This is
another way of saying what will often be said in the following
pages--that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent.
We shall later see that this great truth by no means involves the
condemnation of spinsterhood, but since it determines not only the
physiology, but also the psychology, of the individual, and especially
of woman, it will guide us to a right appreciation of the dangers and
the right direction of spinsterhood, and the means whereby it may be
made a blessing to self and to others. This must be said lest the reader
should be deterred by the unquestionably true assertion that the
individual is meant by Nature to be a parent, and has no excuse for
existence in Nature's eyes except as a parent. If we are to regard the
body as a trustee of the germ-plasm, it is evident that the body which
carries the germ-plasm with itself to the grave--the "immortality of the
germ-plasm" being only conditional and at the mercy of the acts of
individuals--has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious
concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings,
at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons
of both sexes having served the race for evermore in the highest degree.
We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for
herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood.
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