CHAPTER VII
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIFE OF OTHERS
WE now open a wholly new, and by far the most
important, chapter in the Evolution of Man. Up to this time we have found for
him a Body, and the rudiments of Mind. But Man is not a Body, nor a Mind. The
temple still awaits its final tenant--the higher human Soul.
With a Body alone, Man is an animal: the highest
animal, yet a pure animal; struggling for its own narrow life, living for its
small and sordid ends. Add a Mind to that and the advance is infinite. The
Struggle for Life assumes the august form of a struggle for light: he who was
once a savage, pursuing the arts of the chase, realizes Aristotle's ideal man,
"a hunter after Truth." Yet this is not the end. Experience tells us that Man's
true life is neither lived in the material tracts of the body, nor in the
higher altitudes of the intellect, but in the warm world of the affections.
Till he is equipped with these, Man is not human. He reaches his full height
only when Love becomes to him the breath of life, the energy of will, the
summit of desire. There at last lies all happiness, and goodness, and truth,
and divinity:
"For the loving
worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God."
That
Love did not come down to us through the Struggle for Life, the only great
factor in Evolution which up to this time has been dwelt upon, is self-evident.
It has a lineage all its own. Yet inexplicable though the circumstance be, the
history of this force, the most stupendous the world has ever known, has
scarcely even begun to be investigated. Every other principle in Nature has had
a thousand prophets; but this supreme dynamic has run its course through the
ages unobserved; its rise, so far as science is concerned, is unknown; its
story has never been told. But if any phenomenon or principle in Nature is
capable of treatment under the category of Evolution, this is. Love is not a
late arrival, an after-thought, with Creation. It is not a novelty of a
romantic civilization. It is not a pious word of religion. Its roots began to
grow with the first cell of life which budded on this earth. How great it is
the history of humanity bears witness; but how old it is and how solid, how
bound up with the very constitution of the world, how from the first of time an
eternal part of it, we are only now beginning to perceive. For the Evolution of
Love is a piece of pure Science. Love did not descend out of the clouds like
rain or snow. It was distilled on earth. And few of the romances which in after
years were to cluster round this immortal word are more wonderful than the
story of its birth and growth. Partly a product of crushed lives and
exterminated species, and partly of the choicest blossoms and sweetest essences
that ever came from the tree of life, it reached its spiritual perfection after
a history the most strange and chequered that the pages of Nature have to
record. What Love was at first, how crude and sour and embryonic a thing, it is
impossible to conceive. But from age to age, with immeasurable faith and
patience, by cultivations continuously repeated, by transplantings endlessly
varied, the unrecognizable germ of this new fruit was husbanded to its
maturity, and became the tree on which humanity, society, and civilization were
ultimately borne.
As the story of Evolution is usually told, Love--
the evolved form, as we shall see, of the Struggle for the Life of Others--has
not even a place. Almost the whole emphasis of science has fallen upon the
opposite--the animal Struggle for Life. Hunger was early seen by the
naturalists to be the first and most imperious appetite of all living things,
and the course of Nature came to be erroneously interpreted in terms of a
never-ending strife. Since there are vastly more creatures born than can ever
survive, since for every morsel of food provided a hundred claimants appear,
life to an animal was described to us as one long tragedy; and Poetry,
borrowing the imperfect creed, pictured Nature only as a blood-red fang. Before
we can go on to trace the higher progress of Love itself, it is necessary to
correct this misconception. And no words can be thrown away if they serve, in
whatever imperfect measure, to restore to honour what is in reality the supreme
factor in the Evolution of the world. To interpret the whole course of Nature
by the Struggle for Life is as absurd as if one were to define the character of
St. Francis by the tempers of his childhood. Worlds grow up as well as infants;
their tempers change, the better nature opens out, new objects of desire
appear, higher activities are added to the lower. The first chapter or two of
the story of Evolution may be headed the Struggle for Life; but take the book
as a whole and it is not a tale of battle. It is a Love-story.
The circumstances, as has been already pointed
out in the Introduction, under which the world at large received its main
impression of Evolution, obscured these later and happier features. The modern
revival of the Evolution theory occurred almost solely in connection with
investigations in the lower planes of Nature, and was due to the stimulus of
the pure naturalists, notably of Mr. Darwin. But what Mr. Darwin primarily
undertook to explain was simply the Origin of Species. His work was a study in
infancies, in rudiments; he emphasized the earliest forces and the humblest
phases of the world's development. The Struggle for Life was there the most
conspicuous fact--at least, on the surface; it formed the key-note of his
teaching; and the tragic side of Nature fixed itself in the popular mind. The
mistake the world made was two-fold: it mistook Darwinism for Evolution--a
specific theory of Evolution applicable to a single department for a universal
scheme; and it misunderstood Mr. Darwin himself. That the foundations of
Darwinism--or what was taken for Darwinism--were the foundations of all Nature
was assumed. Dazzled with the apparent solidity of this foundation, men made
haste to run up a structure which included the whole vast range of
life--vegetal, animal, social--based on a law which explained but half the
facts, and was only relevant, in the crude form in which it was universally
stated, for the childhood of the world. It was impossible for such an edifice
to stand. Natural history cannot in any case cover the whole facts of human
history, and, so interpreted, can only fatally distort them. The mistake had
been largely qualified had Mr. Darwin's followers even accepted his foundation
in its first integrity; but, perhaps because the author of the theory himself
but dimly apprehended the complement of his thesis, few seem to have perceived
that anything was amiss. Mr. Darwin's sagacity led him distinctly to foresee
that narrow interpretations of his great phrase "Struggle for Existence" were
certain to be made; and in the opening chapters of the Origin of
Species, he warns us that the term must be applied in its "large and
metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including
(which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in
leaving progeny."[78] In spite of this
warning, his overmastering emphasis on the individual Struggle for Existence
seems to have obscured, if not to his own mind, certainly to almost all his
followers, the truth that any other great factor in Evolution existed.
The truth is there are two Struggles for
Life in every living thing--the Struggle for Life, and the Struggle for the
Life of Others. The web of life is woven upon a double set of threads, the
second thread distinct in colour from the first, and giving a totally different
pattern to the finished fabric. As the whole aspect of the after-world depends
on this distinction of strands in the warp, it is necessary to grasp the
distinction with the utmost clearness. Already, in the introductory chapter,
the nature of the distinction has been briefly explained. But it is necessary
to be explicit here, even to redundancy. We have arrived at a point from which
the Ascent of Man takes a fresh departure, a point from which the course of
Evolution begins to wear an entirely altered aspect. No such consummation ever
before occurred in the progress of the world as the rise to potency in human
life of the Struggle for the Life of Others. The Struggle for the Life of
Others is the physiological name for the greatest word of ethics--Other-ism,
Altruism, Love. From Self-ism to Other-ism is the supreme transition of
history. It is therefore impossible to lodge in the mind with too much solidity
the simple biological fact on which the Altruistic Struggle rests. Were this a
late phase of Evolution, or a factor applicable to single genera, it would
still be of supreme importance; but it is radical, universal, involved in the
very nature of life itself. As matter is to be interpreted by Science in terms
of its properties, life is to be interpreted in terms of its functions. And
when we dissect down to that form of matter with which all life is associated,
we find it already discharging, in the humblest organisms visible by the
microscope, the function on which the stupendous superstructure of Altruism
indirectly comes to rest. Take the tiniest protoplasmic cell, immerse it in a
suitable medium, and presently it will perform two great acts--the two which
sum up life, which constitute the eternal distinction between the living and
the dead--Nutrition and Reproduction. At one moment, in pursuance of the
Struggle for Life, it will call in matter from without, and assimilate it to
itself; at another moment, in pursuance of the Struggle for the Life of Others,
it will set a portion of that matter apart, add to it, and finally give it away
to form another life. Even at its dawn life is receiver and giver; even in
protoplasm is Self-ism and Other-ism. These two tendencies are not fortuitous.
They have been lived into existence. They are not grafts on the tree of life,
they are its nature, its essential life. They are not painted on the canvas,
but woven through it.
The two main activities, then, of all living
things are Nutrition and Reproduction. The discharge of these functions
in plants, and largely in animals, sums up the work of life. The object of
Nutrition is to secure the life of the individual; the object of Reproduction
is to secure the life of the Species. These two objects are thus wholly
different. The first has a purely personal end; its attention is turned
inwards; it exists only for the present. The second in a greater or less degree
is impersonal; its attention is turned outwards; it lives for the future. One
of these objects, in other words, is Self-regarding; the other is
Other-regarding. Both, of course, at the outset are wholly selfish; both are
parts of the Struggle for Life. Yet see already in this non-ethical region a
parting of the ways. Selfishness and unselfishness are two supreme words in the
moral life. The first, even in physical Nature, is accompanied by the second.
In the very fact that one of the two mainsprings of life is Other-regarding
there lies a prophecy, a suggestion, of the day of Altruism. In organizing the
physiological mechanism of Reproduction in plants and animals Nature was
already laying wires on which, one far-off day, the currents of all higher
things might travel.
In itself, this second Struggle, this effort to
maintain the life of the species, is not less real than the first; the
provisions for effecting it are not less wonderful; the whole is not less a
part of the system of things. And, taken prophetically, the function of
Reproduction is as much greater than the function of Nutrition as the Man is
greater than the Animal, as the Soul is higher than the Body, as Co-operation
is stronger than Competition, as Love is stronger than Hate. If it were ever to
be charged against Nature that she was wholly selfish, here is the refutation
at the very start. One of the two fundamental activities of all life, whether
plant or animal, is Other-regarding. It is not said that the function of
Reproduction, say in a fern or in an oak, is an unselfish act, yet in a sense,
even though begotten of self, it is an other-regarding act. In the physical
world, to speak of the Struggle for Food as selfish, or to call the Struggle
for Species unselfish, are alike incongruous. But if the morality of Nature is
impugned on the ground of the universal Struggle for Life, it is at least as
relevant to refute the charge - by putting moral content into the universal
Struggle for Species. No true moral content can be put into either, yet the one
marks the beginning of Egoism, the other of Altruism. Almost the whole
self-seeking side of things has come down the line of the individual Struggle
for Life; almost the whole unselfish side of things is rooted in the Struggle
to preserve the life of others.
That an Other-regarding principle should sooner
or later appear on the world's stage was a necessity if the world was ever to
become a moral world. And as everything in the moral world has what may be
called a physical basis to begin with, it is not surprising to find in the mere
physiological process of Reproduction a physical forecast of the higher
relations, or, more accurately, to find the higher relations manifesting
themselves at first through physical relations. The Struggle for the Life of
Others formed an indispensable stepping-stone to the development of the
Other-regarding virtues. Nature always works with long roots. To conduct
Other-ism upward into the higher sphere without miscarriage, and to establish
it there for ever, Nature had to embed it in the most ancient past, so
organizing and endowing protoplasm that life could not go on without it, and
compelling its continuous activity by the sternest physiological necessity.
To say that there is a certain protest of the
mind against associating the highest ethical ends with forces in their first
stage almost physical, is to confess a truth which all must feel. Even Haeckel,
in contrasting the tiny rootlet of sex-attraction between two microscopic cells
with the mighty after-efflorescence of love in the history of mankind, is
staggered at the audacity of the thought, and pauses in the heart of a profound
scientific investigation to reflect upon it. After a panegyric in which he
says, "We glorify love as the source of the most splendid creations of art; of
the noblest productions of poetry, of plastic art and of music; we reverence in
it the most powerful factor in human civilization, the basis of family life,
and, consequently, of the development of the state"; . . . he adds, "So
wonderful is love, and so immeasurably important is its influence on mental
life, that in this point, more than in any other, `supernatural' causation
seems to mock every natural explanation." It is the mystery of Nature, that
between the loftiest spiritual heights and the lowliest physical depths, there
should seem to run a pathway which the intellect of Man may climb. Haeckel has
spoken, and rightly, from the standpoint of humanity; yet he continues, and
with equal right, from the standpoint of the naturalist. "Notwithstanding all
this, the comparative history of evolution leads us back very clearly and
indubitably to the oldest and simplest source of love, to the elective affinity
of two differing cells."[79]
SELF-SACRIFICE IN NATURE
It is not, however, in Haeckel's "elective
affinity of differing cells" that we must seek the physical basis of Altruism.
That may be the physical basis of a passion which is frequently miscalled Love;
but Love itself, in its true sense as Self-sacrifice, Love with all its
beautiful elements of sympathy, tenderness, pity, and compassion, has come down
a wholly different line. It is well to be clear about this at once, for the
function of Reproduction suggests to the biological mind a view of this factor
which would limit its action to a sphere which in reality forms but the merest
segment of the whole. The Struggle for the Life of Others has certainly
connected with it sex relations, as we shall see; but we can only use it
scientifically in its broad physiological sense, as literally a Struggling for
Others, a giving up self for Others. And these others are not Other-sexes. They
have nothing to do with sex. They are the fruits of Reproduction--the egg, the
seed, the nestling, the little child. So far from its chief manifestation being
within the sphere of sex it is in the care and nurture of the young, in the
provision everywhere throughout Nature for the seed and egg, in the endless and
infinite self-sacrifices of Maternity, that Altruism finds its main
expression.
That this is the true reading of the work of this
second factor appears even in the opening act of Reproduction in the lowest
plant or animal. Pledged by the first law of its being--the law of
self-preservation--to sustain itself, the organism is at the same moment
pledged by the second law to give up itself. Watch one of the humblest
unicellular organisms at the time of Reproduction. The cell, when it grows to
be a certain size, divides itself into two, and each part sets up an
independent life. Why it does so is now known. The protoplasm inside the
cell--the body as it were--needs continually to draw in fresh food. This is
secured by a process of imbibition or osmosis through the surrounding wall. But
as the cell grows large, there is not wall enough to pass in all the food the
far interior needs, for while the bulk increases as the cube of the diameter
the surface increases only as the square. The bulk of the cell, in short, has
outrun the absorbing surface; its hunger has outgrown its satisfactions; and
unless the cell can devise some way of gaining more surface it must starve.
Hence the splitting into two smaller cells. There is now more absorbing surface
than the two had when combined. When the two smaller cells have grown as large
as the original parent, income and expenditure will once more balance. As
growth continues, the waste begins to exceed the power of repair and the life
of the cell is again threatened. The alternatives are obvious. It must divide,
or die. If it divides, what has saved its life? Self-sacrifice. By giving up
its life as an individual it has brought forth two individuals, and these will
one day repeat the surrender. Here, with differences appropriate to their
distinctive spheres, is the first great act of the moral life. All life, in the
beginning, is self-contained, self-centred, imprisoned in a single cell. The
first step to a more abundant life is to get rid of this limitation. And the
first act of the prisoner is simply to break the walls of its cell. The plant
does this by a mechanical or physiological process; the moral being by a
conscious act which means at once the breaking-up of Self-ism and the recovery
of a larger self in Altruism. Biologically, Reproduction begins as rupture. It
is the release of the cell, full-fed, yet unsatiated, from itself. "Except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit."
These facts are not coloured to suit a purpose.
There is no other language in which science itself can state them.
"Reproduction begins as rupture. Large cells beginning to die, save their lives
by sacrifice. Reproduction is literally a life-saving against the approach of
death. Whether it be the almost random rupture of one of the more primitive
forms such as Schizogenes, or the overflow and separation of multiple
buds as in Arcella, or the dissolution of a few of the Infusorians, an
organism, which is becoming exhausted, saves itself and multiplies in
reproducing."[80] There is no Reproduction in
plant, animal, or Man which does not involve self-sacrifice. All that is moral,
and social, and other-regarding has come along the line of this function.
Sacrifice, moreover, as these physiological facts disclose, is not an accident,
nor an accompaniment of Reproduction, but an inevitable part of it. It is the
universal law and the universal condition of life. The act of fertilization is
the anabolic restoration, renewal, and rejuvenescence of a katabolic cell: it
is a resurrection of the dead brought about by a sacrifice of the living, a
dying of part of life in order to further life.
Pass from the unicellular plant to one of the
higher phanerogams, and the self-sacrificing function is seen at work with
still greater definiteness, for there we have a clearer contrast with the other
function. To the physiologist a tree is not simply a tree, but a complicated
piece of apparatus for discharging, in the first place, the function of
Nutrition. Root, trunk, branch, twig, leaf, are so many organs--mouths, lungs,
circulatory-system, alimentary canal--for carrying on to the utmost perfection
the Struggle for Life. But this is not all. There is another piece of apparatus
within this apparatus of a wholly different order. It has nothing to do with
Nutrition. It has nothing to do with the Struggle for Life. It is the flower.
The more its parts are studied, in spite of all homologies, it becomes more
clear that this is a construction of a unique and wonderful character. So
important has this extra apparatus seemed to science, that it has named the
great division of the vegetable kingdom to which this and all higher plants
belong, the Phanerogams--the flowering plants; and it recognizes the complexity
and physiological value of this reproductive specialty by giving them the place
of honour at the top of the vegetable creation. Watch this flower at work for a
little, and behold a miracle. Instead of struggling for life it lays down its
life. After clothing itself with a beauty which is itself the minister of
unselfishness, it droops, it wastes, it lays down its life. The tree still
lives; the other leaves are fresh and green; but this life within a life is
dead. And why? Because within this death is life. Search among the withered
petals, and there, in a cradle of cunning workmanship, are a hidden progeny of
clustering seeds--the gift to the future which this dying mother has brought
into the world at the cost of leaving it. The food she might have lived upon is
given to her children, stored round each tiny embryo with lavish care, so that
when they waken into the world the first helplessness of their hunger is met.
All the arrangements in plant-life which concern the flower, the fruit, and the
seed are the creations of the Struggle for the Life of Others.
No one, though science is supposed to rob all the
poetry from Nature, reverences a flower like the biologist. He sees in its
bloom the blush of the young mother; in its fading, the eternal sacrifice of
Maternity. A yellow primrose is not to him a yellow primrose. It is an
exquisite and complex structure added on to the primrose plant for the purpose
of producing other primrose plants. At the base of the flower, packed in a
delicate casket, lie a number of small white objects no larger than
butterflies' eggs. These are the eggs of the primrose. Into this casket, by a
secret opening, filmy tubes from the pollen grains--now enticed from their
hiding-place on the stamens and clustered on the stigma--enter and pour their
fertilizing fovilla through a microscopic gateway which opens in the wall of
the egg and leads to its inmost heart. Mysterious changes then proceed. The
embryo of a future primrose is born. Covered with many protective coats, it
becomes a seed. The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a
rounded capsule opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this
capsule, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of
Reproduction by dispersing them over the ground. There, by and by, they will
burst their enveloping coats, protrude their tiny radicles, and repeat the
cycle of their parents' sacrificial life.
With endless variations in detail, these are the
closing acts in the Struggle for the Life of Others in the vegetable world. We
have illustrated the point from plants, because this is the lowest region where
biological processes can be seen in action, and it is essential to establish
beyond dispute the fundamental nature of the reproductive function. From this
level onwards it might be possible to trace its influence, and growing
influence, throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom until it culminates
in its most consummate expression-- a human mother. Some of the links in this
unbroken ascent will be filled in at a later stage-- for the Evolution of
Maternity is so wonderful and so intricate as to deserve a treatment of its own
--but meantime we must pass on to notice a few of the other gifts which
Reproduction has bestowed upon the world. In a rigid sense, it is impossible to
separate the gains to humanity from the Reproductive function as distinguished
from those of the Nutritive. They are co-operators, not competitors, and their
apparently rival paths continuously intertwine. But mark a few of the things
that have mainly grown up around this second function, and decide whether or
not it be a worthy ally of the Struggle for Life in the Evolution of Man.
To begin at the most remote circumference,
consider what the world owes to-day to the Struggle for the Life of Others in
the world of plants. This is the humblest sphere in which it can offer any
gifts at all, yet these are already of such a magnitude that without them the
higher world would not only be inexpressibly the poorer, but could not continue
to exist. As we have just seen, all the arrangements in plant life which
concern the flower are the creations of the Struggle for the Life of Others.
For Reproduction alone the flower is created; when the process is over it
returns to the dust. This miracle of beauty is a miracle of Love. Its splendour
of colour, its variegations, its form, its symmetry, its perfume, its honey,
its very texture, are all notes of Love--Love-calls or Love-lures or
Love-provisions for the insect world, whose aid is needed to carry the pollen
from anther to stigma, and perfect the development of its young. Yet this is
but a thing thrown in, in giving something else. The Flower, botanically, is
the herald of the Fruit. The Fruit, botanically, is the cradle of the Seed.
Consider how great these further achievements are, how large a place in the
world's history is filled by these two humble things--the Fruits and Seeds of
plants. Without them the Struggle for Life itself would almost cease. The
animal Struggle for Life is a struggle for what? For Fruits and Seeds. All
animals in the long run depend for food upon Fruits and Seeds, or upon lesser
creatures which have utilized Fruits and Seeds. Three-fourths of the population
of the world at the present moment subsist upon rice. What is rice? It is a
seed; a product of Reproduction. Of the other fourth, three-fourths live upon
grains--barley, wheat, oats, millet. What are these grains? Seeds--stores of
starch or albumen which, in the perfect forethought of Reproduction, plants
bequeath to their offspring. The foods of the world, especially the children's
foods, are the foods of the children of plants, the foods which unselfish
activities store round the cradles of the helpless, so that when the sun wakens
them to their new world they may not want. Every plant in the world lives for
Others. It sets aside something, something costly, cared for, the highest
expression of its nature. The Seed is the tithe of Love, the tithe which Nature
renders to Man. When Man lives upon Seeds he lives upon Love. Literally,
scientifically, Love is Life. If the Struggle for Life has made Man, braced and
disciplined him, it is the Struggle for Love that sustains him.
Pass from the foods of Man to drinks, and the,
gifts of Reproduction once more all but exhaust the list. This may be mere
coincidence, but a coincidence which involves both food and drink is at least
worth noting The first and universal food of the world is milk, a product of
Reproduction. All distilled spirits are products of Reproduction. All malted
liquors are made from the embryos of plants. All wines are juices of the grape.
Even on the plane of the animal appetites, in mere relation to Man's hunger and
his thirst, the factor of Reproduction is thus seen to be fundamental. To
interpret the course of Evolution without this would be to leave the richest
side even of material Nature without an explanation. Retrace the ground even
thus hastily travelled over, and see how full Creation is of meaning, of
anticipation of good for Man, how far back begins the undertone of Love.
Remember that nearly all the beauty of the world is Love-beauty--the corolla of
the flower and the plume of the grass, the lamp of the firefly, the plumage of
the bird, the horn of the stag, the face of a woman; that nearly all the music
of the natural world is Love-music--the song of the nightingale, the call of
the mammal, the chorus of the insect, the serenade of the lover; that nearly
all the foods of the world are Love-foods--the date and the raisin, the banana
and the bread-fruit, the locust and the honey, the eggs, the grains, the seeds,
the cereals, and the legumes; that all the drinks of the world are
Love-drinks--the juices of the sprouting grain and the withered hop, the milk
from the udder of the cow, the wine from the Love-cup of the vine. Remember
that the Family, the crown of all higher life, is the creation of Love; that
Co-operation, which means power, which means wealth, which means leisure, which
therefore means art and culture, recreation and education, is the gift of Love.
Remember not only these things, but the diffusions of feeling which accompany
them, the elevations, the ideals, the happiness, the goodness, and the faith in
more goodness, and ask if it is not a world of Love in which we live.
CO-OPERATION IN NATURE
Though Co-operation is not exclusively the
gift of Reproduction, it is so closely related to it that we may next observe a
few of the fruits of this most definitely altruistic principle. For here is a
principle, not merely a series of interesting phenomena, profoundly rooted in
Nature and having for its immediate purpose the establishment of Other-ism. In
innumerable cases, doubtless, Co-operation has been induced rather by the
action of the Struggle for Life--a striking circumstance in itself, as showing
how the very selfish side of life has had to pay its debt to the larger
law--but in multitudes more it is directly allied with the Struggle for the
Life of Others.
For illustrations of the principle in general we
may begin with the very dawn of life. Every life at first was a single cell.
Co-operation was unknown. Each cell was self-contained and self-sufficient, and
as new cells budded from the parent they moved away and set up life for
themselves. This self-sufficiency leads to nothing in Evolution. Unicellular
organisms may be multiplied to infinity, but the vegetable kingdom can never
rise in height, or symmetry, or productiveness without some radical change. But
soon we find the co-operative principle beginning its mysterious integrating
work. Two, three, four, eight, ten cells club together and form a small mat, or
cylinder, or ribbon--the humblest forms of corporate plant-life--in which each
individual cell divides the responsibilities and the gains of living with the
rest. The colony succeeds; grows larger; its co-operations become more close
and varied. Division of labour in new directions arises for the common good;
leaves are organized for nutrition, and special cells for reproduction. All the
organs increase in specialization; and the time arrives when from cryptogams
the plant world bursts into flowers. A flower is organized for Co-operation. It
is not an individual entity, but a commune, a most complex social system.
Sepal, petal, stamen, anther, each has its separate role in the economy, each
necessary to the other and to the life of the species as a whole. Mutual aid
having reached this stage can never be arrested short of the extinction of
plant-life itself.
Even after this stage, so triumphant is the
success of the Co-operative Principle, that having exhausted the possibilities
of further development within the vegetable kingdom, it overflowed these
boundaries and carried the activities of flowers into regions which the
plant-world never invaded before. With a novelty and audacity unique in organic
Nature, the higher flowering plants, stimulated by Co-operation, opened
communication with two apparently forever unrelated worlds, and established
alliances which secured from the subjects of these distant states a perpetual
and vital service. The history of these relations forms the most entrancing
chapter in botanical science. But so powerfully has this illustration of the
principle appealed already to the popular imagination that it becomes a mere
form to re-state it. What interests us anew in these novel enterprises,
nevertheless, is that they are directly connected with the Reproductive
Struggle. For it is not for food that the plant-world voyages into foreign
spheres, but to perfect the supremer labour of its life.
The vegetable world is a world of still life. No
higher plant has the power to move to help its neighbour, or even to help
itself, at the most critical moment of its life. And it is through this very
helplessness that these new Co-operations are called forth. The fertilizing
pollen grows on one part of the flower, the stigma which is to receive it grows
on another, or it may be on a different plant. But as these parts cannot move
towards one another, the flower calls in the aid of moving things. Unconscious
of their vicarious service, the butterfly and the bee, as they flit from flower
to flower, or the wind as it blows across the fields, carry the fertilizing
dust to the waiting stigma, and complete that act without which in a generation
the species would become extinct. No flower in the world, at least no
entomophalous flower, can continuously develop healthy offspring without the
Co-operations of an insect; and multitudes of flowers without such aid could
never seed at all. It is to these Co-operations that we owe all that is
beautiful and fragrant in the flower-world. To attract the insect and
recompense it for its trouble, a banquet of honey is spread in the heart of the
flower; and to enable the visitor to find the nectar, the leaves of the flower
are made showy or conspicuous beyond all other leaves. To meet the case of
insects which love the dusk, many flowers are coloured white; for those which
move about at night and cannot see at all, the night-flowers load the darkness
with their sweet perfume. The loveliness, the variegations of shade and tint,
the ornamentations, the scents, the shapes, the sizes of flowers, are all the
gifts of Co-operation. The flower in every detail, in fact, is a monument to
the Co-operative Principle.
Scarcely less singular are the Co-operations
among flowers themselves, the better to attract the attention of the insect
world. Many flowers are so small and inconspicuous that insects might not
condescend to notice them. But Altruism is always inventive. Instead of
dispersing their tiny florets over the plant, these club together at single
points, so that by the multitude of numbers an imposing show is made. Each of
the associating flowers in these cases preserves its individuality, and--as we
see in the Elder or the Hemlock--continues to grow on its own flower-stalk. But
in still more ingenious species the partners to a floral advertisement
sacrifice their separate stems and cluster close together on a common head. The
Thistle, for example, is not one flower, but a colony of flowers, each complete
in all its parts, but all gaining the advantage of conspicuousness by densely
packing themselves together. In the Sunflowers and many others the sacrifice is
carried still further. Of the multitude of florets clustered together to form
the mass of colour, a few cease the development of the reproductive organs
altogether, and allow their whole strength to go towards adding visibility to
the mass. The florets in the centre of the group, packed close together, are
unable to do anything in this direction; but those on the margin expand the
perianth into a blazing circle of flame, and leave the deep work of
Reproduction to those within. What are the advantages gained by all this mutual
aid? That it makes them the fittest to survive. These Co-operative Plants are
among the most numerous, most vigorous, and most widely diffused in Nature.
Self-sacrifice and Co-operation are thus recognized as sound in principle. The
blessing of Nature falls upon them. The words themselves, in any more than a
merely physical sense, are hopelessly out of court in any scientific
interpretation of things. But the point to mark is, that on the mechanical
equivalents of what afterwards come to have ethical relations Natural Selection
places a premium. Non-co-operative or feebly co-operative organisms go to the
wall. Those which give mutual aid survive and people the world with their
kind.
Without pausing to note the intricate
Co-operations of flowers which reward the eye of the specialist--the subtle
alliance with Space in Dioecious flowers; with Time in Dichogamous species, and
with Size in the Dimorphic and Trimorphic forms--consider for a moment the
extension of the principle to the Seed and Fruit. Helpless, single-handed, as
is a higher plant, with regard to the efficient fertilizing of its flowers, an
almost more difficult problem awaits it when it comes to the dispersal of its
seeds. If each seed fell where it grew, the spread of the species would shortly
be at an end. But Nature, working on the principle of Co-operation, is once
more redundant in its provisions. By a series of new alliances the offspring
are given a start on distant and unoccupied ground; and so perfect are the
arrangements in this department of the Struggle for the Life of Others that
single plants, immovably rooted in the soil, are yet able to distribute their
children over the world. By a hundred devices the fruits and seeds when ripe
are entrusted to outside hands provided with wing or parachute and launched
upon the wind, attached by cunning contrivances to bird and beast, or dropped
into stream and wave and ocean-current, and so transported over the earth.
If we turn to the Animal Kingdom, the Principle
of Co-operation everywhere once more confronts us. It is singular that, with
few exceptions, science should still know so little of the daily life of even
the common animals. A few favourite mammals, some birds, three or four of the
more picturesque and clever of the insects--these almost exhaust the list of
those whose ways are thoroughly known. But, looking broadly at Nature, one
general fact is striking--the more social animals are in overwhelming
preponderance over the unsocial. Mr. Darwin's dictum, that "those communities
which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would
flourish best" is wholly proved. Run over the names of the commoner or more
dominant mammals, and it will be found that they are those which have at least
a measure of sociability. The cat-tribe excepted, nearly all live together in
herds or troops--the elephant, for instance, the buffalo, deer, antelope,
wild-goat, sheep, wolf, jackal, reindeer, hippopotamus, zebra, hyena, and seal.
These are mammals, observe--an association of sociability in its highest
developments with reproductive specialization. Cases undoubtedly exist where
the sociability may not be referable primarily to this function; but in most
the chief Co-operations are centred in Love. So advantageous are all forms of
mutual service that the question may be fairly asked, whether after all
Co-operation and Sympathy--at first instinctive, afterwards reasoned--are not
the greatest facts even in organic Nature? To quote the words of Prince
Kropotkin: "As soon as we study animals--not in laboratories and museums only,
but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppes and the mountains--we at once
perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination
going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of
animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps more, of mutual
support, mutual aid, and mutual defence, amidst animals belonging to the same
species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of
Nature as mutual struggle. . . . If we resort to an indirect test and
ask Nature `Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each
other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals
which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more
chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest
development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts
which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we
may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual
struggle; but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far
greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and
character as ensure the maintenance and further development of the species,
together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the
individual, with the least waste of energy."[81]
In the large economy of Nature, almost more than
within these specific regions, the interdependence of part with part is
unalterably established. The system of things, from top to bottom, is an
uninterrupted series of reciprocities. Kingdom corresponds with kingdom,
organic with inorganic. Thus, to carry on the larger agriculture of Nature,
myriads of living creatures have to be retained in the earth itself--in
the earth--and to prepare and renew the soils in which the otherwise exhausted
ground may keep up her continuous gifts of vegetation. Ages before Man appeared
with his tools of husbandry, these agriculturists of Nature--in humid countries
the Worm, in sub-tropical regions the White Ant--ploughed and harrowed the
earth, so that without the Co-operations of these most lowly forms of life, the
higher beauty and fruitfulness of the world had been impossible. The very
existence of animal life, to take another case of broad economy, is possible
only through the mediation of the plant. No animal has the power to satisfy one
single impulse of hunger without the Co-operation of the vegetable world. It is
one of the mysteries of organic chemistry that the Chlorophyll contained in the
green parts of plants alone among substances has the power to break up the
mineral kingdom and utilize the products as food. Though detected recently in
the tissues of two of the very lowest animals, Chlorophyll is the peculiar
possession of the vegetable kingdom, and forms the solitary point of contact
between Man and all higher animals and their supply of food. Every grain of
matter therefore eaten by Man, every movement of the body, every stroke of work
done by muscle or brain, depends upon the contribution of a plant, or of an
animal which has eaten a plant. Remove the vegetable kingdom, or interrupt the
flow of its unconscious benefactions, and the whole higher life of the world
ends. Everything, indeed, came into being because of something else, and
continues to be because of its relations to something else. The matter of the
earth is built up of co-operating atoms; it owes its existence, its motion, and
its stability to co-operating stars. Plants and animals are made of
co-operating cells, nations of cooperating men. Nature makes no move, Society
achieves no end, the Cosmos advances not one step that is not dependent on
Co-operation; and while the discords of the world disappear with growing
knowledge, Science only reveals with increasing clearness the universality of
its reciprocities.
But to return to the more direct effects of
Reproduction. After creating Others there lay before Evolution a not less
necessary task--the task of uniting them together. To create units in
indefinite quantities and scatter them over the world is not even to take one
single step in progress. Before any higher evolution can take place these units
must by some means be brought into relation so as not only to act together, but
to react upon each other. According to well-known biological laws, it is only
in combinations, whether of atoms, cells, animals, or human beings, that
individual units can make any progress, and to create such combinations is in
every case the first condition of development. Hence the first commandment of
Evolution everywhere is "Thou shalt mass, segregate, combine, grow large."
Organic Evolution, as Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us, "is primarily the formation
of an aggregate." No doubt the necessities of the Struggle for Life tended in
many ways to fulfil this condition, and the organization of primitive
societies, both animal and human, are largely its creation. Under its influence
these were called together for mutual protection and mutual help; and
Co-operations induced in this way have played an important part in Evolution.
But the Co-operations brought about by Reproduction are at once more radical,
more universal, and more efficient. The Struggle for Life is in part a
disruptive force. The Struggle for the Life of Others is wholly a social force.
The social efforts of the first are secondary; those of the last are primary.
And had it not been for the stronger and unbreakable bond which the Struggle
for the Life of Others introduced into the world, the organization of Societies
had never even been begun. How subtly Reproduction effects its purpose an
illustration will make plain. And we shall select it again from the lowest
world of life, so that the fundamental nature of this factor may be once more
vindicated on the way.
More than two thousand years ago Herodotus
observed a remarkable custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the
Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and,
bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the
date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but they knew
that if they neglected it the date crop would be poor or wholly lost. Herodotus
offers the quaint explanation that along with these branches there came from
the desert certain flies possessed of a "vivific virtue," which somehow lent an
exuberant fertility to the dates. But the true rationale of the incantation is
now explained. Palm trees, like human beings, are male and female. The garden
plants, the date bearers, were females; the desert plants were males; and the
waving of the branches over the females meant the transference of the
fertilizing pollen dust from the one to the other.
Now consider, in this far away province of the
vegetable kingdom, the strangeness of this phenomenon. Here are two trees
living wholly different lives, they are separated by miles of desert sand; they
are unconscious of one another's existence; and yet they are so linked together
that their separation into two is a mere illusion. Physiologically they are one
tree; they cannot dwell apart. It is nothing to the point that they are neither
dowered with locomotion nor the power of conscious choice. The point is that
there is that in Nature which unites these seemingly disunited things, which
effects combinations and co-operations where one would least believe them
possible, which sustains by arrangements of the most elaborate kind
inter-relations between tree and tree. By a device the most subtle of all that
guard the higher Evolution of the world--the device of Sex--Nature accomplishes
this task of throwing irresistible bonds around widely separate things, and
establishing such sympathies between them that they must act together or
forfeit the very life of their kind. Sex is a paradox; it is that which
separates in order to unite. The same mysterious mesh which Nature threw over
the two separate palms, she threw over the few and scattered units which were
to form the nucleus of Mankind.
Picture the state of primitive Man; his fear of
other primitive Men; his hatred of them; his unsocialibility; his isolation;
and think how great a thing was done by Sex in merely starting the
crystallization of humanity. At no period, indeed, was Man ever utterly alone.
There is no such thing in nature as a man, or for the matter of that as
an animal, except among the very humblest forms. Wherever there is a
higher animal there is another animal; wherever there is a savage there is
another savage--the other half of him, a female savage. This much, at least Sex
has done for the world-it has abolished the numeral one. Observe, it has
not simply discouraged the existence of one; it has abolished the existence of
one. The solitary animal must die, and can leave no successor. Unsociableness,
therefore, is banished out of the world: it has become the very condition of
continued existence that there should always be a family group, or at least
pair. The determination of Nature to lay the foundation stone of corporate
national life at this point, and to embed Sociability for ever in the
constitution of humanity, is only obvious when we reflect with what
extraordinary thoroughness this Evolution of Sex was carried out. There is no
instance in Nature of Division of Labour being brought to such extreme
specialization. The two sexes were not only to perform different halves of the
same function, but each so entirely lost the power of performing the whole
function that even with so great a thing at stake as the continuance of the
species, one could not discharge it. Association, combination, mutual help,
fellowship, affection--things on which all material and moral progress would
ultimately turn--were thus forced upon the world at the bayonet's point.
This hint, that the course of development is
taking a social, rather than an individual direction, is of immense
significance. If that can be brought about by the Struggle for the Life of
Others--and in the next chapters we shall see that it has been--there can be no
dispute about the rank of the factor which consummates it. Along the line of
the physiological function of Reproduction, in association with its induced
activities and relations, not only has Altruism entered the world, but along
with it the necessary field for its expansion and full expression. If Nature is
to be read solely in the light of the Struggle for Life, these ethical
anticipations--and as yet we are but at the beginning of them--for a social
world and a moral life, must remain the stultification both of science and of
teleology.
THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SEX
Next among the gifts of Reproduction fall to
be examined some further contributions yielded by the new and extraordinary
device which a moment ago leaped into prominence--Sex. The direct, and
especially the collateral, issues here are of such significance that it will be
essential to study them in detail. Realize the novelty and originality of this
most highly specialized creation, and it will be seen at once that something of
exceptional moment must lie behind it. Here is a phenomenon which stands
absolutely alone on the field of Nature. There is not only nothing at all like
it in the world, but while everything else has homologues or analogues
somewhere in the cosmos, this is without any parallel. Familiarity has so
accustomed us to it that we accept the sex separation as a matter of course;
but no words can do justice to the wonder and novelty of this strange line of
cleavage which cuts down to the very root of being in everything that lives.
No theme of equal importance has received less
attention than this from evolutionary philosophy. The single problems which sex
suggests have been investigated with a keenness and brilliance of treatment
never before brought to bear in this mysterious region; and Mr. Darwin's theory
of sexual selection, whether true or false, has called attention to a multitude
of things in living Nature which seem to find a possible explanation here. But
the broad and simple fact that this division into maleness and femaleness
should run between almost every two of every plant and every animal in
existence, must have implications of a quite exceptional kind.
How deep, from the very dawn of life, this rent
between the two sexes yawns is only now beginning to be seen. Examine one of
the humblest water weeds--the Spirogyra. It consists of waving threads or
necklaces of cells, each plant to the eye the exact duplicate of the other. Yet
externally alike as they seem, the one has the physiological value of the male,
the other of the female. Though a primitive method of Reproduction, the process
in this case foreshadows the law of all higher vegetable life. From this point
upwards, though there are many cases where Reproduction is asexual, in nearly
every family of plants a Reproduction by spores takes place, and where it does
not take place its absence is abnormal, and to be accounted for by
degeneration. When we reach the higher plants the differences of sex become as
marked as among the higher animals. Male and female flowers grow upon separate
trees, or live side by side on the same branch, yet so unlike one another in
form and colour that the untrained eye would never know them to be relatives.
Even when male and female are grown on the same flower-stalk and enclosed in a
common perianth, the hermaphroditism is generally but apparent, owing to the
physiological barriers of heteromorphism and dichogamy. Sex-separation, indeed,
is not only distinct among flowering plants, but is kept up by a variety of
complicated devices, and a return to hermaphroditism is prevented by the most
elaborate precautions.
When we turn to the animal kingdom again, the
same great contrast arrests us. Half a century ago, when Balbiani described the
male and female elements in microscopic infusorians, his facts were all but
rejected by science. But further research has placed it beyond all doubt that
the beginnings of sex are synchronous almost with those shadowings in of life.
From a state marked by a mere varying of the nuclear elements, a state which
might almost be described as one antecedent to sex, the sex-distinction slowly
gathers definition, and passing through an infinite variety of forms, and with
countless shades of emphasis, reaches at last the climax of separateness which
is observed among birds and mammals. Often, even in the Metazoa, this
separateness is outwardly obscured, as in star-fishes and reptiles; often it is
matter of common observation; while sometimes it is carried to such a pitch of
specialization that only the naturalist identifies the two wholly unlike
creatures as male and female. Through the whole wide field of Nature then this
gulf is fixed. Each page of the million-leaved Book of Species must be as it
were split in two, the one side for the male, the other for the female.
Classification naturally takes little note of this distinction; but it is
fundamental. Unlikenesses between like things are more significant than
unlikenesses of unlike things. And the unlikenesses between male and female are
never small, and almost always great. Though the fundamental difference is
internal the external form varies; size, colour, and a multitude of more or
less striking secondary sexual characteristics separate the one from the other.
Besides this, and more important than all, the cycle of a year's life is never
the same for the male as for the female; they are destined from the beginning
to pursue different paths, to live for different ends.
Now what does all this mean? To say that the
sex-distinction is necessary to sustain the existence of life in the world is
no answer, since it is at least possible that life could have been kept up
without it. From the facts of Parthenogenesis, illustrated in bees and
termites, it is now certain that Reproduction can be effected without
fertilization; and the circumstance that fertilization is nevertheless the
rule, proves this method of Reproduction, though not a necessity, to be in some
way beneficial to life. It is important to notice this absence of necessity for
sex having been created--the absence of any known necessity-- from the merely
physiological standpoint. Is it inconceivable that Nature should sometimes do
things with an ulterior object, an ethical one, for instance? To no one with
any acquaintance with Nature's ways will it be possible to conceive of such a
purpose as the sole purpose. In these early days when sex was instituted it was
a physical universe. Undoubtedly sex then had physiological advantages; but
when in a later day the ethical advantages become visible, and rise to such
significance that the higher world nearly wholly rests upon them, we are
entitled, as viewing the world from that higher level, to have our own
suspicions as to a deeper motive underlying the physical.
Apart from bare necessity, it is further
remarkable that no very clear advantage of the sex-distinction has yet been
made out by Science. Hensen and Van Beneden are able to see in conjugation no
more than a Verjungung or rejuvenescence of the species. The living
machinery in its wearing activities runs down and has to be wound up again; to
keep life going some - fresh impulse must be introduced from time to time; or
the protoplasm, exhausting itself, seeks restoration in fertilization and
starts afresh.[82] To Hatschek it is a remedy
against the action of injurious variations; while to Weismann it is simply the
source of variations. "I do not know," says the latter, "what meaning can be
attributed to sexual reproduction other than the creation of hereditary
individual characters to form the material on which natural selection may work.
Sexual reproduction is so universal in all classes of multicellular organisms,
and nature deviates so rarely from it, that it must necessarily be of
pre-eminent importance. If it be true that new species are produced by
processes of selection, it follows that the development of the whole organic
world depends on these processes, and the part that amphigony has to play in
nature, by rendering selection possible among multicellular organisms, is not
only important, but of the very highest imaginable importance."[83]
These views may be each true; and probably, in a
measure, are; but the fact remains that the later psychical implications of sex
are of such transcendent character as to throw all physical considerations into
the shade. When we turn to these, their significance is as obvious as in the
other case it was obscure. This will appear if we take even the most
distinctively biological of these theories--that of Weismann. Sex, to him, is
the great source of variation in Nature, in plainer English, of the variety of
organisms in the world. Now this variety, though not the main object of sex, is
precisely what it was essential for Evolution by some means to bring about. The
first work of Evolution always is, as we have seen, to create a mass of similar
things--atoms, cells, men--and the second is to break up that mass into as many
different kinds of things as possible. Aggregation masses the raw material,
collects the clay for the potter; differentiation destroys the featureless
monotonies as fast as they are formed, and gives them back in new and varied
forms. Now if Evolution designed, among other things, to undertake the
differentiation of Mankind, it could not have done it more effectively than
through the device of sex. To the blending, or to the mosaics, of the different
characteristics of father and mother, and of many previous fathers and mothers,
under the subtle wand of heredity, all the varied interest of the human world
is due. When one considers the passing on, not so much of minute details of
character and disposition, but of the dominant temperament and type; the new
proportion in which already inextricably mingled tendencies are re-arranged,
and the changed environment in which, with each new generation, they must
unfold; it is seen how perfect an instrument for variegating humanity lies
here. Had sex done nothing more than make an interesting world, the debt of
Evolution to Reproduction had been incalculable.
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.[84] 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."[85]
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."[86] 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."[87]
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.[88]
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."
[78] Origin of Species, 6th edition, p.
50.
[79] Haeckel, Evolution of Man, Vol.
II., p. 394.
[80] The Evolution of Sex, page 232.
[81] Nineteenth Century, 1890, p.
340.
[82] Geddes and Thomson, The Evolution of
Sex, p. 163.
[83] Biological Memoirs, p. 281.
[84] The Evolution of Sex, pp. 41-6.
[85] The Evolution of Sex, p. 42. See
also pp. 41-46.
[86] Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, p.
2.
[87] Faust, Pt. II. Bayard Taylor's
tr.
[88] 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.
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