e of which these others, and we ourselves, exist, since
in Nature's eyes and scheme we are but vessels of the future. In later
chapters we shall have much occasion, because of their great practical
importance in the conduct of woman's life from girlhood onwards, to
discuss the physiological and psychological facts which demonstrate
overwhelmingly the truth of the view that the individual was evolved by
Nature for the care of the germ-plasm, or, in other words, was and is
constructed primarily and ultimately for parenthood.

Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in
any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee;
any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any
instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the
highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent
of either sex. On the contrary, it is in such cases as that of the
worker-bee that we find the warrant--in apparent contradiction--for our
notion of the meaning of the individual, and also the key to the problem
placed before us amongst ourselves by the case of inevitable
spinsterhood. Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high
and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but,
in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which
she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to
represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far
from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive
characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility. But when we
come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find
that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact,
the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her
incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfilment of the whole of
motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore,
that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the
individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception,
but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case
of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case
of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from
either the animal or the vegetable world. Natural selection, of which
the continuance of the race is the first and never n