battle-field. What is it to him,
a grain in the human sand, that Russia should conquer the East, that
Germany should be united, that the English flag should wave above new
lands? the heritage his fathers left him shall be greater for his sons.
Patriotism! what is it but the mother instinct of a people?

Take it that the decree has gone forth from Heaven: There shall be
no more generations, with this life the world shall die. Think you we
should move another hand? The ships would rot in the harbours, the grain
would rot in the ground. Should we paint pictures, write books, make
music? hemmed in by that onward creeping sea of silence. Think you with
what eyes husband and wife would look on one another. Think you of the
wooing--the spring of Love dried up; love only a pool of stagnant water.

How little we seem to realize this foundation of our life. Herein, if
nowhere else, lies our eternity. This Ego shall never die--unless the
human race from beginning to end be but a passing jest of the Gods, to
be swept aside when wearied of, leaving room for new experiments. These
features of mine--we will not discuss their aesthetic value--shall
never disappear; modified, varied, but in essential the same, they shall
continue in ever increasing circles to the end of Time. This temperament
of mine--this good and evil that is in me, it shall grow with every age,
spreading ever wider, combining, amalgamating. I go into my children and
my children's children, I am eternal. I am they, they are I. The tree
withers and you clear the ground, thankful if out of its dead limbs you
can make good firewood; but its spirit, its life, is in fifty saplings.
The tree dies not, it changes.

These men and women that pass me in the street, this one hurrying to his
office, this one to his club, another to his love, they are the mothers
of the world to come.

This greedy trickster in stocks and shares, he cheats, he lies, he
wrongs all men--for what? Follow him to his luxurious home in the
suburbs: what do you find? A man with children on his knee, telling them
stories, promising them toys. His anxious, sordid life, for what object
is it lived? That these children may possess the things that he thinks
good for them. Our very vices, side by side with our virtues, spring
from this one root, Motherhood. It is the one seed of the Universe. The
planets are but children of the sun, the moon but an offspring of the
earth, stone of her stone, iron of her iron