isolate himself from its influence and devote to more noble
purposes that vital power, that emotional capacity, which is now
consumed by love.
Nothing impossible is to be found in this point of view. I have shown
more than once that woman by her maternal functions, uses up so much
physical and psychical energy, that in the sphere of intellectual
production she must remain of less significance. What I at an earlier
period assumed intuitively, has been substantiated since then by a
specialist. A Finnish doctor has shown how the vital power of lower
organisms, is concentrated in sexual production. But the higher man
goes, so much more power is made free. This power which is not consumed
in the production of new generations, can serve intellectual production.
Each of the two different productive expressions of human vital action
must to a certain extent limit the development of the power of the
other, and restrict its capacity of work. The same writer contends that
this is the natural cause of the more limited fertility of civilised
man, and will be, according to the pessimists named above, the decisive
factor in the prophesied downfall of love.
According to my conception of the word, it is love on the contrary,
which will win the victory by the relative weakening of impulse, and by
scientific analysis of the same. Men will no longer mistake impulse for
love. Of course this impulse is always present in love, but in the same
way in which the sculpture of the cave man is present in the work of
Michael Angelo. Man will then, with all the powers of his being, be able
to love, when love, according to the happy expression of Thoreau, is not
a glow, but a light. Then he will see for the first time, what wealth
life can have through love, when love becomes a happiness worthy of man
because it becomes an æsthetic creation, a religious worship; when the
completed unity of those who love is expressed in a new being,--a being
that will some day be really grateful for the life it has received.
Where the amelioration of the human race is concerned, the
transformation of customs and feelings is always the essential thing.
Influence of legislation in comparison with it is ever slight. But as
has been said before, legislation has its role to play. Especially
where there are diseases which can certainly be transmitted, society
must interfere to restrict marriage. In Germany and America a good
proposal has been made, for the period of transition in this direction.
It is suggested that the law shall require as an obligatory condition
for marriage, a certificate of a medical witness with complete data as
to the health of both parties. Those who contract marriage will continue
to have their freedom of choice but at least they would not enter
ignorantly upon marriage as they do now, and expose themselves and their
children to disastrous consequences. It appears to me to be at least as
important for society to have a medical certificate as to capacity for
marriage, as it is for military service. In the one case, we deal with
giving life, in the other with taking it away. And although the latter
has certainly been, up till now, regarded as a more serious occasion
than the former, still an awakening social conscience should demand
progress in this direction. It is conceivable that from this beginning
new customs will develop; further legislation may be dispensed with;
human beings will agree to sacrifice the most dangerous of all
liberties, giving life to a defective offspring, while prohibition of
marriage now would not hinder parenthood. For the great mass might
continue, outside of marriage, to rob children of the possibilities of
health and happiness, by burdening them with inherited diseases or bad
tendencies.
Nietzsche, who knew little of love because he knew nothing of woman, and
who therefore on this subject says little worthy of attention, has still
spoken more profoundly on the subject of parenthood than any
contemporary writer. He saw what impurity, what poverty are concealed
under the name of marriage. He saw how meretricious, how ignorant
education is. In his writings are to be found prophetical and poetical
words describing the end aimed at in parenthood, and showing what true
parenthood should be.
I will that thy victory and thy emancipation shall yearn for a
child. Living memorials shalt thou build for thy victory, and for
thy emancipation.
Thou must build upward to a height beyond thyself. But first I
would have thee thyself built with a square foundation, body and
soul.
See that through thee the race progresses, not continues only.
Let a true marriage help thee to this end.
A more exalted being must thou create, a being gifted with
initiative like a wheel that turns itself. A creative principle
shouldst thou create.
Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the
one,--the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence
for one another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for
those whose wills are united in this one act of will.