Woman & womanhood : a search for principles / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Caleb Saleeby
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Woman & womanhood : a search for principles / by C.W. Saleeby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/416 page 27
    problem of sex is our concern, and we may have to traverse many past ages of “ aeonian evolution,” and even to consider certain quite humble organisms, be- fore we rightly see woman as an evolutionary pro- duct of the laws of life. But, first, as to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore, the race exists for the production of indi- viduals, in any sense that we human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the individual exists for the race. After all, that does not mean that individuals exist and are worth Nature’s while merely in order to see the germ-plasm on its way. To say that the individual exists for the race is to say that he, and, as we shall see, pre-eminently she, exist for future individuals; and that is not a destiny to be despised of any. Let us attempt to state simply but accurately what biologists mean in regarding the individual as primarily the host and servant of some- thing called the germ-plasm. When the processes of development and of repro- duction are closely scrutinized, we find evidence which, together with the conclusions based thereon, was first
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