The Law of Conservation : Part 1

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 4 of 23)

Students of the physical sciences discovered in the nineteenth century a universal law of Nature, always believed by the wisest since the time of Thales, but never before proven, which is now commonly known as the law of the conservation of energy. When we say to a child, "You cannot eat your cake and have it," we are expressing the law of the conservation of matter, which is really a more or less accurate part-expression of the law of the conservation of energy.

The law that from nothing is made - and further, though here this concerns us less, that nothing is ever destroyed - is the only firm foundation for any work or any theory whether in science or philosophy. The chemist who otherwise bases his account of a reaction is wrong; the sociologist who denies it Nature will deny. It was the sure foundation upon which Herbert Spencer erected the philosophy of evolution; and every page of this book depends upon the certainty that this law applies to woman and to womanhood as it does to the rest of the universe.

Further, it may be shown that certain less universal but most important generalizations made by two or three biologists are indeed special cases of the universal law. There is, first, the law of Herbert Spencer, which states that for every individual there is an inevitable issue between the demands of parenthood and the demands of self; and there is, secondly, the law of Professors Geddes and Thomson, which asserts that this issue specially concerns the female as compared with the male gender, the distinguishing character of femaleness being that in it a higher proportion of the vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore, necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual. It is of service to one's thinking, perhaps, to regard Geddes and Thomson's law as a special case of Spencer's, and Spencer's as a special case of the law of the conservation of energy. First, then, somewhat of detail regarding the law of balance between expenditure on the self and expenditure upon the race; and then to the all-important application of this to the case of womanhood - for upon this application the whole of the subsequent argument depends.

When he set forth, with great daring, to write the "Principles of Biology," Spencer was already at an advantage compared with the accepted writers upon the subject, not merely because of his stupendous intellectual endowment, but also because the idea of the conservation of energy was a permanent guiding factor in all his thought. Therefore it was, one supposes, that this bold young amateur, for he was little more, perceived in the light of the evolutionary idea of which he was one of the original promulgators, a simple truth which had been unperceived by all previous writers upon biology, from Aristotle onwards. It is in the last section of his book that Spencer propounds his "law of multiplication," depending upon what he calls the "antagonism between individuation and genesis."

As I have observed elsewhere, the word antagonism is perhaps too harsh, and may certainly be misleading, for it may induce us to suppose that there is no possible reconciliation of the claims and demands of the race and the individual, the future and the present. I believe most devoutly that there is such a reconciliation, as indeed Spencer himself pointed out, and a central thesis of this book is indeed that in the right expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood, woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and richest self-development. Therefore one may be inclined to abandon the word antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spenserian terms.

This principle has immense consequences - most notably that as life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used for the enrichment and development of the individual life, and less for mere physical parenthood. We should argue that, in the case of mankind, and preeminently in the case of woman, this enrichment and development of the individual life is best and most surely attained by parenthood or foster-parenthood, made self-conscious and provident, and magnificently transmuted by its extension and amplification upon the psychical plane in the education of children and, indeed, the care and ennoblement of human life in all its stages.

This law of Spencer's has been discussed at length by the present writer in a previous volume, and we may therefore now proceed to its notable illustration in the case of womanhood and the female gender in general, as made by Geddes and Thomson now more than twenty years ago. It is surprising that the distinguished authors do not seem to have recognized that their law is a special case of Spencer's; but one of them granted this relation in a discussion upon the present writer's first eugenic lecture to the Sociological Society.

We must therefore now briefly but adequately consider the argument of the remarkable book published by the Scottish biologists in 1889, and presented in a new edition in 1900. The latter date is of interest, because it coincides with the re-discovery of the work of Mendel, published in 1865, to which we must afterwards more than once refer; and the work of the Mendelians during the subsequent decade very substantially modifies much of the authors' teaching upon the determination of gender, and the intimate nature of the physiological differences between the genders. We have learned more about the nature of gender in the decade or so since the publication of the new edition of the "Evolution of gender" than in all preceding time. Such, at least, is the well-grounded opinion of all who have acquainted themselves with the work of the Mendelians, as we should see: and therefore that book is by no means commended to the reader's attention as the last word upon the subject. The rather would one particularly direct him to the following prophetic and admirable passage in the preface of 1900:

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.