exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely
a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed
unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively
modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was
regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual
matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women
possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while
another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most
simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in
lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of
life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an
elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible
to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was
pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
Christianity again, which ended by making women into the chief pillars of
the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later,
when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of
subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the
licentiousness of those northern women at whose coldness they are now
shocked.

That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in
the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving,
by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to
achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed
with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions,
the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that
both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating
object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with
which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two
contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the
play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the
delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were
forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic
life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They
were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth,
according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the
latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
range, are the erotic rights of women.

The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims,
have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted
them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of
women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and
women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to
understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of
women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been
utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so
that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if
that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question
whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic
rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims
the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic
aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them
exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in
harmonious sympathy. That is why the erotic rights of women have been the
last of all to be attained.

Yet to-day we see a change here. The change required is, it has been said,
a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the
sexual impulses are manifested. It involves no necessary change in the
external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed
out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order. Various
recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude
and of atmosphere. In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the
men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day
work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above
themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves. In
part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered many
elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more
and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties,
privileges, and responsibilities as men. In part, also, it may be added,
there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the
primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating and dissolving
many foolish and often mischievous superstitions. The result is that, as
many competent observers have noted, the young men of to-day show a new
attitude towards women and towards marriage, an attitude of simplicity and
frankness, a desire for mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss
difficulties, an appeal to understand and to be understood. Such an
attitude, which had hitherto been hard to attain, at once creates the
atmosphere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic activities of women
can breathe and live.

This consummation, we have seen, may be regarded as the attainment of
certain rights, the corollary of other rights in the social field which
women are slowly achieving as human beings on the same human level as men.
It opens to women, on whom is always laid the chief burden of sex, the
right to the joy and exaltation of sex, to the uplifting of the soul
which, when the right conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the
intimate approach and union of two human beings. Yet while we may find
convenient so to formulate it, we need to remember that that is only a
fashion of speech, for there are no rights in Nature. If we take a broader
sweep, what we may choose to call an erotic right is simply the perfect
poise of the conflicting forces of life, the rhythmic harmony in which
generation is achieved with the highest degree of perfection compatible
with the make of the world. It is our part to transform Nature's large
conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the
plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep
into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious
heads toward the sky.




CHAPTER VI

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX


When we hear the sexual functions spoken of we commonly understand the
performance of an act which normally tends to the propagation of the race.
When we see the question of sexual abstinence discussed, when the
desirability of sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when the idea
arises of the erotic rights and needs of woman, it is always the same act
with its physical results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception is
quite adequate for practical working purposes in the social world. It
enables us to deal with all our established human institutions in the
sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of Euclid enable us to
traverse the field of elementary geometry. But beyond these useful
purposes it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions of sex on the
psychic and erotic side are of far greater extension than any act of
procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are
concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge
our outlook and deepen our insight.

There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or
what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human
beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing
offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher
mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual
impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual
relationship--or even in order to understand all that is involved in the
secondary object of marriage--we must go beyond conscious motives and
consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted
in the human organism.

The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from
without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work,
and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the
glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on
an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know,
liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and
developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full
life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their
balanced functions are essential to wholesome and complete existence. In
a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest
ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for
arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell,
the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is
significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in
ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in
conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole
organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world
by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become
immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on
a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is
becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
with its resulting lack of organic harmony and equilibrium, can be
counteracted by the physical and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with
the external world. In this action and reaction, moreover, we cannot
distinguish between sexual ends and general ends. The activities of the
ductless glands and their hormones equally serve both ends in ways that
cannot be distinguished. "The individual metabolism," as a distinguished
authority in this field has expressed it, "is the reproductive
metabolism."[18] Thus the establishment of our complete activities as
human beings in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately dependent
upon, a perpetual and many-sided play with our environment.

[18] W. Blair Bell, _The Sex-Complex,_ 1920, p. 108. This book is a
cautious and precise statement of the present state of knowledge on this
subject, although some of the author's psychological deductions must be
treated with circumspection.

It is thus that we arrive at the importance of the play-function, and
thus, also, we realise that while it extends beyond the sexual sphere it
yet definitely includes that sphere. There are at least three different
ways of understanding the biological function of play. There is the
conception of play, on which Groos has elaborately insisted, as
education: the cat "plays" with the mouse and is thereby educating
itself in the skill necessary to catch mice; all our human games are a
training in qualities that are required in life, and that is why in
England we continue to attribute to the Duke of Wellington the saying
that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
Then there is the conception of play as the utilisation in art of the
superfluous energies left unemployed in the practical work of life; this
enlarging and harmonising function of play, while in the lower ranges it
may be spent trivially, leads in the higher ranges to the production of
the most magnificent human achievements. But there is yet a third
conception of play, according to which it exerts a direct internal
influence--health-giving, developmental, and balancing--on the whole
organism of the player himself. This conception is related to the other
two, and yet distinct, for it is not primarily a definite education in
specific kinds of life-conserving skill, although it may involve the
acquisition of such skill, and it is not concerned with the construction
of objective works of art, although--by means of contact in human
relationship--it attains the wholesome organic effects which may be
indirectly achieved by artistic activities. It is in this sense that we
are here concerned with what we may perhaps best call the play-function
of sex.[19]

[19] The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice Parmelee,
_Personality and Conduct_, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But it is understood
by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more extended sense than I have used
it.

As thus understood, the play-function of sex is at once in an inseparable
way both physical and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity all the
complex and inter-related systems of the organism. At the same time it
satisfies the most profound emotional impulses, controlling in harmonious
poise the various mental instincts. Along these lines it necessarily tends
in the end to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and introduce into
the sphere of sex the other two more objective fields of play, that of
play as education, and that of play as artistic creation. It may not be
true, as was said of old time, "most of our arts and sciences were
invented for love's sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion as
we truly and wisely exercise the play-function of sex, we are at the same
time training our personality on the erotic side and acquiring a mastery
of the art of love.

The longer I live the more I realise the immense importance for the
individual of the development through the play-function of erotic
personality, and for human society of the acquirement of the art of love.
At the same time I am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
personality and the ignorance of the art of love even among those men and
women, experienced in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might most
confidently expect to find such development and such art. At times one
feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate
field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally
possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving,
the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement
of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.

In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge
but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from
superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing
knowledge. We have to cease to regard as admirable the man who regards
the accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it
affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with
contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity
therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of
love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic
personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and
luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of
little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in all
its aspects. Now all this is difficult, and for some people even painful;
to root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it cannot all be done in
a day.

It is not easy to form a clear picture of the erotic life of the average
man in our society. To the best informed among us knowledge in this field
only comes slowly. Even when we have decided what may or may not be termed
"average" the sources of approach to this intimate sphere remain few and
misleading; at the best the women a man loves remain far more illuminating
sources of information than the man himself. The more one knows about him,
however, the more one is convinced that, quite independently of the place
we may feel inclined to afford to him in the scale of virtue, his
conception of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love, if they
have any existence at all, are of a humble character. As to the notion of
play in the sphere of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
practice it, that is for him something quite low down, something to be
ashamed of, and he would not dream of associating it with anything he has
been taught to regard as belonging to the spiritual sphere. The conception
of "divine play" is meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: (1)
He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to
him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2)
he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life. It
cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is
part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that
they become pathetically inadequate. It is to be noted that both of them
are based solely on the physical act of sexual conjunction, and that they
are both exclusively self-regarding. So that they are, after all, although
the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may be able to find, yet
still not really erotic. For love is not primarily self-regarding. It is
the intimate, harmonious, combined play--the play in the wide as well as
in the more narrow sense we are here concerned with--of two personalities.
It would not be love if it were primarily self-regarding, and the act of
intercourse, however essential to secure the propagation of the race, is
only an incident, and not an essential in love.

Let us turn to the average woman. Here the picture must usually be still
more unsatisfactory. The man at least, crude as we may find his two
fundamental notions to be, has at all events attained mental pride and
physical satisfaction. The woman often attains neither, and since the man,
by instinct or tradition, has maintained a self-regarding attitude, that
is not surprising. The husband--by primitive instinct partly, certainly by
ancient tradition--regards himself as the active partner in matters of
love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
His wife consequently falls into the complementary position, and regards
herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible, if not
indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of, should she by chance experience
it. So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and
pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.

Few people realise--few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to
realise--how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their
own lives and in the power to help others. A woman has a husband, she has
marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic
troubles--it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that
constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the
home and in the world. Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly
are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional
side--and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains--quite virginal, as
immature as a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic personality, she
has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature
remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of
bringing her personality--having indeed no achieved personality to
bring--to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around
her.

That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under
favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it
might so easily be avoided. But there is this further result, full of the
possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however
innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive
emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her
husband.

It happens so often. A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home,
preserved from evil companions, preserved also from what her friends
regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals,
yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has
little more than a conventional knowledge. Yet he may by good chance be
the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual
experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and
honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband. The union
seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking
to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.
But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his
wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense
means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife
according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised
that his knowledge was imperfect. She on her side loves her husband; she
comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.
Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she has
never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly
satisfied. The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she
has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating
influence; her erotic personality has never been developed. Then
something happens. Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to
take part in the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for
her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends,
perhaps her husband's friends. Some man among them becomes congenial to
her. There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and
if there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused and the friendship
brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or
intrigue--scarcely however a desirable kind of solution--becomes possible.
But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable
feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders such
solution unacceptable. In due course the husband returns, and then, to her
utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before,
that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has
fallen in love. She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for
whom her affection and attachment remain the same as before, for what has
happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any
change in her old love. The situation which arises is one of torturing
anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are
animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses. The husband in his
devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be
gratified. She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which
seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.
We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most
desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation. The points to note are
that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute
unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and
intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided
if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state
and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the
development of personality.

A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she
may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is
past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the
development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full
flowering of her whole nature. Up to then she had to all appearance had
all the essential experiences of life. Yet she had remained spiritually
virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her
sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and
bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was
unhappy. Now she has become another person. The new liberated forces from
within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich
complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and
harmonised her realisation of all relationships. Her new erotic experience
has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has
quickened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same time, more mentally
alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences
of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may
explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her
expression, a new force into all her activities. Such is the exquisite
flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface
of life are now and then privileged to see. The sad part of it is that we
see it so seldom and then often so late.

It must not be supposed that there is any direct or speedy way of
introducing into life a wider and deeper conception of the erotic
play-function, and all that it means for the development of the
individual, the enrichment of the marriage relationship, and the moral
harmony of society. Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise and to
stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It is only slowly and indirectly
that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew
life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those
degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they
are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the
heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. To make way for the
true and beautiful revelation, we can at least seek to cast out those
ancient growths, which may once have been true and beautiful, but now are
false and poisonous. By casting out from us the conception of love as vile
and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our hearts for the reception
of love as something unspeakably holy.

In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day
without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or
even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
psycho-analysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from
outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and
impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free-play of his
nature. It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the
suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound
rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the
leading out of the individual's special tendencies.[20] It removes
inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or
that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best
moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger and freer and more
natively spontaneous morality to come into play. It has this influence
above all in the sphere of sex, where such inhibitions have been most
powerfully laid on the native impulses, where the natural tendencies have
been most surrounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with artificial
stains of impurity and degradation derived from alien and antiquated
traditions. Thus the therapeutical experience of the psycho-analysts
reinforces the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the
intimate experiences of life.

[20] See, for instance, H.W. Frink, _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_,
1918, Ch. X.

Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when
propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It
is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions.
It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism,
physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has
been said, is so serious as lust--to use the beautiful term which has been
degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure--and
we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. Play is
primarily the instinctive work of the brain, but it is brain activity
united in the subtlest way to bodily activity. In the play-function of sex
two forms of activity, physical and psychic, are most exquisitely and
variously and harmoniously blended. We here understand best how it is that
the brain organs and the sexual organs are, from the physiological
standpoint, of equal importance and equal dignity. Thus the adrenal
glands, among the most influential of all the ductless glands, are
specially and intimately associated alike with the brain and the sex
organs. As we rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands march
side by side in developmental increase of size, and at the same time,
sexual activity and adrenal activity equally correspond.

Lovers in their play--when they have been liberated from the traditions
which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
love--are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the
body and of the soul. They are passing to each other the sacramental
chalice of that wine which imparts the deepest joy that men and women can
know. They are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind husband and
wife together more truly and more firmly than the priest of any church.
And if in the end--as may or may not be--they attain the climax of free
and complete union, then their human play has become one with that divine
play of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of the dust of the
ground and in his own image, some God of Chaos once created Man.




CHAPTER VII

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE

I


The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the
most intimate of all relations. It is a relation which almost amounts to
identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so abstract, as scarcely to
concern us at all. It is only lately indeed that there has been formulated
even so much as a science to discuss this relationship, and the duties
which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet
the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes
arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior
person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other
side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of
Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of
classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia
for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by Francis Galton, less than
fifty years ago, to express "the effort of Man to improve his own breed."
But the thing the term stands for is, in reality, also far from modern. It
is indeed ancient and may even be nearly as old as Man himself.
Consciously or unconsciously, sometimes under pretexts that have disguised
his motives even from himself, Man has always been attempting to improve
his own quality or at least to maintain it. When he slackens that effort,
when he allows his attention to be too exclusively drawn to other ends, he
suffers, he becomes decadent, he even tends to die out.

Primitive eugenics had seldom anything to do with what we call
"birth-control." One must not say that it never had. Even the mysterious
mika operation of so primitive a race as the Australians has been supposed
to be a method of controlling conception. But the usual method, even of
people highly advanced in culture, has been simpler. They preferred to see
the new-born infant before deciding whether it was likely to prove a
credit to its parents or to the human race generally, and if it seemed not
up to the standard they dealt with it accordingly. At one time that was
regarded as a cruel and even inhuman method. To-day, when the most
civilised nations of the world have devoted all their best energies to
competitive slaughter, we may have learnt to view the matter differently.
If we can tolerate the wholesale murder and mutilation of the finest
specimens of our race in the adult possession of all their aptitudes we
cannot easily find anything to disapprove in the merciful disposal of the
poorest specimens before they have even attained conscious possession of
their senses. But in any case, and whatever we may ourselves be pleased to
think or not to think, it is certain that some of the most highly
developed peoples of the world have practised infanticide. It is equally
certain that the practise has not proved destructive to the emotions of
humanity and affection. Even some of the lowest human races,--as we
commonly estimate them,--while finding it necessary to put aside a certain
proportion of their new-born infants, expend a degree of love and even
indulgence on the children they bring up which is rarely found among
so-called civilised nations.

There is no need, however, to consider whether or not infanticide is
humane. We are all agreed that it is altogether unnecessary, and that it
is seldom that even that incipient form of infanticide called abortion,
still so popular among us, need be resorted to. Our aim now--so far at all
events as mere ideals go--is not to destroy life but to preserve it; we
seek to improve the conditions of life and to render unnecessary the
premature death of any human creature that has once drawn breath.

It is indeed just here that we find a certain clash between the modern
view of life and the view of earlier civilisations. The ancients were
less careful than we claim to be of the individual, but they were more
careful of the race. They cultivated eugenics after their manner, though
it was a manner which we reprobate.[21] We pride ourselves, rightly or
wrongly, on our care for the individual; during all the past century we
claim to have been strenuously working for an amelioration of the
environment which will make life healthier and pleasanter for the
individual. But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether
desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we
have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the
amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life. The
most we hope is that somehow the improvement of the conditions of the
individual will incidentally improve the stock. These our practical
ideals, which have flourished for a century past, arose out of the great
French Revolution and were inspired by the maxim of that Revolution, as
formulated by Rousseau, that "All men are born equal." That maxim, was
overthrown half a century ago; the great biological movement of science,
initiated by Darwin, showed that it was untenable. All men are not born
equal. Everyone agrees about that now, but nevertheless the momentum of
the earlier movement was so powerful that we still go on acting as though
all men are, and always will be, born equal, and that we need not trouble
ourselves about heredity but only about the environment.

[21] But this statement must not be left without important
qualification. Thus the ancient Greeks (as Moissides has shown in
_Janus_, 1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but also
their women, often took the most enlightened interest in eugenics, and,
moreover, showed it in practice. They were in many respects far in
advance of us. They clearly realised, for instance, the need of a proper
interval between conceptions, not only to ensure the health of women,
but also the vigour of the offspring. It is natural that among every
fine race eugenics should be almost an instinct or they would cease to
be a fine race. It is equally natural that among our modern degenerates
eugenics is an unspeakable horror, however much, as the psycho-analysts
would put it, they rationalise that horror.

The way out of this clash of ideals--which has compelled us to hope
impossibilities from the environment because we dreaded what seemed the
only alternative--is, as we know, furnished by birth-control. An
unqualified reliance on the environment, making it ever easier and easier
for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in
the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge of
the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the
ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling us to cherish that
ideal of the sacredness of human life which we profess to honour so
highly. The main difficulty is that it demands a degree of scientific
precision which the ancients could not possess and might dispense with, so
long as they were able to decide the eugenic claims of the infant by
actual inspection. We have to be content to determine not what the infant
is but when it be likely to be, and that involves a knowledge of the laws
of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire. We may all in
our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater
extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make
on our own families. To such observations Galton attached great importance
and strove in various ways to further them. Detailed records, physical and
mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is
desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal
and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific
value. We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in
human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank. We have no right to
attempt to impose on any human creature an exaggerated and one-sided
development. But it is not only our right, it is our duty, or rather one
may say, the natural impulse of every rational and humane person, to seek
that only such children may be born as will be able to go through life
with a reasonable prospect that they will not be heavily handicapped by
inborn defect or special liability to some incapacitating disease. What is
called "positive" eugenics--the attempt, that is, to breed special
qualities--may well be viewed with hesitation. But so-called "negative"
eugenics--the effort to clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the
coming generation--demands our heartiest sympathy and our best
co-operation, for as Galton, the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards
the end of his life of this new science: "Its first object is to check the
birth-rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being,
though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely." We can seldom be
absolutely sure what stocks should not propagate, and what two stocks
should on no account be blended, but we can attain reasonable probability,
and it is on such probabilities in every department of life that we are
always called upon to act.

It is often said--I have said it myself--that birth-control when practised
merely as a limitation of the family, scarcely suffices to further the
eugenic progress of the race. If it is not deliberately directed towards
the elimination of the worst stocks or the worst possibilities in the
blending of stocks, it may even tend to diminish the better stocks since
it is the better stocks that are least likely to propagate at random. This
is true if other conditions remain equal. It is evident, however, that the
other conditions will not remain equal, for no evidence has yet been
brought forward to show that birth-control, even when practised without
regard to eugenic considerations--doubtless the usual rule up to the
present--has produced any degeneration of the race. On the contrary, the
evidence seems to show that it has improved the race. The example of
Holland is often brought forward as evidence in favour of such a tendency
of birth-control, since in that country the wide-spread practise of
birth-control has been accompanied by an increase in the health and
stature of the people, as well as an increase in their numbers to a
remarkable degree, for the fall in the birth-rate has been far more than
compensated by the fall in the death-rate, while it is said that the
average height of the population has increased by four inches. It is,
indeed, quite possible to see why, although theoretically a random
application of birth-control cannot affect the germinal possibilities of a
community, in practise it may improve the somatic conditions under which
the germinal elements develop. There will probably be a longer interval
between the births of the children, which has been demonstrated by Ewart
and others to be an important factor not only in preserving the health of
the mother but in increasing the health and size of the child. The
diminution in the number of the children renders it possible to bestow a
greater amount of care on each child. Moreover, the better economic
position of the father, due to the smaller number of individuals he has to
support, makes it possible for the family to live under improved
conditions as regards nourishment, hygiene, and comfort. The observance of
birth-control is thus a far more effective lever for raising the state of
the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is
direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to
attain the same end. For however energetic such collective action may be
in striving to improve general social conditions by municipalising or
State-supporting public utilities, it can never adequately counter-balance
the excessive burden and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a family
by undue child-production. It can only palliate them.

When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised
without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act
beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a
power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards
that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out, there are two objects that
may be aimed at: one called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote the
increase of the best stocks amongst us; the other, called negative
eugenics, which seeks to promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our
knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to pursue either of these
objects with complete certainty. This is especially so as regards positive
eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to attempt to breed human
beings, as we do animals, for points, when we are in the presence of what
seem to us our finest human stocks, physically, morally, and
intellectually, it is our wisest course just to leave them alone as much
as we can. The best stocks will probably be also those best able to help
themselves and in so doing to help others. But that is obviously not so as
regards the worst stocks. It is, therefore, fortunate that the aim here
seems a little clearer. There are still many abnormal conditions of which
we cannot say positively that they are injurious to the race and that we
should therefore seek to breed them out. But there are other conditions so
obviously of evil import alike to the subjects themselves and to their
descendants that we cannot have any reasonable doubt about them. There is,
for instance, epilepsy, which is known to be transformed by heredity into
various abnormalities dangerous alike to their possessors and to society.
There are also the pronounced degrees of feeble-mindedness, which are
definitely heritable and not only condemn those who reveal them to a
permanent inaptitude for full life, but constitute a subtle poison working
through the social atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level of
civilisation in the community. Nowhere has this been so thoroughly studied
and so clearly proved as in the United States. It is only necessary to
mention Dr. C.B. Davenport of the Department of Experimental Evolution at
Cold Spring Harbor (New York) who has carried on so much research in
regard to the heredity of epilepsy and other inheritable abnormal
conditions, and Dr. Goddard of Vineland (New Jersey) whose work has
illustrated so fully the hereditary relationships of feeble-mindedness.
The United States, moreover, has seen the development of the system of
social field-work which has rendered possible a more complete knowledge of
family heredity than has ever before been possible on a large scale.

It is along such lines as these that our knowledge of the eugenic
conditions of life will grow adequate and precise enough to form an
effective guide to social conduct. Nature, and a due attention to laws of
heredity in life, will then rank in equal honour to our eyes with nurture
or that attention to the environmental conditions of life which we already
regard as so important. A regard to nurture has led us to spend the
greatest care on the preservation not only of the fit but the unfit, while
meantime it has wisely suggested to us the desirability of segregating or
even of sterilising the unfit. But the study of Nature leads us further
and, as Galton said, "Eugenics rests on bringing no more individuals into
the world than can be properly cared for, and these only of the best
stocks." That is to say that the only instrument by which eugenics can be
made practically effective in the modern world is birth-control.

It is not scientific research alone, nor even the wide popular diffusion
of knowledge, that will suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control,
singly or in their due combination, into the course of our daily lives.
They need to be embodied in our instinctive impulses. Galton considered
that eugenics must become a factor of religion and be regarded as a sacred
and virile creed, while Ellen Key holds that the religions of the past
must be superseded by a new religion which will be the awakening of the
whole of humanity to a consciousness of the "holiness of generation." For
my own part, I scarcely consider that either eugenics or birth-control can
be regarded as properly a part of religion. Being of virtue and not of
grace they belong more naturally to the sphere of morals. But here they
certainly need to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the mind can
take them. They cannot become guides to conduct until their injunctions
have been printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The demands of the
race must speak from within us, in the voice of conscience which we
disobey at our peril. When that happens with regard to ascertained laws of
racial well-being we may know that we are truly following, even though not
in the letter, those great spirits, like Galton with his intellectual
vision and Ellen Key with her inspired enthusiasm, who have pointed out
new roads for the ennoblement of the race.


II

It may be well, before we go further, to look a little more closely into