id="Page_11" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[11]"/>impalpable prison around them, has barred them from that part of life which is social and broadly human; the falsely feminine has been developed to the loss of the womanhood in them. It is only in obedience to man that woman has gained her power of life. She has borne children at his will and for his pleasure. She has received her very consciousness from man: this has been her womanhood, to feel herself under another's will. There is no possible hiding of the truth; if women influence men, men command life.

But is it possible, looking forward to new conditions of society, now approaching like a long-delayed spring, to foresee a remedy? Can the woman of the future belong to herself? What are her natural disabilities, and to what extent are they modifiable by new arrangements of social and domestic life? Must she be content for the future with that dependence on the individual man which has been her fate in the past; or, on the other hand, can she take up her economic and social position in society and work therein for her own maintenance as free from considerations of her sex as a man can? These are the questions which must be faced when united womanhood begins to formulate their wants and to realise their power. It is almost idle in the present transition to speculate as to what women should or should not be, or the work they should or should not do. Women do not yet know what they want. All that can be done is to note the changes that are taking place, for we cannot, even do we wish, now change the revolutionary forces. We must seek to understand their causes, so that we may be able to direct them in the future in such ways as will tend to the greater solidarity and happiness of women and men.

In the everlasting controversy as to woman's place in Nature the majority of arguments have been based on an assumed inferiority of the female sex. Appeal has been made to anatomy to establish the difference between the natural endowment of men and women in the hope of fixing by means of anatomical measurements and tests those characters of males and females that are unalterable, because inborn, and those that are acquired, and therefore modifiable. But the obstacles in the way of anatomical investigations are very great, if only on account of the complexity of the material. Often and often it has happened that old conclusions have been overthrown by new knowledge. Indeed, it may be said that such appeal has resulted in uncertainty, and in many instances in confusion. The chief source of error has been the careless acceptance of female inferiority, which has maimed most investigations and seriously retarded the attainment of useful results. And though it is very far from my purpose to wish to deny the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine character, it is still true that a blank separation of human qualities into male qualities and female qualities is no longer possible. In no instance have the anatomists succeeded in determining with absolute distinction between the characters that belong separately to the sexes. Moreover, it has been shown that there is no such thing as a fixed woman character, but that women differ according to the circumstances under which they live, just as men differ. This brings us directly against the old problem, inferiority cannot be accepted as the sole reason of woman's present restricted position in society. Other causes must be sought for.

Many features of the social and psychic as well as the physical phenomena of human life have what we may call an organismal mainspring, and become more intelligible when traced back to these. No one, for instance, can appreciate the social significance of sex, or account for the existing sexual relationships in human societies, who does not know something of their biological antecedents. Take again the sex differences, which attain to such complexity and importance in the human civilised races, these can be explained only if their origin is recognisable. To comprehend the higher forms of life we must gain an acquaintance with the lower and more formative types. In this way we shall begin to see something of that continual upward change under the action of love's-selection that has developed the female and the male. Many problems that have brought sorrow and perplexity to us to-day will become recognisable as we ascertain their causes, and then we can do much to remove them. Thus the problem of woman must first be considered from a biological point of view. Explorations must be made into the remote and obscure beginnings of sex. We must carry our investigations back beyond the cycle of man, and trace the growth and uses of the differentiation of the sexes from the lowest forms of life.

Biology, a science hardly more than a century old, is still in the descriptive and comparative stage; it is the scientific study of the present and past history of animal life for the purpose of understanding its future history. It is of vital importance to human welfare in the future that we should learn by this comparative study of origins and of the potent past what are the lines along which progress is to be expected.

This, then, will be the first path of our discovery. We shall have to traverse many past ages of life and to consider certain humble organisms, before we shall be able really to understand woman in her true position in the sexual relationship as we find it to-day.

But the possibility of applying biological results to sociology with any hope of enlightenment depends on an understanding of the questions, How? and Why? It is important to know what the phenomena are, but it is yet more important to know how? and for what reason? they have come about. Thus we are led forward always from facts to their efficient causes. Women are found to differ from men in this or that respect. But this in itself decides nothing. As soon as we are informed as to any one difference, we must seek out its cause; and this we must do over and over again. Hundreds of women must be interrogated, observed and reported upon—and then what? Shall we know the answer to our problem? Certainly not. In each case we must ask: Is this difference we have found between the sexes a natural inborn quality of woman, whether it be physical or psychical, that must be regarded as a right and unalterable part of her woman character, or is it an acquired, and therefore changeable, modification that has been superimposed upon her through the artificial sexual, social and economic circumstances of her environment? The mere asking of this question will give many new discoveries.

Life is a relation between two forces: on the one hand the organism and on the other the external conditions that form the environment. These two processes are known as Nature and Nurture, they are complementary and inseparable, and they act together. Thus the organism modifies its surroundings, and is in turn modified by them. But every life possesses in great degree the power of self-adaptation, and, broadly speaking, it is true that no matter under what conditions it may be compelled to live, it will mould its own life into harmony with those conditions and thus continue its existence, and this whether it is compelled to adopt a more perfect or a less perfect character. It becomes evident that an appropriate environment is necessary if the Nature is to be expressed, or expressed fully; otherwise life cannot realise development. The environment is constantly checking and modifying the inheritance. Nurture supplies the liberating stimulus to the inheritance, and growth is limited, in exact measurement by the Nurture stimuli available. Human advancement is, of course, widely different from the slow progress in the lower forms of life, but it is fundamentally the same. Experience is continually