INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE SEX-CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE

"The most beautiful witness to the Evolution of Man is the Mind of a little child.... It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or Lucretius, that Maternity, bending over the hollowed cradle in the forest for a first smile of recognition from her babe, expressed the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a living witness to Ascent."—Professor Drummond.

I

Tracing the attribute of Love to its source in the parental function, it becomes clear that this function cannot be dismissed thus in a phrase.

There are two parents. And the parts played by these, respectively, not only differ widely in their nature, but they are signally disproportionate in their share of the labours involved. For while the male bears the brunt of the struggle with environment, for his own and for survival of his mate and offspring, upon the female falls the biological stress of pregnancy and lactation, and the material cares of upbringing.

The reproductive function of the male is but slight and cursory. With the female lies the tax of havening the embryo before birth, of nurturing it with her blood and substance, of suffering the drain it makes upon her vital energy, the burden of its weight; with, finally, the anguish and the dangers of delivery. And having come through all this, the subconscious and involuntary sacrifice is replaced by further—but now voluntary sacrifices. She not only continues to feed it with her living substance, but she employs brain and wit and bodily effort in tending, safeguarding and rearing it.

Meanwhile the sire—among the lower creatures, at all events—detaches himself with lordly indifference from any portion in these later, as he went free of the earlier obligations. He shares his prey with her and with their young. He defends them from the natural enemies of all. Sometimes he condescends to play for minutes with his cubs. But excepting among birds, the male parent takes little or no part in the upbringing of his family.

As with Love, so with Fatherhood, we take it as matter-of-course that this sprang and has evolved to present developments directly out of natural instinct. But as Love did not evolve out of the sex-instinct, neither did father-love evolve from a paternal instinct inherent in the lower animals and in primal man.

Of this, Professor Drummond says:

"The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no Fathers, ... while Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still wanders in the forest, a savage and unblessed soul.

"This time for him is not lost. In his own way he also is at school, and learning lessons which will one day be equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle; and these robuster elements—strength, courage, manliness, endurance, self-reliance—could only have been secured away from domestic cares.... The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem to attack.... If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent.... When we leave the Birds and pass on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile; and among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in case the father eats them."

In place of saying, therefore, that Love sprang in, and has developed from the exercise of the parental function, we must say that Love—in all its higher aspects—sprang and has developed in the maternal function.

But since every attribute, in order to be conscious and realised, is not only rooted but is reared in living function—out of what living function did Mother-love evolve? In the exercise of what vital processes has it been fostered and furthered?

In so far as these involve sacrifice of self in the interests of the child, the maternal ante-natal processes are processes of self-surrender. But these, when once incurred, are subconscious and involuntary. The prospective mother has no choice but to submit to physiological exactions.

And only a few women—those in whom maternal love is deep beyond the average—feel affection for their infants before birth.

Since love must have an object upon which to exercise its faculties and lavish its devotion, it is not, therefore, until the babe is in the mother's arms that the Love-attribute begins to function. And then the primal fount of all conscious and voluntary human selflessness and sacrifice springs afresh in the individual when, in yearning toward the helpless being in her arms, she wells with tenderness and gives herself to be its life.

In the altruistic tender yearning of the mother to her babe, whereat her blood transforms itself to milk, Human Love first sprang and functioned consciously.

This is my Body which is given for you.... This is my Blood ... which is shed for you.

Says Goethe, "There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation." He might have added "and on a great biological function." Every act of voluntary sacrifice, every impulse of compassion, mercy, tenderness, devotion, has had its inspiration and its source in this which is discredited by some as being a merely physical, and is despised, accordingly, as being an inferior process; this mystical transmutation of the mother's blood to milk, and the self-forgetting yearning wherein she yields herself as food for offspring. By the evolution, upon ever higher planes of consciousness, of this primarily instinctive sacrifice, not only Motherhood but Fatherhood too, and the Love-passion between the sexes have been fructified and purified, and uplifted down the ages. Other acts of devotion arise out of maternal ministry. But this is the intrinsic source of all.

Travelling up through all the rudimentary phases of development, simultaneously and side by side with the male fierce methods for the Survival of Fitness, there was evolving in the female, subconsciously and secretly, this sacramental impulse which was to inaugurate a new era—an era wherein charity and ruth were to be born as response to the claims of Unfitness.

The first woman who, of her free-will, gave her breast to her babe was the Mother of all the Humanities. She it was who prepared the way for the coming of Christ. By her, Love entered first into human consciousness.

And by countless generations of such willing tender sacrifice upon the part of mothers, human love has climbed out of the darkness of blind subconscious instinct into the Light of a great transfiguration.

It is weighty evidence of the evolutionary impulse inherent in the function of Lactation, that the development of this maternal trait engenders species so far higher in organisation and morale than those of creatures unequipped to suckle offspring, as to set the Mammalia in a class by themselves in the van of progressive advance. The higher organisation and morale of such result not only from the self-surrendering instinct in the mothers of species, but doubtless also from the superior nutrition promoted in the developing tissues of the young of species, by the highly-individualised food elements which are secreted by the maternal living cells.

The vital significance of this new potence in blood to transform itself to milk for sustenance of offspring is emphasised by the fact that the Mammalia are warm-blooded creatures. While that this new quickening of Life by the altruistic parental instinct originates in the female shows her as medium of that Divine Influx inspiring Creative Evolution, and evolving faculty by way of living function.

II

The question now arises: If Love and the higher affections had their origin in the maternal function, how happens it that man, in whom this capacity is absent, and who is devoid, moreover, of an inherent paternal instinct, has come, notwithstanding, to possess these higher affections?

One may answer off-hand, with the lightness of the tyro, that these have been transmitted to him by maternal inheritance.

But complex biological problems are not thus easily explained. Nature works by processes, not by implications. And the physical functions and the mental attributes of the sexes are so dissimilar, and have, with evolution, so diverged by ever further accentuation, that we must seek for definite biological processes by way of which the male has become endowed with, and whereby his primal characteristics have been transformed by the evolution in him of the maternal instinct—under guise of the wholly new and alien trait of Fatherhood.

A study of Evolution shows the differentiation and intensification of Sex-characteristics to have been the main feature in Human advance, and to have been progressively achieved by incalculable centuries of increasing differentiation and intensification of two opposite orders of impulse and faculty.

In savages and in all the less civilised races, the personal and temperamental differences between the sexes are but slight, and last for no longer than a few years of life. As with other faculties, Sex-differentiations become ever further intensified and more complexly defined as development rises in the scale. Man becomes more man. Woman, more woman. Most notable during the period over which the human organisation sustains its maximum of condition, these Sex-characteristics take longer to arrive at their perfection, and are longer and more fully sustained in the higher races and organisms than is the case with the lower. Then, with that degeneration of tissue which sets in with on-coming age, the old man becomes womanish, the old woman mannish.

It cannot be doubted that human perfection reaches its climax in the accentuation of the differences between the Sex-characteristics, physical and mental, of the one sex from those of the other. The best types of men differ far more from the best types of women than inferior men and women differ from one another. In body and in attribute, the sexes are complementary and supplementary. And their dissimilarities are the measure of their complementary and supplementary values.

Their attraction to one another, their interest and happiness in one anothers' company, are proportional to the degree in which members of one sex supply for members of the other, sentiment and qualities lacking in their own. Mannish women and womanish men are alike incapable of experiencing and inspiring the love-passion, which charms and transfigures life for true man and true woman. These unfortunate, imperfect neuter-persons, because of the deficiency in them of normal sex attributes and impulse, are shut out from the richest and sweetest, most sacred emotions of Humanity—precisely as persons of defective brain are debarred from the richer and fuller appreciations and joys of consciousness.

And yet, apart and distinct from, although at the root of this abnormal neuterdom, wherein the traits of one sex are so antagonised by those of the other that the finest powers of both are nullified—normally, all men possess latent in them the qualities of Woman; all women have latent in them the qualities of Man. Otherwise, this third Neuter-gender—mannish women and womanish men—could not have come into being.

In crises of life and under other abnormal conditions, the dormant characteristics of the one sex are seen to emerge in members of the other, and to become dominant. A woman, in the face of danger, develops the strength, the courage and the material resource of a man. A man, when put to it, reveals the gentleness, patience and psychical resource of a woman. And in neither is this substitution of alien traits imitative, merely. That it is vital and intrinsic is shown by the fact that not only mental characteristics, but the body itself becomes transformed. If the circumstances—exposure to danger, to hard and rough physical labours or to mental exactions which are the normal of the male—continue for long, woman's physique, equally with her attributes, becomes increasingly virile of mode.

A kindred metamorphosis occurs in men. When called upon to exercise for any length of time the functions of a woman, beside a sick bed, for example—or, to state it otherwise, when the male in him no longer receives the stimulus of the natural male rÔle and activities—man's virile qualities decline. He becomes emasculate.

So too in disease. With the vital powers at low ebb, man's virility ebbs low. He grows soft and sensitive, uncontrolled and emotional, loses energy and initiative; lapses in outlook and temperament from the masculine normal. In abnormal states of physical development, men are puerile or womanish.

Women, as result of like abnormal undevelopment, or after operative removal of reproductive organs (propter quos est mulier) become mannish of type. In extreme cases the figure changes to a strong and sturdy maleness, the voice drops to gruffness; manners and speech become terse and abrupt, the jaw squares; even moustache or beard may develop. Such women lose, perhaps, every womanly characteristic; refinement of form, mental delicacy and sensitiveness, emotion, subtlety. They lapse to the biological grade, not of cultured, but of rough working men. In lesser degrees of sex-extinction, such as are seen in many of our modern girls, de-sexed by masculine training, the subjects are boyish merely; lean, active, restless, hipless, breastless, lacking all those fair, delicate artistries of face and form, as likewise the complex sensibility and emotionalism which are the higher characteristics of their sex.

III

These and other singularities of the phenomenon indicate that man has, so to speak, a woman concealed in him; woman has a man submerged in her. The case suggests the little Noah and his wife of the toy weatherglass. Under some conditions the man in woman emerges temporarily. Under some conditions the woman in man reveals herself. But the emergence in the one sex of the characteristics of the other, when appreciable and permanent, is abnormal and unpleasing, and is obviously degenerative.

Man is at his best when the woman in him is dominated by his natural virile traits. Woman is at her best when the man in her is sheathed within her native womanliness. This way, each is a highly evolved and a finely-specialised creation.

Nevertheless, such possession, in latency, of the qualities of the other, not only enhances for members of both sexes the potence of their own, inspiring and enriching these, but it engenders more perfect sympathy and understanding between them. The woman in man endues him with intuitive apprehension of the Woman-nature; of its needs and modes, its disabilities, its sufferings and aspirations. The man in woman informs her of the intrinsic values of his sterner calibre, and thus lends her patience with his impatiences, moves her tenderness and care for him in his rougher, more arduous lot, wins her admiration of his enterprises and ambitions. Moreover, the man in her strengthens and intelligises her mental fibre, stiffens and renders more stable and effective her more pliant will and softer, more delicate aptitudes.

While she, in her turn, endows him with her intrinsic mentalities.

Masculine intellection, pure and simple, is initiative, vigorous, enterprising; analytical, logical, critical; its outlook rational and concrete, its disposition just and honest. Capable in the degree of its virility, of strenuous and sustained endeavour, of keen concentration and close application; taking nothing for granted, but questioning and demanding proof of all things, it is an admirable executive agent of Mind. Per se, however, it is rational and deductive, judicial and judicious, rather than inspirational and creative. The blending with it of the Woman-faculty in him quickens his male brain by contributing the emotional element; endues it with intuitive sensibility, fructifies it with female creativeness.

Thus it blossoms in Imagination—a new talent, which his natural intellectual energy and executive ability enable him to raise to highest issues in Inductive Science and the creative Arts.

Sex, with its phenomena of the characteristics of both sexes blended but, nevertheless, distinctive in the totally dissimilar constitution of members of both, presents an enigma which all the thinkers of all the ages have left unsolved.

What is its significance—what its explanation? How has it been possible—without miracle, but by way of biological sequences of form and process, of function and faculty—for the divergent characteristics, physical and mental, of the two sexes to have developed in both, not only without either order of characteristics (normally) neutralising those of the other, but, on the contrary, with both orders ever further intensifying their differences in the sex to which they belong?

By hereditary transmission. True! But by what precise means? Because Nature achieves her results always by the continuous operation of unerring Law and intensifying processes, not by eccentricities or deviations. When she seems to us to skip at random, it means that we have missed some intermediate footprints linking her progressive sequences in a long unbroken train.

This problem of human duality, physical and psychical, has baffled not biologists only, but philosophers, religionists and seers. It fills both life and literature with puzzles, paradoxes, incongruities. It has been the source of perpetual misapprehension, misconception, maladministration, personal and ethical.

It lies at the root of the whole Woman question. It has supplied the motive—and has made the mischief of the Feminist propaganda and practice.

Because, in view of the masculine qualities latent in women, allied with the circumstance that masculine powers are those most profitable and effective on the plane alike of physics and of economics, it has seemed an inevitable conclusion that these dormant male potentialities were powers lying idle; virgin soil which, tilled and cultivated, would yield fruitful harvest. And this for the benefit not of woman solely, but of Humanity at large. Strangely enough, the converse proposition has not presented itself. A pity! For it might have brought enlightenment. Because it presents itself outright in the form of a patent absurdity.

Suppose a Man's Movement which should have had for aim the cult in males of their potential woman-qualities! Not for an instant could the project have found footing as being rational, its ends desirable, or as improving upon Nature. Everywhere is pity or contempt for the effeminate man. He is regarded as a poor creature, neither one thing nor the other; as little the peer of true man as he is notably an unworthy counterfeit of woman.

Yet how is this? Is it that we admit the male-sex to be so vastly and intrinsically superior to the female that we are not satisfied for half only, but demand that the whole human species shall be male? Nevertheless, since masculine qualities, although undeniably present, are normally latent in women, they must be inferior in power and calibre to these same qualities in men. Otherwise, in place of remaining in latency, they would assert themselves like men. Woman's inferior masculine powers, even when developed to the full, can equip her, therefore, to be no more than inferior male; "lesser man" merely, in place of being "diverse"—the highly-differentiated, finely-specialised being for which Nature would seem to have been shaping in her, during untold Æons of progressive differentiation.

IV

The prevailing notion is that these masculine potentialities dormant in women are powers common to both sexes, which have been blighted in the one by long generations of educational and vocational disabilities precluding exercise and outlet for them. Or that they are powers which have been dwarfed by long "subjection" of the sex in maternal and domestic functions mainly.

Consulting Biology, we find that such artificial repression of Faculty in the mother (even were artificially-repressed faculty transmissible as such) could in no way have limited itself, in succeeding generations, to inheritance by daughters. On the contrary, the more we learn of the laws of Heredity, the more it is seen that Faculty descends from mother to son, rather than from mother to daughter. And yet, despite the sex-disabilities, personal and social, which are now condemned as having precluded the mothers of earlier eras from developing their masculine abilities, such mothers transmitted masculine characteristics in ever-increasing degree to successive generations of male offspring.

Whereupon another seeming paradox confronts us. Namely, that the sons of those earlier women, in whom masculine inherences were permitted to remain dormant, were notably more virile of body and mind than are the sons of latter-day emancipated mothers who have sedulously cultivated and have fully exercised their male proclivities.

And now upsprings a further momentous consideration: Is this cause and effect? Were the sons of women in whom the potential male had remained abeyant, more virile of body and brain than are the sons of women who have cultivated masculine characteristics, solely and absolutely because the mothers in the latter case had misappropriated to their own uses powers that belonged by right of heredity to sons? While those other mothers, by retaining such in latency, preserved them as a rich inheritance for male heirs. Is it similar, indeed, to the cases of a mother who realises and expends for her own purposes her sons' financial patrimony, and of a mother who, expending the interest alone thereof, retains the capital intact; and is enabled thus to pass it on as heritage? Is the power held latent in one generation the potential of the generation following?

It may be asked: Why should woman forgo possession and exercise of faculties available to her, in order to transmit these to sons? One might answer as in respect of that other patrimony. If it be true that she holds these powers in trust merely, they are not hers to spend. To expend them is to despoil her sons; to make paupers and bankrupts of them, humanly speaking. Further, since daughters inherit from the father, the male entail woman forbears to realise and to exploit for her own uses returns to her sex in the person of her grand-daughter—by paternal inheritance. For the able father is the parent of the able daughter.

Thus Nature works with the eternal justice of eternal reciprocity between the sexes; making them all the while more complexly diverse, but nevertheless more closely interdependent. So that one sex can neither progress nor can it regress by itself; but draws the other onward with it, or drags it back. Thus, the bread of human heritage consigned to the stream of posterity by one sex, for equipment and furtherance of the other, returns to the hand of the sex that consigned it.

If this be so—and I hope to prove it so—the woman who develops the potential male in her defrauds of its lawful racial and personal entail not only the opposite sex, in the person of her son, but she defrauds of its dower her own sex too, in the person of her grand-daughter.

Of the interesting and important biological processes underlying the mystery of the Dual-Sex constitution and its manifold phenomena, I am about to present a wholly new and—I venture to believe—a wholly true and convincing elucidation.

Natura simplex est, said Newton, et sibi semper consonans. (Nature is simple and always agrees with herself.) Bewilderingly multiple in her phenomena, she is superbly simple in her principles. By the operation of her one great Law of Gravitation, she sustains the mighty Solar systems—and brings the apple to the ground. By the extension, counterpoise and co-operation of one Primal Cosmic Energy—with its dual impulses, Centripetal and Centrifugal—she has generated all the diverse marvels of a Universe. And in view of her simplicity of Principle, it is conceivable that the Duality of Sex may be an extension into Life of that same principle of Duality which characterises the vaster Cosmic phenomena.

If this be true, Man and Woman are the complex resultant of infinitely many and varied evolutionary differentiations and associations of the two modes of Primal Energy. If so, the principle of Sex must have existed before Matter; must have been inherent in Creation before Creation began to evolve. And if so, Evolution would seem to have had for its purpose the ever further and fuller manifestation of these dual and contrary inherences in terms of Life and Sex. While, to judge by effects, it has had for its means such ever more intimate and intricate co-operations of these as have resulted in the progressively diverse and complex developments found to-day in Human Life and Human Sex-Characteristics.