conditional and at the mercy of the acts of
individuals--has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious
concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings,
at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons
of both sexes having served the race for evermore in the highest degree.
We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for
herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It
will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a
sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every
kind, in which this vastly important question is at present involved.

This conception of the individual as something meant to be a parent will
not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice
to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency
to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar
mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little
reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience
and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann
upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the developmental
processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine
that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and
directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the
germ-plasm, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with
what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the
mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose that
even our most enjoyable and apparently most personal attributes and
appetites were designed by Nature for us. Not at all. It is the race for
which she is concerned. It is not the individual as individual, but the
individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she
hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the
individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or
the individual in whom it has never appeared. Our appetites for food and
drink, well devised by Nature to be pleasant in their satisfaction--lest
otherwise we should fail to satisfy them and a possible parent should be
lost to her purposes--are immediately rendered of no account when there
stirs within us, whether in its crude or transmuted forms, the appetite
for the exercis