Part 24
In war the Samoan woman often interferes to make peace between the belligerents. Among the Khonds, also, when two tribes quarrel, the women sometimes make peace, calling in the intervention of a third tribe. Quite recently, among the Montenegrins and Albanians, fierce strife broke out between different families, but in these fights, if a man took refuge with a woman and she covered him with her apron, he was safe. Among the Bedouin Arabs a woman can save the life of the condemned man who implores her protection. So it also was among the Roman Vestals, when in the streets they accidentally met a man condemned to death; it was required, however, that the meeting should be evidently a chance one, for it was feared that the privilege might be carried too far. Among civilised nations this sentiment of pity becomes naturally more developed. Christianity owed a great deal of its success among women to the fact, that it knew how to make use of their pity, by organising those associations of women which are its greatest ornament. From the earliest years after the death of Jesus, in the cenobitic form of society lived by the disciples of the Messiah, they made use of the charitable sentiment of childless widows and created the order of Deaconesses, which was devoted to the care of the poor and the sick.[35] Legouvé says: “Women offered their services to Christianity like a volunteer battalion consecrated to charitable work. In the Apostles’ time their mission was one of sympathy and watchfulness, a mother’s vocation; in the time of the Martyrs they remained womanly in their modesty, while exhibiting a manly courage; in the time of the Doctors, whilst orators speak and learned men write, women continue to love and console.”[36]
This Christian tradition has survived and is still powerful, thanks to the deeply laid sentiment of pity in the heart of woman. “Private charity in Paris,” writes M. du Camp,[37] “is almost entirely in the hands of women. There are in Paris women of the world, young and beautiful, born for pleasure, accustomed to every luxury, who visit the poor, nurse the sick, rock little motherless children, and all this they do simply without a word of self-praise.”
The society of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” in Paris, is composed of widows, who, without binding themselves by religious vows, engage to nurse the sick gathered into the hospitals of the association, poor outcasts attacked by loathsome diseases—cancer, for example. Women of wealth and belonging to great families often obtain admission to this society. Female religious orders are rarely contemplative; they are nearly always charitable in aim. “The Daughters of Charity” possess establishments all over the known world; they migrate, says M. du Camp, “like benevolent birds, carrying with them the principle of self-sacrifice and the love of those that suffer. In all countries I have visited, among sects most antagonistic to their religion, I have beheld them at work; their faces shadowed by the immense cap, which resembles the wings of a white swan; instructing children, visiting the sick, caring for the plague-stricken, blessed by our sailors whom they nurse in the French hospitals in foreign lands.”[38]
Pity in woman is sometimes so powerful a sentiment that it supplies the place in her of a higher faculty, intelligence. It was thus that a humble servant-maid, without learning, who could neither read nor write, founded one of the most prominent nursing sisterhoods in France, “Les petites Soeurs des Pauvres,” which to-day numbers 3,400 sisters, and possesses 207 houses, where more than 25,000 old men are received and cared for. In the first half of this century there was such misery in Brittany that the old men were literally abandoned by all. Jeanne Jugau, whose earnings hardly sufficed to maintain herself, took in one, then two, then a number of them, without a thought of her own poverty, slaving might and main for their support. Two women, Virginie Tredaniel and Marie Catherine, helped her; a priest, Le Pailleur, took the direction of their work, and in a short time the order was founded, and grew apace. There, where genius might have failed, the love and pity of a servant-maid succeeded.
Another heroine of charity, though of a different type, was Jeanne Garnier. She was perpetually haunted by a desire to do good, to help and succour the unfortunate. M. du Camp has portrayed her character in a most graphic manner: impulsive, prone from childhood to adopt extreme measures, while in the convent she was given to rebellious and untractable conduct, for which she was sent away. When she was twenty years old she married; the love she bore her husband and two sons was deep and ardent. Three years after her marriage she had the unspeakable grief of losing both husband and sons at one fell stroke. After this occurrence her life had but one aim, ceaselessly and untiringly to succour and help the sorrowful. One day she was told that a woman, disfigured by a cutaneous disease, was lying in an attic in Lyons, abandoned by every one. She went at once to her, ministered to her, and every day went to wash her sores. Thus was suggested to her the founding of the association of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” of which we have already spoken, and the idea of pressing into the service of the sick, widows who found themselves in the same position as herself. She was not rich, but being an untiring and determined worker, capable of attacking the same person ten times a day, she obtained money. When they had to convey the sick to the new hospital, there was among them one woman so horribly disfigured by burns that no conveyance could be found whose driver was willing to take her. Jeanne Garnier then took her on her own shoulders and carried her there herself. The association of “Les Dames du Calvaire” was not the only charitable work which owes its existence to her. She conceived a great many other plans, of which many were carried out, for she never ceased working, up to the moment of her death, which occurred at forty-two years of age, of exhaustion.
In the United States, where woman enjoys much greater freedom than in Europe, she makes an excellent use of her liberty. In fact, all associations of women have a charitable end in view; and these societies not being subjected to the severe rules of Catholic religious orders, and not requiring from their members so absolute a renunciation of the pleasures of life, exhibit the most perfect and most modern form of charitable associations, which have been known up to the present day. The first woman’s club that was founded in that country, the Sorosis, has for its object the amelioration of the condition of shop-girls: it has also founded asylums for homeless children. The Temperance Union, founded by women, seeks to stem the tide of intemperance. The Women’s League has obtained the admission of women on commissioners boards for schools and hospitals. The College Settlement Girls, composed of female graduates from universities, carry help into the purlieus of the city.[39]
CRUELTY, PITY, AND THE MATERNAL SENTIMENT.
Is woman kind or cruel? Can we reconcile these two series of facts, so contradictory in themselves? That is the question which now comes before us. Let us seek, first of all, the origin and the genesis of feminine cruelty. We have seen women exhibiting great ingenuity in torturing; she does not wish to destroy her enemies, but to torment and torture them; she seeks to protract their pain as long as possible, and to lengthen out her enjoyment of vengeance. On this point woman goes much further than man: for among savages men do not amuse themselves by prolonging the miseries of their enemies; they rather wreak their vengeance by killing them at one stroke. Savages often make a wholesale carnage, massacring whole tribes and nations. But it is always the woman who practices the art of killing a man by inches, over a slow fire, as it were. Thus we find that the redskins give their prisoners of war over to their women. Notice, even at the present day, the difference between the quarrels of men and women. Women scratch each other, tear out the hair, fly at the eyes of their adversaries, trying to inflict some painful wound: men give blows and stabs; they strive to disable or stun their enemy, or to destroy him. There is the same difference but on a smaller scale. This aptitude in inflicting pain is an outgrowth of weakness. We know from the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and from the struggle for life, that every living being must be provided with a certain number of means of defense and offense, and amongst these means must be classed many instincts and sentiments which spring from natural selection, adaptation, and heredity. The cruelty of woman is one of these instincts and sentiments. Woman not being powerful enough to destroy her enemies, had to seek for the means of defending herself, by wounding their more delicate organs, by inflicting such acute pain as would serve to disable them. This tendency to protect one’s self by such means has become instinctive by heredity; and so much the more since the woman who was able thus to defend herself, had at the outset of man’s evolution a far better chance of survival.
All this is so true, that we find other weak creatures also to be cruel. Children take pleasure in tormenting insects, birds, or little dogs, and are very cruel to each other. I knew a child who used to cut his nails like the teeth of a saw, in order to inflict more painful scratches on his companions. Humming birds, says Brehm, are the smallest and the cruelest of birds. When they are attacked by a more powerful enemy they try to peck out his eyes with their long, sharp beaks. The struggle for life and natural selection has provided their weakness with this means of defense, and they are even cruel to each other when they fight, to such an extent has the sentiment of cruelty in them become instinctive.
And now we must seek for the genesis of the other phenomenon, pity. It is a notorious fact, that maternity being the great function of woman, through the whole order of animal life, with the exception of some few fishes, it is always the female who is thus the benefactress of the race. Maternity is always an altruistic function; in the inferior orders this altruism is a purely physical act, and consists merely in a material sacrifice; (the detaching of a portion of the maternal body, under the form of bud, or egg;) in the higher orders, this altruism becomes psychical and consists in a conscious sacrifice of self and of vitality in the interests of the race.
What then is the essential nature of these altruistic sacrifices? Maternity is protection given to weakness; for the infant is above all other created things a being requiring succour.
It is thus that, the images relating to the state of weakness being in great numbers strongly impressed on the mind of woman, when one of them presents itself to her, by the law of association it awakens all those maternal sentiments whose function it is to help the weak. At first, motherhood only extends from a woman’s own children to those of others; this is the first stage of pity, such as we find it in the animals and among many undeveloped savage peoples. Afterwards in a region of higher psychical development the sentiment of pity broadens till it embraces a wider group, the sick, the aged, those condemned to death; for all those unfortunates who claim the pity of woman are the weak appealing for help to the strong. It is only the weak who can inspire pity. Thus pity, in woman, is but the outgrowth of the maternal sentiment applied to a larger class of helpless people. “Woman,” says M. du Camp, “may bind herself by the religious vow of chastity; but she is a born mother and remains a mother, even though circumstances may have broken the physical law of her sex. The Little Sisters of the Poor, call their pensioners ‘the good little old men,’ and themselves ‘the good little sisters,’ their superior ‘the good little mother.’ With them everybody is good and little; all these expressions are the reflection of maternal love.”
We must mention also, that one cause of a livelier sense of pity in woman, is her own weakness and her lower intellect. “Anger,” writes A. Bain, “the passion for war, are bound up with activity and strength; conditions of weakness and of repose are favorable to the softer sentiments.” Strong men who display great muscular or mental activity, and who often experience the satisfactions arising from power, only realise with extreme difficulty the feelings of the weak; for, as H. Spencer remarks,[40] “to feel pity for any suffering which we witness, we must have experienced it ourselves to the same extent or in an approximate degree.” Thus healthy persons become, after a serious sickness, more feeling than they formerly were for those who are suffering; women are continually in a state of ill-health.
Besides which women have not been involved in the struggle for life, as have men during the whole process of evolution: this struggle for life implying, as it does, the necessity of pursuing one’s own object irrespective of the ills which it may entail on the unhappy competitors, and often rendering a man insensible to the sorrows of those around him. To this we add, that love for man has not been without influence in developing the sense of pity in woman. The main characteristic of the love of woman towards man, is self-abnegation and devotion; woman finds her happiness in devotion to the man she loves and in making for him the most painful sacrifices. Read the “Letters of Heloise,” the “Life of Carlyle,” or the “Life of Mme. de Lespinasse.” Each woman, carries hidden in her heart, an inexhaustible treasure of devotion which heredity has added to through all the centuries, during which woman has lived in contact with man and sought to win his good-will, displaying an affection and an ardent zeal in his behalf; nothing then is easier than to spend this treasure on the unhappy, when she has not found the man on whom to lavish it.
The close relationship between pity, maternity, and love, is also shown by this fact, that the heroines of charity are almost always widows without sons, or unmarried women. When a woman has a husband or sons to love and cherish, she does not feel the same tenderness towards the suffering; this goes to prove that if these two sentiments are interchangeable, they are but two different forms of the same thing.
PITY AND CRUELTY.
We are now in a position to answer the question: Is woman kind or cruel? Pity and cruelty coexist together in her; we might call this state in woman a state of unstable equilibrium; to-day she is kind, divinely good, charitable; to-morrow she will be perverse and cruel. On one side her feebleness renders her cruel, and her impulsive nature prevents her from repressing the outbursts of anger and of vengeance; on the other hand, the gentle habits of maternal affection, her lower intelligence, and even the weakness of her nature develop in her kindly sentiments. Woman may experience the strongest feelings of maternal affection at the sight of a helpless creature; but that will not prevent her from cruelly persecuting a rival, especially if she has been wounded in her sentiments of wife or mother. Thus woman, who is the natural protector of the weak, treats them oftentimes with a cruelty of which man is totally incapable. Woman loves, hates, consoles, inflicts pain, according as she finds herself in the presence of a friend, an enemy, a helpless being, or of a rival.
Many of the fiercest heroines of the Paris Commune, had been trained nurses during the war, and distinguished for their devotion to the sick. There is nothing astonishing in this, for contradiction in feeling is so often a psychical law that a great Italian philosopher, Robert Ardigò, has said that man is not a logical being.
We have noticed before that weakness is in part the cause of cruelty and partly also of pity, and this accounts for the co-existence of the two contrary sentiments. They coexist because they have a common origin. But this instability of equilibrium is lessened by evolution, and pity becomes stronger than cruelty. Among civilised nations the cruelty of women has become merely a moral attitude: the civilised woman, less powerful than her savage sister, no more subjects her enemies to physical pain, does not shed their blood; she contents herself with slandering them, turning them into ridicule, and humiliating them. The diminution of muscular strength is in itself favorable to the softening of female character.
Furthermore, sexual selection also helps in this; in the human race as civilisation advances the male assumes more and more the right of selection, and man shrinks instinctively from meeting in a woman a high development of the qualities which he himself possesses, for he wishes to dominate her and to be her superior. This explains to us the singular fact, which we notice every day, that of a _savant_ marrying a stupid or unintelligent wife; this is why the normal man, as also the vicious, choose gentle and good women when they desire to found families. If sometimes the choice falls on a wicked woman, it is because the man desires to form a criminal co-partnership, such as was perhaps the normal condition of family life during the early days of human evolution. Many of the domestic tragedies which we witness to-day can be traced to no other cause than this _penchant_ of the male, even of the vicious, to choose the woman who appears to be the most gentle. Women with their clear penetration and sure instincts have seized upon this inclination in man and made capital out of it with infinite ability: do we not see many young women simulate a gentleness, a sweetness, and kindness which they do not naturally possess in order to capture the good-will of men? Women have thus practised the habit of repressing their evil _penchants_, through interested motives, because they saw that men chose the most gentle among them as wives.
Besides sexual selection, physical grace plays a conspicuous part, as well as those psychical qualities which are associated with it. Man having set a high value on graceful demeanour, woman sought and still seeks with all her strength to adorn herself with it.
We know that by the law of association between the emotional states and their outward expression, which mutually correspond, each gesture, each attitude, and each graceful expression of the countenance has a tendency to throw the mind into some sweet and peaceful condition; this is why the culture of physical grace has been for woman an exercise of goodness. This fostering of physical beauty has had a beneficial influence on her moral character. We might say that as woman grew in beauty, she became better. Finally woman being in the present day more respected than in former times, she has less often the occasion to exercise her instinctive cruelty, which on this account is being gradually obliterated. Pity each day becomes more and more the normal state of the feminine mind, and cruelty the exception. In order to be cruel, a woman’s character must be perverted, as is the case in female criminals, whose vice exceeds that of man in similar circumstances. Or she must have received some deep provocation, wounding her profoundly in her deepest and tenderest sentiments, which has awakened the original cruelty slumbering latent in the depths of her heart.
We may thus predict that in the ages to come, woman will become entirely good.
GUILLAUME FERRERO.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Spencer. _Principles of Sociology_, II., p. 361.
[25] Irving. _Hist. of the Life and Voyages of Chris. Columbus_, II., p. 15.
[26] Hovelacque. _Les débuts de l’humanité_.
[27] Sacher-Masoch. _Rev. des Deux Mondes._
[28] Sacher-Masoch. Ibid.
[29] Letourneau. _Evolution de la Morale_, p. 122.
[30] Mantegazza. _Fisiologia etc._ Milan. 1889.
[31] _Histoire morale des femmes._
[32] Romanes. _Animal Intelligence_, Vol. II.
[33] Hovelacque. _Op. cit._
[34] Letourneau. _La Sociologie d’après l’ethnographie._ Paris, 1884.
[35] Renan. _Les Apôtres._
[36] Op. cit.
[37] _La charité privée à Paris_, 1887.
[38] Op. cit.
[39] _The Forum._ 1891.
[40] Spencer. _Principles of Psychology_, II, p. 648.
PANPSYCHISM AND PANBIOTISM.
I. PROFESSOR HAECKEL’S PANPSYCHISM.
Professor Haeckel, in his article “Our Monism,”[41] propounds the theory of Panpsychism, which he considers as an essential feature of Monism. He says:
“One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be that I regard _all_ matter as _ensouled_, that is to say, as endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain) and with motion, or, better, with the power of motion. As elementary (atomistic) attraction and repulsion these powers are asserted in every simplest chemical process, and on them is based also every other phenomenon, consequently also the highest developed soul-activity of man.
“Simplest example: sulphur and quicksilver rubbed together form cinnabar, a new body of entirely different properties. This is possible only on the supposition that the molecules (or atoms) of the two elements if brought within the proper distance, mutually _feel_ each other, by attraction move toward each other; on the decomposition of a simple chemical compound the contrary takes place: repulsion. (Empedocles’s doctrine of ‘the love and hatred of atoms.’)”
Not being able to accept Professor Haeckel’s doctrine of Panpsychism, I propose what might best be called Panbiotism, briefly set forth in the maxim πᾶν βιωτόν; that is, everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live.
The word βιωτός is mostly used by Greek authors in the negative, as in the phrase βίον οὐ βιωτόν, an unlivable life, in the sense of a life unendurable or not worth living. Thus Sophocles and others. The word βιωτός is embodied in the term Panbiotism in its etymological sense of “livable.”
I am willing to concede to Professor Haeckel that all nature is alive. Indeed, I have most emphatically insisted on the doctrine that there is a spontaneity pervading all nature. (See “Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed., pp. 110 et seqq.)