03.07a. THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MATERNITY

THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MATERNITY
But let us not be diverted from the main stream by these secondary results of the sex-distinction. A far more important implication lies before us. The problem that remains for us to settle is as to how the merely physical forms of Other-ism began to be accompanied or overlaid by ethical characters. And the solution of this problem requires nothing more than a consideration of the broad and fundamental fact of sex itself. In what it is, and in what it necessarily implies, we shall find the clue to the beginnings of the social and moral order of the world. For, rising on the one hand out of maleness and on the other hand out of femaleness, developments take place of such a kind as to constitute this the turning-point of the world’s moral history. Let it be said at once that these developments are not to be sought for in the direction in which, from the nature of the factors, one might hastily suppose that they lay. What seems to be imminent at this stage, and as the natural end to which all has led up, is the institution of affection in definite forms between male and female. But we are on a very different track. Affection between male and female is a later, less fundamental, and, in its beginnings, less essential growth; and long prior to its existence, and largely the condition of it, is the even more beautiful development whose progress we have now to trace. The basis of this new development is indeed far removed from the mutual relations of sex with sex. For it lies in maleness and femaleness themselves, in their inmost quality and essential nature, in what they lead to and what they become. The superstructure, certainly, owes much to the psychical relations of father and mother, husband and wife, but the Evolution of Love began ages before these were established.

What exactly maleness is, and what femaleness, has been one of the problems of the world. At least five hundred theories of their origin are already in the field, but the solution seems to have baffled every approach. Sex has remained almost to the present hour an ultimate mystery of creation, and men seem to know as little what it is as whence it came. But among the last words of modern science there are one or two which spell out a partial clue to both of these mysterious problems. The method by which this has been reached is almost for the first time a purely biological one, and if its inferences are still uncertain, it has at least established some important facts.

Starting with the function of nutrition as the nearest ally of Reproduction, the newer experimenters have discovered cases in which sex apparently has been determined by the quantity and quality of the food-supply. And in actual practice it has been found possible, in the case of certain organisms, to produce either maleness or femaleness by simply varying their nutrition--femaleness being an accompaniment of abundant food, maleness of the reverse. When Yung, to take an authentic experiment, began his observations on tadpoles, he ascertained that in the ordinary natural condition the number of males and females produced was not far from equal--the percentage being about 57 female to 43 male, thus giving the females a preponderance of seven. But when a brood of tadpoles was sumptuously fed the percentage of females rose to 78, and when a second brood was treated even more liberally, the number amounted to 81. In a third experiment with a still more highly nutritious diet, the result of the high feeding was more remarkable, for in this case 92 females were produced and only 8 males. In the case of butterflies and moths, it has been found that if caterpillars are starved before entering the chrysalis state the offspring are males, while others of the same brood, when highly nourished, develop into females. A still more instructive case is that of the aphides, the familiar plant-lice of our gardens. During the warmth of summer, when food is abundant, these insects produce parthenogenetically nothing but females, while in the famines of later autumn they give birth to males. In striking confirmation of this fact it has been proved that in a conservatory where the aphides enjoy perpetual summer, the parthenogenetic succession of females continued to go on for four years and stopped only when the temperature was lowered and food diminished. Then males were at once produced. It will no longer be said that science is making no progress with this unique problem when it is apparently able to determine sex by turning off or on the steam in a green house. With regard to bees the relation between nutrition and sex seems equally established. "The three kinds of inmates in a bee-hive are known to everyone as queens, workers, and drones; or, as fertile females, imperfect females, and males. What are the factors determining the differences between these three forms? In the first place, it is believed that the eggs which give rise to drones are not fertilized, while those that develop into queens and workers have the normal history. But what fate rules the destiny of the two latter, determining whether a given ovum will turn out the possible mother of a new generation, or remain at the lower level of a non-fertile working female? It seems certain that the fate mainly lies in the quantity and quality of the food. Royal diet, and plenty of it, develops the future queens . . Up to a certain point the nurse bees can determine the future destiny of their charge by changing the diet, and this in some cases is certainly done. If a larva on the way to become a worker receive by chance some crumbs from the royal superfluity, the reproductive function may develop, and what are called `fertile workers,’ to a certain degree above the average abortiveness, result; or, by direct intention, a worker grub may be reared into a queen bee.

It is unnecessary to prolong the illustration, for the point it is wished to emphasize is all but in sight. As we have just witnessed, the tendency of abundant nutrition is to produce females, while defective nutritive conditions produce males. This means that in so far as nutrition reacts on the bodies of animals--and nothing does so more--there will be a growing difference, as time begins to accumulate the effects, between the organization and life-habit of male and female respectively. In the male, destructive processes, a preponderance of waste over repair, will prevail; the result will be a katabolic habit of body; in the female the constructive processes will be in the ascendant, occasioning an opposite or anabolic habit. Translated into less technical language, this means that the predominating note in the male will be energy, motion, activity; while passivity, gentleness, repose, will characterize the female. These words, let it be noticed, psychical though they seem, are yet here the coinages of physiology. No other terms indeed would describe the difference. Thus Geddes and Thomson: "The female cochineal insect, laden with reserve-products in the form of the well-known pigment, spends much of its life like a mere quiescent gall on the cactus plant. The male, on the other hand, in his adult state, is agile, restless, and short-lived. Now this is no mere curiosity of the entomologist, but in reality a vivid emblem of what is an average truth throughout the world of animals--the preponderating passivity of the females, the freedomness and activity of the males." Rolph’s words, because he writes neither of men nor of animals, but goes back to the furthest recess of Nature and characterizes the cell itself, are still more significant: "The less nutritive and therefore smaller, hungrier, and more mobile organism is the male; the more nutritive and usually more quiescent is the female."

Now what do these facts indicate? They indicate that maleness is one thing and femaleness another, and that each has been specialized from the beginning to play a separate role in the drama of life. Among primitive peoples, as largely in modern times, "The tasks which demand a powerful development of muscle and bone, and the resulting capacity for intermittent spurts of energy, involving corresponding periods of rest, fall to the man; the care of the children and all the various industries which radiate from the hearth, and which call for an expenditure of energy more continuous, but at a lower tension, fall to the woman. Whether this or any theory of the origin of Sex be proved or unproved, the fact remains, and is everywhere emphasized in Nature, that a certain constitutional difference exists between male and female, a difference inclining the one to a robuster life, and implanting in the other a certain mysterious bias in the direction of what one can only call the womanly disposition. On one side of the great line of cleavage have grown up men--those whose lives for generations and generations have been busied with one particular set of occupations; on the other side have lived and developed women--those who for generations have been busied with another and a widely different set of occupations. And as occupations have inevitable reactions upon mind, character, and disposition, these two have slowly become different in mind and character and disposition. That cleavage therefore, which began in the merely physical region, is now seen to extend into the psychical realm, and ends by supplying the world with two great and forever separate types. No efforts, or explanations, or expostulations can ever break down that distinction between maleness and femaleness, or make it possible to believe that they were not destined from the first of time to play a different part in human history. Male and female never have been and never will be the same. They are different in origin; they have travelled to their destinations by different routes; they have had different ends in view. The result is that they are different, and the contribution therefore of each to the evolution of the human race is special and unique. By and by it will be our duty to mark what Man, in virtue of his peculiar gift, has done for the world; part indeed of his contribution has been already recorded here. To him has been mainly assigned the fulfilment of the first great function--the Struggle for Life. Woman, whose higher contribution has not yet been named. is the chosen instrument for carrying on the Struggle for the Life of Others. Man’s life, on the whole, is determined chiefly by the function of Nutrition; Woman’s by the function of Reproduction. Man satisfies the one by going out into the world, and in the rivalries of war and the ardours of the chase, in conflict with Nature, and amid the stress of industrial pursuits, fulfilling the law of Self-preservation; Woman completes her destiny by occupying herself with the industries and sanctities of the home, and paying the debt of Motherhood to her race.

Now out of this initial difference--so slight at first as to amount to no more than a scarcely perceptible bias--have sprung the most momentous issues. For by every detail of their separate careers the two original tendencies--to outward activity in the man; to inward activity, miscalled passivity, in the woman--became accentuated as time went on. The one life tended towards selfishness, the other towards unselfishness. While one kept Individualism alive, the other kept Altruism alive. Blended in the children, these two master-principles from this their starting-point acted and reacted all through history, seeking that mean in which true life lies. Thus by a Division of Labour appointed by the will of Nature, the conditions for the Ascent of Man were laid. But by far the most vital point remains. For we have next to observe how this bears directly on the theme we set out to explore--the Evolution of Love. The passage from mere Other-ism, in the physiological sense, to Altruism, in the moral sense, occurs in connection with the due performance of her natural task by her to whom the Struggle for the Life of Others is assigned. That task, translated into one great word, is Maternity--which is nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others transfigured, transferred to the moral sphere. Focused in a single human being, this function, as we rise in history, slowly begins to be accompanied by those heaven-born psychical states which transform the femaleness of the older order into the Motherhood of the new. When one follows Maternity out of the depths of lower Nature, and beholds it ripening in quality as it reaches the human sphere, its character, and the character of the processes by which it is evolved, appear in their full divinity. For of what is Maternity the mother? Of children? No; for these are the mere vehicle of its spiritual manifestation. Of affection between female and male? No; for that, contrary to accepted beliefs, has little to do in the first instance with sex-relations. Of what then? Of Love itself, of Love as Love, of Love as Life, of Love as Humanity, of Love as the pure and undefiled fountain of all that is eternal in the world. In the long stillness which follows the crisis of Maternity, witnessed only by the new and helpless life which is at once the last expression of the older function and the unconscious vehicle of the new, Humanity is born. By an alchemy which remains, and must ever remain, the secret of Nature, the physiological forces give place to those higher principles of sympathy, solicitude, and affection which from this time onwards are to change the course of Evolution and determine a diviner destiny for a Human Race:

"Earth’s insufficiency
Here grows to event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The woman-soul leadeth us
Upward and on.

So stupendous is this transition that the mere possibility staggers us. Separated by the whole diameter of conscious intelligence and will, what possible affinities can exist between the Reproductive and the Altruistic process? What analogy can ever exist between the earlier physiological Struggle for the Life of Others and the later Struggle of Love? Yet, different though their accompaniments may be, when closely examined they are seen, at every essential point, running parallel with each other. The object in either case is to continue the life of the Species; the essence of both is self-sacrifice; the first manifestation of the sacrifice is to make provision for Others by helping them to draw the first few breaths of life. But what has Love to do with Species? Can Altruism have reference to mere life? The answer is, that in its first beginnings it has almost nothing to do with anything else. For, consider the situation. Reproduction, let us suppose, has done its most perfect work on the physiological plane: the result is that a human child is born into the world. But the work of Reproduction being to Struggle for the Life of the Species, its task is only complete when it secures that the child, representing the Species, shall live. If the child dies, Reproduction has failed; the Species, so far as this effort is concerned, comes to an end. Now, can Reproduction as a merely physiological function complete this process? It can not. What can? Only the Mother’s Care and Love. Without these, in a few hours or days, the new life must perish; the earlier achievement of Reproduction is in vain. Hence there comes a moment when these two functions meet, when they act as complements to each other; when Physiology hands over its unfinished task to Ethics; when Evolution--if for once one may use a false distinction--depends upon the `moral’ process to complete the work the `cosmic ` process has begun. At what precise stage of the Ascent, in association with what class of animals, Other-ism began to shade into Altruism in the ethical sense, is immaterial. Whether the Altruism in the early stages is real or apparent, profound or superficial, voluntary or automatic, does not concern us. What concerns us is that the Altruism is there; that the day came when, even though a rudiment, it was a reality; above all that the arrangements for introducing and perfecting it were realities. The prototype, for ages, may have extended only to form, to the outward relation; for further ages no more Altruism may have existed than was absolutely necessary to the preservation of the species. But to fix the eye upon it at that remote stage and assert that, because it was apparently then automatic, it must therefore have been automatic ever after, is to forget the progressive character of Evolution as well as to ignore facts. While many of the apparent Other-regarding acts among animals are purely selfish and purely automatic, undoubtedly there are instances where more is involved. Apart from their own offspring--in relation to which there may always be the suspicion of automatism; and apart from domestic animals--which are open to the further suspicion of having been trained to it-- animals act spontaneously towards other animals; they have their playmates; they make friendships, and very attached friendships. Much more, indeed, has been claimed for them; but it is not necessary to claim even this much. No evolutionist would expect among animals--domestic animals always excepted--any considerable development of Altruism, because the physiological and psychical conditions which directly led to its development in Man’s case were fulfilled in no other creature.

Simple as seems the method by which the first few sparks of Love were nursed into flame in the bosom of Maternity, the details of the evolution are so intricate as to require a chapter to themselves. But the emphasis which Nature puts on this process may be judged of by the fact that one half the human race had to be set apart to sustain and perfect it. To the evolutionist who discerns the true proportions of the forces which made for the Ascent of Man, one of the two or three great events in the natural history of the world was the institution of sex. It is here that the master-forces which were to dominate the latest and highest stages of the process start; here, specialized into Egoism and Altruism, they part; and here, each having run its different course, they meet to distribute their gains to a succeeding race. With the initial impulses of their sex strengthened by the different life-routine to which each led, these two forces ran their course through history, determining by their ceaseless reactions the order and progress of the world, or when wrongly balanced, its disorder and decay. According to evolutional philosophy there are three great marks or necessities of all true development--Aggregation, or the massing of things; Differentiation, or the varying of things ; and Integration, or the re-uniting of things into higher wholes. All these processes are brought about by sex more perfectly than by any other factor known. From a careful study of this one phenomenon, science could almost decide that Progress was the object of Nature, and that Altruism was the object of Progress. This vital relation between Altruism in its early stages and physiological ends, neither implies that it is to be limited by these ends nor defined in terms of them. Everything must begin somewhere. And there is no aphorism which the labours of Evolution, at each fresh beginning, have tended more consistently to endorse than "first that which is natural, then that which is spiritual." How this great saying also disposes of the difficulty, which appears and reappears with every forward step in Evolution, as to the qualitative terms in which higher developments are to be judged, is plain. Because the spiritual to our vision emerges from the natural, or, to speak more accurately, is convoyed upwards by the natural for the first stretches of its ascent, it is not necessarily contained in that natural, nor is it to be defined in terms of it. What comes "first" is not the criterion of what comes last. Few things are more forgotten in criticism of Evolution than that the nature of a thing is not dependent on its origin, that one’s whole view of a long, growing, and culminating process is not to be governed by the first sight the microscope can catch of it. The processes of Evolution evolve as well as the products; evolve with the products. In the Environments they help to create, or to make available, they find a field for new creations as well as further reinforcements for themselves. With the creation of human children Altruism found an area for its own expansion such as had never before existed in the world. In this new soil it grew from more to more, and reached a potentiality which enabled it to burst the trammels of physical conditions, and overflow the world as a moral force. The mere fact that the first uses of Love were physical shows how perfectly this process bears the stamp of Evolution. The later function is seen to relieve the earlier at the moment when it would break down without it, and continue the ascent without a pause.
If it be hinted that Nature has succeeded in continuing the Ascent of Life in Animals without any reinforcement from psychical principles, the first answer is that owing to physiological conditions this would not have been possible in the case of Man. But even among animals it is not true that Reproduction completes its work apart from higher principles, for even there, there are accompaniments, continually increasing in definiteness, which at least represent the instincts and emotions of Man. It is no doubt true that in animals the affections are less voluntarily directed than in the case of a human mother. But in either case they must have been involuntary at first. It can only have been at a late stage in Evolution that Nature could trust even her highest product to carry on the process by herself. Before Altruism was strong enough to take its own initiative, necessity had to be laid upon all mothers, animal and human, to act in the way required. In part physiological, this necessity was brought about under the ordinary action of that principle which had to take charge of everything in Nature until the will of Man appeared--Natural Selection. A mother who did not care for her children would have feeble and sickly children. Their children’s children would be feeble and sickly children. And the day of reckoning would come when they would be driven off the field by a hardier, that is a better-mothered, race. Hence the premium of Nature upon better mothers. Hence the elimination of all the reproductive failures, of all the mothers who fell short of completing the process to the last detail. And hence, by the law of the Survival of the Fittest, Altruism, which at this stage means good-motherism, is forced upon the world.
This consummation reached, the foundations of the human world are finished. Nothing foreign remains to be added. All that need happen henceforth is that the Struggle for the Life of Others should work out its destiny. To follow out the gains of Reproduction from this point would be to write the story of the nations, the history of civilization, the progress of Social Evolution. The key to all these processes is here. There is no intelligible account of the world which is not founded on the realization of the place of this factor in development. Sociology, practically, can only beat the air, can make no step forward as a science, until it recognizes this basis in biology. It is the failure, not so much to recognize the supremacy of this second factor, but to see that there is any second factor at all, that has vitiated almost every attempt to construct a symmetrical social philosophy. It has long, indeed, been perceived that society is an organism, and an organism which has grown by natural growth like a tree. But the tree to which it is usually likened is such a tree as never grew on this earth. For it is a tree without flowers; a tree with nothing but stem and leaves; a tree that performed the function of Nutrition, and forgot all about Reproduction. The great unrecognized truth of social science is that the Social Organism has grown and flowered and fruited in virtue of the continuous activities and inter-relations of the two co-related functions of Nutrition and Reproduction, that these two dominants being at work it could not but grow, and grow in the way it has grown. When the dual nature of the evolving forces is perceived; when their reactions upon one another are understood; when the changed material with which they have to work from time to time, the further obstacles confronting them at every stage, the new Environments which modify their action as the centuries add their growths and disencumber them of their withered leaves,-- when all this is observed, the whole social order falls into line. From the dawn of life these two forces have acted together, one continually separating, the other continually uniting; one continually looking to its own things, the other to the things of Others. Both are great in Nature--but "the greatest of these is Love." The answer to the argument in favour of automatism is thus summarized by C. M. Williams: "(1) That functions which are preserved and inherited must evidently be, not only in animals and plants, but also and equally in man, such as favour the preservation of the species; those which do not so favour it must perish with the individuals or species to which they belong; (2) that it cannot, indeed, be assumed that a result which has never come within the experience of the species can be willed as an end, although, with the species, function securing results which, from a human point of view, might be regarded as such, may be preserved; but (3) that, as far as we assume the existence of consciousness at all in any species or individual, we must assume pleasure and pain, pleasure in customary function, pain in its hindrance; and (4) that, as far as we can assume memory, we may also feel authorized to assume that a remembered action may be associated with remembered results that come within the experience of the animal, some phases of which may thus become, as combined with pleasure or pain, ends to seek or consequences to avoid."--Evolutional Ethics, p. 386.