THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY
=The laws of multiplication.=--Implicit or explicit approval of a
falling birth-rate involves opposition to the opinion of the man in
the street, the general opinion of the medical profession,[23] the
bench of bishops and the social prophet and publicist in general.
Nevertheless a fall in the birth-rate is a factor in organic progress,
and, in general, the level of any species is in inverse proportion to
its birth-rate, from bacteria to the most civilised classes of men in
the most civilised countries of to-day. But in truth the uninformed
opinion, totally contrary to the whole history of life and to the most
obvious comparative facts of the birth-rate amongst and within present
day human societies, was utterly disposed of forty years ago in the
closing chapter of the greatest contribution yet made to philosophic
biology--Herbert Spencer's _Principles of Biology_. The last chapter
of that masterpiece is entitled “The Laws of Multiplication.”
Unfortunately it has not been read by one in ten thousand of those who
think themselves entitled to hold, and even to express, opinions about
the birth-rate. Spencer's discovery is the complementary half-truth
to the discovery of Malthus, and just as the law of Malthus is
pessimistic, so the law of Spencer is optimistic. In a word, Malthus
assumed--indeed, formally declared--that there was no natural factor of
an internal kind tending to limit the rate of vital fertility. Spencer
discovered that there is such a factor, which can and does limit and
has been limiting vegetable, animal, and human fertility since the dawn
of life.
All reproduction involves an expenditure of energy in some degree on
the part of the parent. Now the energy available by any individual is
finite. If he expends it all upon reproduction, he himself, or she
herself, must cease to exist. This happens in all the lowest forms
of life, which multiply by fission or simple splitting. The young
bacteria are their sub-divided parent. At the other extreme is the
case of the individual who retains the whole of his energy for his own
development and life, and has no offspring at all. Such consummate
bachelor philosophers as Kant and Spencer may be quoted, and the list
of childless men of genius might be extended quite indefinitely. This
is not to declare this last state to be the ideal, but merely to point
out the logical extremes.
Spencer's principle is that there is an “Antagonism,” or, as we
may rather say, an inverse ratio, between “Individuation” and
“Genesis”--between the proportion of energy expended upon the
individual and the proportion expended upon the continuance of the
race. Thus “Individuation,” meaning all those processes which maintain
and expand the life of the individual, and “Genesis,” meaning all
those processes which involve the formation of new individuals--are
necessarily antagonistic. Every higher degree of individual evolution
is followed by a lower degree of race multiplication, and _vice versâ_.
Increase in bulk (_cf._ the elephant), complexity or activity involves
diminution in fertility, and _vice versâ_. This is an obvious _à
priori_ principle.
Should the reader declare that there must be something the matter with
an asserted principle of progress which leads in theory or in practice
to the production of a childless generation, and therefore the end of
all progress, and that this principle suggests that the most completely
developed man and woman cannot be parents--then I would join in the
chorus of fathers and mothers generally, who would say that, in human
parenthood, if not, indeed, in sub-human parenthood, the antagonism
is reconciled in a higher unity; that the best and most complete
development of the individual is effected only through parenthood, in
due degree--as Spencer, himself childless, formally declared.
It is impossible here to show how complete is the evidence for
Spencer's law, both from the side of logical necessity and from the
side of observation. In order to indicate the overwhelming character
of the evidence, one would have to transcribe the whole of his
long chapter, and to add to it all our modern knowledge of human
birth-rates. This cannot be done, but even without it we may venture
to say that people who regard a falling birth-rate as in itself, and
obviously, a sign of racial degeneration or immorality, or approaching
weakness or failure of any kind, can have made no substantial additions
to their knowledge of the subject since they themselves formed items in
the birth-rate.
Spencer goes on to show, with profound insight, that, in general,
greater individuality, or, to put it in other words, the more highly
evolved organism, “_though less fertile absolutely, is the more fertile
relatively_.” The supreme instance of this truth is, of course, the
case of man, in whom individuation has reached its unprecedented
height, who is _absolutely_ the least fertile of creatures,[24] and
yet who is _relatively_ the most fertile--unique in his actual and
persistent multiplication.
=Their action in man.=--Within the human species the laws of
multiplication hold. It is still worth while, after half a century, to
quote Spencer's remark as to infertility in women due to mental labour
carried to excess--“most of the flat-chested girls who survive their
high-pressure education are incompetent to bear a well-developed infant
and to supply it with the natural food for the natural period.” On all
hands people with opened eyes are rightly urging this truth upon us
to-day. In the United States the so-called higher education of girls
has been proved in effect to sterilise them--and these the flower of
the nation's girlhood, and therefore, rightly, the very elect for
motherhood. Here is simply an instance of the Spencerian principle in
its most unfortunate misdirection by man.
Before leaving Spencer, we must refer briefly to the predictions,
based upon the foregoing principles, with which he concluded his great
work. The further evolution of man, he declares, must take mainly the
direction of a higher intellectual and emotional development. Hitherto,
and even to-day, pressure of population is the original cause of human
competition, application, discipline, expenditure of energy--and one
may add, the possibility of continued selection. Excess of fertility,
then, says Spencer, is the cause of man's evolution, but “man's further
evolution itself necessitates a decline in his fertility.” The future
progress of civilisation will be accompanied by increased development
of individuality, emotional and intellectual. As Spencer observes, this
does not necessarily mean a mentally laborious life, for as mental
activity “gradually becomes organic, it will become spontaneous and
pleasurable.”
Finally, the necessary antagonism between individuality and parenthood
ensures the ultimate attainment of the highest form of the maintenance
of the race--“... _a form in which the amount of life shall be the
greatest possible, and the births and deaths the fewest possible_.”
* * * * *
If now we look back at the law of Malthus we shall realise the
enormous significance of the law of Spencer. In this respect we have
the advantage over Malthus that we are aware, as he was not, of the
great fact of organic evolution. We discover, then, that an actual
consequence of the pressure of population, leading as it does to the
struggle for existence, and, in the main, the survival of higher types,
is that the rate of fertility falls. This conception of the fall in
the birth-rate--which, it is maintained, has been a great factor in
all organic progress--was entirely absent from the mind of Malthus.
In a word, the unlimited multiplication which Malthus observed leads
to its own correction. It provides abundance of material for natural
selection to work upon, and then the survival-value of individuation,
wherever it appears, asserts itself, with the consequence that the rate
of multiplication declines. This is actually to be observed to-day.
Malthus desired that we should postpone marriage to later ages so
as to lower the birth-rate. The increasing necessity and demand for
individuation is effecting that which Malthus desired. The average age
at marriage has been rising in our own country in both sexes during the
last thirty years: and the evidence shows that as civilisation advances
the age of marriage becomes later and later. Professor Metchnikoff has
discussed some aspects of this question in his book _The Nature of Man_.
=The intensive culture of life.=--For every student of progress, and
not least for the eugenist, Spencer's law is a warrant of hope and a
promise of better things to come. It teaches that in the development
of higher--that is to say, more specialised--that is to say, more
individualised--organic types, Nature is working already, and has
been working for ages, towards the elimination of the brutal elements
in the struggle for existence. This is, of course, what every worker
for progress, and every eugenist in especial, desires. Spencer's
discovery teaches also that individuality compensates a species for
loss of high fertility. The survival-value of individuation is greater
than the survival-value of rapid multiplication. _The very fact of
progress is the replacement of lower by higher life, the supersession
of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of survival-value,
the increasing dominance of mind over matter, the substitution of the
intensive for the merely extensive cultivation of life._ These various
phrases express, I believe, various aspects of one and the same great
fact, and I only wish it were possible to include here an exhaustive
study of the conception which may be expressed by the phrase “the
intensity of life”--as distinguished from its mere extension. There is,
I believe, a real and significant analogy between the introduction of
what is called intensive cultivation in agriculture, and the eugenic
principle which seeks to replace the extensive by the intensive
cultivation of human life.
=The eugenic difficulty.=--But it will be already evident to the reader
that, though Spencer's law offers hope and warrant to the eugenist,
it also poses him with a permanent and ineradicable difficulty which
is inherent in natural necessity--viz., the difficulty that, in
consequence of the operation of this law, those very classes or members
of a society whose parenthood he most desires must be, in general, the
least fertile. Throughout the animal world the lesser fertility of
higher species is no real handicap to them, as we know; but where the
conditions of selection are so profoundly modified as in human society,
the case is very different. Furthermore, amongst mankind individuality
has often grown, and does grow, to such an extent that parenthood
disappears altogether. Indeed, Spencer's law expresses itself--and
the eugenist must qualify his hopes by the fact--in the practical
infertility of many[25] of the most highly individualised and even
unique personalities, that is to say, in the ranks of what we call
genius. To this subject we must return.
A notable section in Mr. Galton's great work, _Inquiries into Human
Faculty_, states very plainly the difficulty for the eugenist involved
in Spencer's law, under its more statistical aspect. What are the
relative effects of early and late marriages? Mr. Galton proves,
mathematically, that in a very few generations a group of persons who
marry late will be simply bred down and more than supplanted by those
who marry early. Now no one will dispute that the less individualised,
the lower types, the more nearly animal, do in general marry earlier,
and are more fertile. Here, then, is an anti-eugenic tendency in
human society, depending really upon Spencer's law and requiring us
to recognise and counteract it by throwing all the weight we can
upon the side of progress, which means _increasing to our utmost the
survival-value and the effective fertility of the higher types_.
Much more space might be spent upon this gravest of problems for the
eugenist--the fact that the very persons from whom he desires to
recruit the future on account of their greater individuality are also
on that very account the persons who, by natural necessity, tend to be
less fertile. The difficulty shows itself in the male sex, but it shows
itself still more conspicuously in the female sex, where the proportion
of the individual energy devoted to the race, as compared with that
devoted to individuation, is necessarily far higher, and must so remain
if the race is to persist. Primarily, the body of woman is the temple
of life to come--and _therefore_, as we shall some day teach our girls,
the holy of holies. Without going further into this matter now, it
may be suggested that a cardinal principle of practical importance
is involved. It is that the individual development of women, their
higher education, their self-expression in works of art and thought and
practice, cannot safely be carried to the point at which motherhood
is compromised; else the race in question will necessarily disappear
and be replaced by any race whatsoever, the women of which continue to
be mothers. There are women of the worker bee type whom this argument
annoys intensely. No one wants _them_ to be mothers.
The proposition that all progress in the psychical world depends upon
individuality, just as all organic progress, and indeed, all organic
evolution, depends upon the physical individuality which biologists
call variation, may suggest to the reader the importance which must
attach to our study of talent and genius, and the possibility of aiding
their production. Meanwhile, we must look a little further at the
general question of individuality or quality _versus_ quantity from the
international point of view.
=Quantity versus quality.=--The reader will understand how it is
that anyone writing from the biological standpoint must view with
something like contempt the common assumption that, in international
competition, mere statistics of population furnish, as such, final
and adequate data for prophecy. Let us remind ourselves once more
that, according to these crude criteria, which were really superseded
untold æons ago, the dominance of the world must belong in the near
future not to Russia, with its balance of more than two million births
per annum, rather than to France, with its approximately stationary
population, but to the bacteria, the growth of population amongst
which, if it be not controlled by the less fertile creature we call
man, may be of simply inexpressible magnitude. But the world is not,
and will not be, ruled by bacteria, their fertility notwithstanding.
Indeed, the disease-producing bacteria have already had sentence of
death pronounced upon them by the higher intelligence of man, and
that sentence will be carried out within a century. Similarly within
the bounds of humanity we must recognise the limitations of mere
statistics. The population of France, some forty years ago, consisted
of so many millions of units. The figure does not matter,--let us put
it at 30,000,001. Now that 1, so to say, was called Louis Pasteur,
and from the point of view of statistics or those who think they can
predict history by counting heads, he was only an almost infinitesimal
fraction, about one-thirty-millionth part, of the French people. Yet,
as Huxley pointed out long ago, his mind sufficed to pay the entire
indemnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prussian war. This
single unit was worth more than a host of soldiers of the merely
mechanical kind. Or take Athens, with its population of 30,000 people,
mostly slaves, and consider its influence upon the world. Or, indeed,
go where you please, whether to the history of nations or the history
of religion or science or art, and ask whether the counting of heads,
the ordinary census taking which indeed amounts merely to weighing
nations by the ton, is an adequate one. In estimating national
capital by the methods of vital statistics alone, we are in a far
worse case than he would be who estimated monetary wealth by numbers
of coins, without considering whether they were pounds, shillings or
pence, whether they were genuine or counterfeit. The illustration is
ludicrously inadequate, as every illustration must be, simply because
the human case is unique. In the units of a population, which many
prophets treat as if they were all of equal value, there are not merely
differences to which the difference between a sovereign and a penny
offers no parallel; there is not merely an enormous quantity of bogus
or counterfeit units, but there is a very large number of units in
every population which, so far from adding to the value of the rest,
subtract from it, are parasitic upon it. Students of money will find
no parallel to this. Yet in the face of facts which ought to be common
intellectual property amongst school-children, we find many writers,
bishops, socialist economists, moralists, schoolboy Imperialists, and
the rest, pointing merely to the quantitative question of population
as if it were everything, though they must surely know that, if
international competition were the highest state of mankind, and if
the work of Kelvin and Lister had been sold at its real worth by us to
the rest of the world, those two men alone, in their services to life,
and in the power which they give us over life, would be equal in value
to, shall we say, the lower four-fifths of the whole birth-rate during
the last generation. All human history teaches, as all animal history
teaches in lesser degree, that quality and individuality is everything,
that quantity is nothing or far worse than nothing _except in so far
as it is quantity of quality_: yet though this lesson is written upon
every page of the past, the greater number of our publicists and our
public advisers still implicitly deny it. As Mr. Crackanthorpe put it,
speaking of the figures for 1907, it is not the defective numbers, but
the numbers of defectives, that should give us concern.
=Mass versus mind.=--John Ruskin called Darwin “a dim comet, wagging
its tail of phosphorescent nothing against the steadfast stars”--a
description as delightful as it is foolish. Yet the conception of
eugenics, which is indeed a necessary deduction from Darwin's great
discovery, finds abundant warrant and support in Ruskin's own wonderful
writings, and here I quote, from _Time and Tide_, some sentences which
still require to be read and remembered by the majority of our present
advisers. He says:--
“And the question of numbers is wholly immaterial, compared with
that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends on the
prior determination of character. Make your nation consist of
knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case of any
other vermin--the more, the worse. Or, to put the matter in narrower
limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent whether he
shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final concern
whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to be hanged....
You have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you
can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly
whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical
laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their
numbers, such sacrifices should be made, and to what extent?... The
French and British public may and will, with many other publics, be
at last brought ... to see farther that a nation's real strength
and happiness do not depend upon properties and territories, nor on
machinery for their defence, but on their getting such territory as
they _have_, well filled with none but respectable persons, which is
a way of _infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every
potentate.”
Surely it is not necessary, one feels, and yet one knows it is
necessary, again to lay down propositions of such shining truth, and
one wonders whether they shine so brightly as to blind those who should
see them: or what can conceivably be the explanation of such arguments
as those of the Bishop of London and others who, in the face of our
monstrous infant and child mortality, the awful pressure of population
and over-crowding in our great cities, where every year a larger and
larger proportion of the population lives, and is born and dies--plead
for a higher birth-rate on moral grounds, of all amazing grounds
conceivable; and those also who, from the military or so-called
Imperial point of view, regarding men primarily as “food for powder,”
in Shakespeare's phrase, read and quote statistics of population in
order to promulgate the same advice?
To the moralist we need make no reply except simply to name the infant
mortality which is at last coming to be recognised everywhere as,
perhaps, the most abominable of all our scandals. To the militarist I
would quote the case of our ally, Japan. He recalls the war between
China and Japan, and its issue, and has some idea, perhaps, of the
population ratio of those two Empires. How was it that Providence was
on the side of the small battalions? He recalls also the Russo-Japanese
war and its issue; and the population ratio of the two Empires in that
case. How many other instances does not military history afford of
the truth that in the human species mind is the master of matter? One
would suppose that a critical historical enquiry had been made, proving
that the results of all past wars could have been predicted by the
simple method of estimating the total aggregate weight of the combatant
nations in flesh and blood and bone! More than this, if the development
of the art of warfare means anything, if there has been any such
development since the days of fists and stones, it means, as all human
development in every sphere means, the increasing dominance of mind
over matter, character and initiative over machinery, _dead or alive_.
Meanwhile, the estimate of warriors in terms of the scale and the foot
rule are still accepted just as if they had not been rendered obsolete
for ever with the passing of the “dragons of the prime.”
As regards the psychical worth of the soldier, is it not recognised,
though too commonly forgotten, when we applaud the value of the veteran
or of seasoned troops? Physically the veteran is, on the average,
inferior to the younger man. It is the psychical that gives him
his worth, just as it was patriotism and sobriety that enabled the
few sober Japanese to beat the many drunken Russians. It is safe to
prophesy that, in all future war, the numerical criterion, which in
effect weighs armies by the ton, as if war were merely a tug-of-war,
will become less and less important--if, indeed, it is not already
negligible; whilst the purely psychical qualities, from generalship and
strategy and hygiene to initiative, judgment, accuracy, memory, and
down finally to mere brutal red-blooded courage, will determine the
issue.
Platitude, of course, but if true, why ignored? Why cannot our military
advisers learn, in this respect, from the Navy? Owing to the very
nature of the sea as compared with the land, in relation to the merely
physical capacities of man, a Navy must be more intelligent than an
Army, just as it requires more intelligence to make a boat than to
walk; and it is in the Navy that the mechanical factor has been most
completely transferred, so that the human machinery is at a discount
and the steel machinery made by the human mind is much, whilst the
value of the psychical in all its aspects dominates and controls
the whole. Great Britain, as the foremost naval power in the world,
should long ago have left to its ultimate fate amongst other nations
the idea that quantity--so many tons of soldiers and so many tons of
sailors--affords an estimate of the warring force of a nation: even if
the whole history of this little isle and the possession of our present
Empire did not teach, as the history of Rome taught and as the history
of Athens teaches in another sphere, that not mass but mind makes a
nation great.