CHAPTER VI

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALITY

=The laws of multiplication.=--Implicit or explicit approval of a falling birth-rate involves opposition to the opinion of the man in the street, the general opinion of the medical profession,[23] the bench of bishops and the social prophet and publicist in general. Nevertheless a fall in the birth-rate is a factor in organic progress, and, in general, the level of any species is in inverse proportion to its birth-rate, from bacteria to the most civilised classes of men in the most civilised countries of to-day. But in truth the uninformed opinion, totally contrary to the whole history of life and to the most obvious comparative facts of the birth-rate amongst and within present day human societies, was utterly disposed of forty years ago in the closing chapter of the greatest contribution yet made to philosophic biology--Herbert Spencer's _Principles of Biology_. The last chapter of that masterpiece is entitled “The Laws of Multiplication.” Unfortunately it has not been read by one in ten thousand of those who think themselves entitled to hold, and even to express, opinions about the birth-rate. Spencer's discovery is the complementary half-truth to the discovery of Malthus, and just as the law of Malthus is pessimistic, so the law of Spencer is optimistic. In a word, Malthus assumed--indeed, formally declared--that there was no natural factor of an internal kind tending to limit the rate of vital fertility. Spencer discovered that there is such a factor, which can and does limit and has been limiting vegetable, animal, and human fertility since the dawn of life.

All reproduction involves an expenditure of energy in some degree on the part of the parent. Now the energy available by any individual is finite. If he expends it all upon reproduction, he himself, or she herself, must cease to exist. This happens in all the lowest forms of life, which multiply by fission or simple splitting. The young bacteria are their sub-divided parent. At the other extreme is the case of the individual who retains the whole of his energy for his own development and life, and has no offspring at all. Such consummate bachelor philosophers as Kant and Spencer may be quoted, and the list of childless men of genius might be extended quite indefinitely. This is not to declare this last state to be the ideal, but merely to point out the logical extremes.

Spencer's principle is that there is an “Antagonism,” or, as we may rather say, an inverse ratio, between “Individuation” and “Genesis”--between the proportion of energy expended upon the individual and the proportion expended upon the continuance of the race. Thus “Individuation,” meaning all those processes which maintain and expand the life of the individual, and “Genesis,” meaning all those processes which involve the formation of new individuals--are necessarily antagonistic. Every higher degree of individual evolution is followed by a lower degree of race multiplication, and _vice versâ_. Increase in bulk (_cf._ the elephant), complexity or activity involves diminution in fertility, and _vice versâ_. This is an obvious _à priori_ principle.

Should the reader declare that there must be something the matter with an asserted principle of progress which leads in theory or in practice to the production of a childless generation, and therefore the end of all progress, and that this principle suggests that the most completely developed man and woman cannot be parents--then I would join in the chorus of fathers and mothers generally, who would say that, in human parenthood, if not, indeed, in sub-human parenthood, the antagonism is reconciled in a higher unity; that the best and most complete development of the individual is effected only through parenthood, in due degree--as Spencer, himself childless, formally declared.

It is impossible here to show how complete is the evidence for Spencer's law, both from the side of logical necessity and from the side of observation. In order to indicate the overwhelming character of the evidence, one would have to transcribe the whole of his long chapter, and to add to it all our modern knowledge of human birth-rates. This cannot be done, but even without it we may venture to say that people who regard a falling birth-rate as in itself, and obviously, a sign of racial degeneration or immorality, or approaching weakness or failure of any kind, can have made no substantial additions to their knowledge of the subject since they themselves formed items in the birth-rate.

Spencer goes on to show, with profound insight, that, in general, greater individuality, or, to put it in other words, the more highly evolved organism, “_though less fertile absolutely, is the more fertile relatively_.” The supreme instance of this truth is, of course, the case of man, in whom individuation has reached its unprecedented height, who is _absolutely_ the least fertile of creatures,[24] and yet who is _relatively_ the most fertile--unique in his actual and persistent multiplication.

=Their action in man.=--Within the human species the laws of multiplication hold. It is still worth while, after half a century, to quote Spencer's remark as to infertility in women due to mental labour carried to excess--“most of the flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure education are incompetent to bear a well-developed infant and to supply it with the natural food for the natural period.” On all hands people with opened eyes are rightly urging this truth upon us to-day. In the United States the so-called higher education of girls has been proved in effect to sterilise them--and these the flower of the nation's girlhood, and therefore, rightly, the very elect for motherhood. Here is simply an instance of the Spencerian principle in its most unfortunate misdirection by man.

Before leaving Spencer, we must refer briefly to the predictions, based upon the foregoing principles, with which he concluded his great work. The further evolution of man, he declares, must take mainly the direction of a higher intellectual and emotional development. Hitherto, and even to-day, pressure of population is the original cause of human competition, application, discipline, expenditure of energy--and one may add, the possibility of continued selection. Excess of fertility, then, says Spencer, is the cause of man's evolution, but “man's further evolution itself necessitates a decline in his fertility.” The future progress of civilisation will be accompanied by increased development of individuality, emotional and intellectual. As Spencer observes, this does not necessarily mean a mentally laborious life, for as mental activity “gradually becomes organic, it will become spontaneous and pleasurable.”

Finally, the necessary antagonism between individuality and parenthood ensures the ultimate attainment of the highest form of the maintenance of the race--“... _a form in which the amount of life shall be the greatest possible, and the births and deaths the fewest possible_.”

* * * * *

If now we look back at the law of Malthus we shall realise the enormous significance of the law of Spencer. In this respect we have the advantage over Malthus that we are aware, as he was not, of the great fact of organic evolution. We discover, then, that an actual consequence of the pressure of population, leading as it does to the struggle for existence, and, in the main, the survival of higher types, is that the rate of fertility falls. This conception of the fall in the birth-rate--which, it is maintained, has been a great factor in all organic progress--was entirely absent from the mind of Malthus. In a word, the unlimited multiplication which Malthus observed leads to its own correction. It provides abundance of material for natural selection to work upon, and then the survival-value of individuation, wherever it appears, asserts itself, with the consequence that the rate of multiplication declines. This is actually to be observed to-day. Malthus desired that we should postpone marriage to later ages so as to lower the birth-rate. The increasing necessity and demand for individuation is effecting that which Malthus desired. The average age at marriage has been rising in our own country in both sexes during the last thirty years: and the evidence shows that as civilisation advances the age of marriage becomes later and later. Professor Metchnikoff has discussed some aspects of this question in his book _The Nature of Man_.

=The intensive culture of life.=--For every student of progress, and not least for the eugenist, Spencer's law is a warrant of hope and a promise of better things to come. It teaches that in the development of higher--that is to say, more specialised--that is to say, more individualised--organic types, Nature is working already, and has been working for ages, towards the elimination of the brutal elements in the struggle for existence. This is, of course, what every worker for progress, and every eugenist in especial, desires. Spencer's discovery teaches also that individuality compensates a species for loss of high fertility. The survival-value of individuation is greater than the survival-value of rapid multiplication. _The very fact of progress is the replacement of lower by higher life, the supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of survival-value, the increasing dominance of mind over matter, the substitution of the intensive for the merely extensive cultivation of life._ These various phrases express, I believe, various aspects of one and the same great fact, and I only wish it were possible to include here an exhaustive study of the conception which may be expressed by the phrase “the intensity of life”--as distinguished from its mere extension. There is, I believe, a real and significant analogy between the introduction of what is called intensive cultivation in agriculture, and the eugenic principle which seeks to replace the extensive by the intensive cultivation of human life.

=The eugenic difficulty.=--But it will be already evident to the reader that, though Spencer's law offers hope and warrant to the eugenist, it also poses him with a permanent and ineradicable difficulty which is inherent in natural necessity--viz., the difficulty that, in consequence of the operation of this law, those very classes or members of a society whose parenthood he most desires must be, in general, the least fertile. Throughout the animal world the lesser fertility of higher species is no real handicap to them, as we know; but where the conditions of selection are so profoundly modified as in human society, the case is very different. Furthermore, amongst mankind individuality has often grown, and does grow, to such an extent that parenthood disappears altogether. Indeed, Spencer's law expresses itself--and the eugenist must qualify his hopes by the fact--in the practical infertility of many[25] of the most highly individualised and even unique personalities, that is to say, in the ranks of what we call genius. To this subject we must return.

A notable section in Mr. Galton's great work, _Inquiries into Human Faculty_, states very plainly the difficulty for the eugenist involved in Spencer's law, under its more statistical aspect. What are the relative effects of early and late marriages? Mr. Galton proves, mathematically, that in a very few generations a group of persons who marry late will be simply bred down and more than supplanted by those who marry early. Now no one will dispute that the less individualised, the lower types, the more nearly animal, do in general marry earlier, and are more fertile. Here, then, is an anti-eugenic tendency in human society, depending really upon Spencer's law and requiring us to recognise and counteract it by throwing all the weight we can upon the side of progress, which means _increasing to our utmost the survival-value and the effective fertility of the higher types_.

Much more space might be spent upon this gravest of problems for the eugenist--the fact that the very persons from whom he desires to recruit the future on account of their greater individuality are also on that very account the persons who, by natural necessity, tend to be less fertile. The difficulty shows itself in the male sex, but it shows itself still more conspicuously in the female sex, where the proportion of the individual energy devoted to the race, as compared with that devoted to individuation, is necessarily far higher, and must so remain if the race is to persist. Primarily, the body of woman is the temple of life to come--and _therefore_, as we shall some day teach our girls, the holy of holies. Without going further into this matter now, it may be suggested that a cardinal principle of practical importance is involved. It is that the individual development of women, their higher education, their self-expression in works of art and thought and practice, cannot safely be carried to the point at which motherhood is compromised; else the race in question will necessarily disappear and be replaced by any race whatsoever, the women of which continue to be mothers. There are women of the worker bee type whom this argument annoys intensely. No one wants _them_ to be mothers.

The proposition that all progress in the psychical world depends upon individuality, just as all organic progress, and indeed, all organic evolution, depends upon the physical individuality which biologists call variation, may suggest to the reader the importance which must attach to our study of talent and genius, and the possibility of aiding their production. Meanwhile, we must look a little further at the general question of individuality or quality _versus_ quantity from the international point of view.

=Quantity versus quality.=--The reader will understand how it is that anyone writing from the biological standpoint must view with something like contempt the common assumption that, in international competition, mere statistics of population furnish, as such, final and adequate data for prophecy. Let us remind ourselves once more that, according to these crude criteria, which were really superseded untold æons ago, the dominance of the world must belong in the near future not to Russia, with its balance of more than two million births per annum, rather than to France, with its approximately stationary population, but to the bacteria, the growth of population amongst which, if it be not controlled by the less fertile creature we call man, may be of simply inexpressible magnitude. But the world is not, and will not be, ruled by bacteria, their fertility notwithstanding. Indeed, the disease-producing bacteria have already had sentence of death pronounced upon them by the higher intelligence of man, and that sentence will be carried out within a century. Similarly within the bounds of humanity we must recognise the limitations of mere statistics. The population of France, some forty years ago, consisted of so many millions of units. The figure does not matter,--let us put it at 30,000,001. Now that 1, so to say, was called Louis Pasteur, and from the point of view of statistics or those who think they can predict history by counting heads, he was only an almost infinitesimal fraction, about one-thirty-millionth part, of the French people. Yet, as Huxley pointed out long ago, his mind sufficed to pay the entire indemnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prussian war. This single unit was worth more than a host of soldiers of the merely mechanical kind. Or take Athens, with its population of 30,000 people, mostly slaves, and consider its influence upon the world. Or, indeed, go where you please, whether to the history of nations or the history of religion or science or art, and ask whether the counting of heads, the ordinary census taking which indeed amounts merely to weighing nations by the ton, is an adequate one. In estimating national capital by the methods of vital statistics alone, we are in a far worse case than he would be who estimated monetary wealth by numbers of coins, without considering whether they were pounds, shillings or pence, whether they were genuine or counterfeit. The illustration is ludicrously inadequate, as every illustration must be, simply because the human case is unique. In the units of a population, which many prophets treat as if they were all of equal value, there are not merely differences to which the difference between a sovereign and a penny offers no parallel; there is not merely an enormous quantity of bogus or counterfeit units, but there is a very large number of units in every population which, so far from adding to the value of the rest, subtract from it, are parasitic upon it. Students of money will find no parallel to this. Yet in the face of facts which ought to be common intellectual property amongst school-children, we find many writers, bishops, socialist economists, moralists, schoolboy Imperialists, and the rest, pointing merely to the quantitative question of population as if it were everything, though they must surely know that, if international competition were the highest state of mankind, and if the work of Kelvin and Lister had been sold at its real worth by us to the rest of the world, those two men alone, in their services to life, and in the power which they give us over life, would be equal in value to, shall we say, the lower four-fifths of the whole birth-rate during the last generation. All human history teaches, as all animal history teaches in lesser degree, that quality and individuality is everything, that quantity is nothing or far worse than nothing _except in so far as it is quantity of quality_: yet though this lesson is written upon every page of the past, the greater number of our publicists and our public advisers still implicitly deny it. As Mr. Crackanthorpe put it, speaking of the figures for 1907, it is not the defective numbers, but the numbers of defectives, that should give us concern.

=Mass versus mind.=--John Ruskin called Darwin “a dim comet, wagging its tail of phosphorescent nothing against the steadfast stars”--a description as delightful as it is foolish. Yet the conception of eugenics, which is indeed a necessary deduction from Darwin's great discovery, finds abundant warrant and support in Ruskin's own wonderful writings, and here I quote, from _Time and Tide_, some sentences which still require to be read and remembered by the majority of our present advisers. He says:--

“And the question of numbers is wholly immaterial, compared with that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends on the prior determination of character. Make your nation consist of knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case of any other vermin--the more, the worse. Or, to put the matter in narrower limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent whether he shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final concern whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to be hanged.... You have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their numbers, such sacrifices should be made, and to what extent?... The French and British public may and will, with many other publics, be at last brought ... to see farther that a nation's real strength and happiness do not depend upon properties and territories, nor on machinery for their defence, but on their getting such territory as they _have_, well filled with none but respectable persons, which is a way of _infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every potentate.”

Surely it is not necessary, one feels, and yet one knows it is necessary, again to lay down propositions of such shining truth, and one wonders whether they shine so brightly as to blind those who should see them: or what can conceivably be the explanation of such arguments as those of the Bishop of London and others who, in the face of our monstrous infant and child mortality, the awful pressure of population and over-crowding in our great cities, where every year a larger and larger proportion of the population lives, and is born and dies--plead for a higher birth-rate on moral grounds, of all amazing grounds conceivable; and those also who, from the military or so-called Imperial point of view, regarding men primarily as “food for powder,” in Shakespeare's phrase, read and quote statistics of population in order to promulgate the same advice?

To the moralist we need make no reply except simply to name the infant mortality which is at last coming to be recognised everywhere as, perhaps, the most abominable of all our scandals. To the militarist I would quote the case of our ally, Japan. He recalls the war between China and Japan, and its issue, and has some idea, perhaps, of the population ratio of those two Empires. How was it that Providence was on the side of the small battalions? He recalls also the Russo-Japanese war and its issue; and the population ratio of the two Empires in that case. How many other instances does not military history afford of the truth that in the human species mind is the master of matter? One would suppose that a critical historical enquiry had been made, proving that the results of all past wars could have been predicted by the simple method of estimating the total aggregate weight of the combatant nations in flesh and blood and bone! More than this, if the development of the art of warfare means anything, if there has been any such development since the days of fists and stones, it means, as all human development in every sphere means, the increasing dominance of mind over matter, character and initiative over machinery, _dead or alive_. Meanwhile, the estimate of warriors in terms of the scale and the foot rule are still accepted just as if they had not been rendered obsolete for ever with the passing of the “dragons of the prime.”

As regards the psychical worth of the soldier, is it not recognised, though too commonly forgotten, when we applaud the value of the veteran or of seasoned troops? Physically the veteran is, on the average, inferior to the younger man. It is the psychical that gives him his worth, just as it was patriotism and sobriety that enabled the few sober Japanese to beat the many drunken Russians. It is safe to prophesy that, in all future war, the numerical criterion, which in effect weighs armies by the ton, as if war were merely a tug-of-war, will become less and less important--if, indeed, it is not already negligible; whilst the purely psychical qualities, from generalship and strategy and hygiene to initiative, judgment, accuracy, memory, and down finally to mere brutal red-blooded courage, will determine the issue.

Platitude, of course, but if true, why ignored? Why cannot our military advisers learn, in this respect, from the Navy? Owing to the very nature of the sea as compared with the land, in relation to the merely physical capacities of man, a Navy must be more intelligent than an Army, just as it requires more intelligence to make a boat than to walk; and it is in the Navy that the mechanical factor has been most completely transferred, so that the human machinery is at a discount and the steel machinery made by the human mind is much, whilst the value of the psychical in all its aspects dominates and controls the whole. Great Britain, as the foremost naval power in the world, should long ago have left to its ultimate fate amongst other nations the idea that quantity--so many tons of soldiers and so many tons of sailors--affords an estimate of the warring force of a nation: even if the whole history of this little isle and the possession of our present Empire did not teach, as the history of Rome taught and as the history of Athens teaches in another sphere, that not mass but mind makes a nation great.