XI

_Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism_

From an early period of the life-history of our planet, the preservation

of the species had obviously become quite as imperative an end as the

preservation of individuals; one is at first inclined to say more

imperative, but if we pause long enough to remember that total failure

to preserve individuals would be equivalent to immediate extinction of

the species, we see that the one requirement is as indispensable as the

other. Individuals must be preserved, and the struggle for life is

between them; species must be preserved, and in the rivalry those have

the best chance in which the offspring are either most redundant in

numbers or are best cared for. In plants and animals of all but the

higher types, the offspring are spores or seeds, larvŠ or spawn, or

self-maturing eggs. In the absence of parental care the persistence of

the species is ensured by the enormous number of such offspring. A

single codfish, in a single season, will lay six million eggs, nearly

all of which perish, of course, or else in a few years the ocean could

not hold all the codfishes. But the princess in the Arabian tale, who

fought with the malignant Jinni, could not for her life pick up all the

scattered seeds of the pomegranate; and in like manner of the codfish

eggs, one in a million or so escapes and the species is maintained. But

in the highest types of animal life in birds and mammals--with their

four-chambered hearts, completely arterialized blood, and enhanced

consciousness--parental care becomes effective in protecting the

offspring, and the excessive production diminishes. With birds, the

necessity of maintaining a high temperature for the eggs leads to the

building of nests, to a division of labour in the securing of food, to

the development of a temporary maternal instinct, and to conjugal

alliances which in some birds last for a lifetime. As the eggs become

effectively guarded the number diminishes, till instead of millions

there are half a dozen. When it comes to her more valuable products,

Nature is not such a reckless squanderer after all. So with mammals, for

the most part the young are in litters of half a dozen or so; but in

Man, with his prolonged and costly infancy parental care reaches its

highest development and concentration in rearing children one by one.

From the dawn of life, I need hardly say, all the instincts that have

contributed to the preservation of offspring must have been favoured and

cultivated by natural selection, and in many cases even in types of life

very remote from Humanity, such instincts have prompted to very

different actions from such as would flow from the mere instinct of

self-preservation. If you thrust your walking-stick into an ant-heap,

and watch the wild hurry and confusion that ensues when part of the

interior is laid bare, you will see that all the workers are busy in

moving the larvŠ into places of safety. It is not exactly a maternal

instinct, for the workers are not mothers, but it is an altruistic

instinct involving acts of self-devotion. So in the case of fish that

ascend rivers or bays at spawning time, the actions of the whole shoal

are determined by a temporarily predominant instinct that tends towards

an altruistic result. In these and lower grades of life there is already

something at work besides the mere struggle for life between

individuals; there is something more than mere contention and slaughter;

there is the effort towards cherishing another life than one's own. In

these regions of animate existence we catch glimpses of the cosmic roots

of love and self-sacrifice. For the simplest and rudest productions of

Nature mere egoism might suffice, but to the achievement of any higher

aim some adumbration of altruism was indispensable.

Before such divine things as love and self-sacrifice could spring up

from their cosmic roots and put forth their efflorescence, it was

necessary that conscious personal relations should become established

between mother and infant. We have already observed the critical

importance of these relations in the earliest stages of the evolution of

human society. We may now add that the relation between mother and child

must have furnished the first occasion for the sustained and regular

development of the altruistic feelings. The capacity for unselfish

devotion called forth in that relation could afterward be utilized in

the conduct of individuals not thus related to one another.

Of all kinds of altruism the mother's was no doubt the earliest; it was

the derivative source from which all other kinds were by slow degrees

developed. In the evolution of these altruistic feelings,

therefore,--feelings which are an absolutely indispensable constituent

in the process of ethical development,--the first appearance of real

maternity was an epoch of most profound interest and importance in the

history of life upon the earth.

Now maternity, in the true and full sense of the word, is something

which was not realized until a comparatively recent stage of the earth's

history. God's highest work is never perfected save in the fulness of

time. For countless ages there were parents and offspring before the

slow but never aimless or wanton cosmic process had brought into

existence the conscious personal relationship between mother and child.

Protection of eggs and larvŠ scarcely suffices for the evolution of true

maternity; the relation of moth to caterpillar is certainly very far

from being a prototype of it. What spectacle could be more dreary than

that of the Jurassic period, with its lords of creation, the oviparous

dinosaurs, crawling or bounding over the land, splashing amid the mighty

waters, whizzing bat-like through the air, horrible brutes innumerable,

with bulky bodies and tiny brains, clumsy, coarse in fibre, and

cold-blooded.

"Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime."

The remnants of that far-off dismal age have been left behind in great

abundance, and from them we can easily reconstruct the loathsome picture

of a world of dominating egoism, whose redemption through the evolution

of true maternity had not yet effectively begun. For such a world might

Caliban's theology indeed seem fitted. Nearly nine tenths of our

planet's past life-history, measured in duration, had passed away

without achieving any higher result than this,--a fact which for

impatient reformers may have in it some crumbs of consolation.

For, though the mills of God grind slowly, the cosmic process was aiming

at something better than egoism and dinosaurs, and at some time during

the long period of the Chalk deposits there began the tremendous

world-wide rivalry between these dragons and the rising class of

warm-blooded viviparous mammals which had hitherto played an

insignificant part in the world. The very name of this class of animals

is taken from the function of motherhood. The offspring of these

"mammas" come into the world as recognizable personalities, so far

developed that the relation between mother and child begins as a

relation of personal affection. The new-born mammal is not an egg nor a

caterpillar, but a baby, and the baby's dawning consciousness opens up a

narrow horizon of sympathy and tenderness, a horizon of which the

expansion shall in due course of ages reveal a new heaven and a new

earth. At first the nascent altruism was crude enough, but it must have

sufficed to make mutual understanding and cooperation more possible than

before; it thus contributed to the advancement of mammalian

intelligence, and prepared the way for gregariousness, by and by to

culminate in sociality, as already described. In the history of creation

the mammals were moderns, equipped with more effective means of

ensuring survival than their oviparous antagonists. The development of

complete mammality was no sudden thing. Some of the dinosaurs may have

been ovoviviparous, like some modern serpents. The Australian duck-bill,

a relic of the most ancient incipient mammality, is still oviparous; the

opossum and kangaroo preserve the record of a stage when viviparousness

was but partially achieved; but with the advent of the placental mammals

the break with the old order of things was complete.

The results of the struggle are registered in the Eocene rocks. The

ancient world had found its Waterloo. Gone were the dragons who so long

had lorded it over both hemispheres,--brontosaurs, iguanodons,

plesiosaurs, lŠlaps, pterodactyls,--all gone; their uncouth brood quite

vanished from the earth, and nothing left alive as a reminder, save a

few degenerate collateral kin, such as snakes and crocodiles, objects

of dread and loathing to higher creatures. Never in the history of our

planet has there been a more sweeping victory than that of the mammals,

nor has Nature had any further occasion for victories of that sort. The

mammal remains the highest type of animal existence, and subsequent

progress has been shown in the perfecting of that type where most

perfectible.

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