Our first question must be--Do Nature and Life, the facts and
laws of the continuance and maintenance of living creatures, lend
countenance to this idea; can it be translated from general terms,
essentially poetic and therefore suspect by many, into precise, hard,
scientific language; is it a fact, like the atomic weight of oxygen or
the laws of motion, that woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the
future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of
the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is
of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity
to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been
divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and
inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a
biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained
knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology,
afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been
so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms
already set forth. Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the
individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of
the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered
by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects
our understanding of the difference between man and woman.
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