The Relation Between Male and Female

The relation of the sexes is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct.

It peeps out everywhere in spite of all veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious, and the aim of the jest, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all allusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints, of all unspoken offers and all stolen glances, the daily meditation of the young, and often also of the old, the hourly thought of the unchaste, and even against their will the constantly recurring imagination of the chaste, the ever ready material of a joke, just because the profoundest seriousness lies at its foundation. It is, however, the piquant element and the joke of life that the chief concern of all men is secretly pursued and ostensibly ignored as much as possible.

But, in fact, we see it every moment seat itself, as the true and hereditary lord of the world, out of the fulness of its own strength, upon the ancestral throne, and looking down from thence with scornful glances, laugh at the preparations which have been made to bind it, imprison it, or at least to limit it and wherever it is possible to keep it concealed, or even so to master it that it shall only appear as a subordinate, secondary concern of life. But all this agrees with the fact that the sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live, and consequently the concentration of all desire; therefore in the text I have called the genital organs the focus of the will. Indeed, one may say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence.

The will to live manifests itself indeed primarily as an effort to sustain the individual; yet this is only a step to the effort to sustain the species, and the latter endeavour must be more powerful in proportion as the life of the species surpasses that of the individual in duration, extension, and value. Therefore sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live, its most distinctly expressed type; and the origin of the individual in it, and its primacy over all other desires of the natural man, are both in complete agreement with this.

One other remark of a physiological nature is in place here, a remark which throws light upon my fundamental doctrine ex- pounded in the second book. As the sexual impulse is the most vehement of desires, the wish of wishes, the concentration of all our volition, and accordingly the satisfaction of it which exactly corresponds to the individual wish of any one, that is, the desire fixed upon a definite individual, is the summit and crown of his happiness, the ultimate goal of his natural endeavours, with the attainment of which everything seems to him to have been at-[315] tained, and with the frustrating of which everything seems to him to have been lost:—so we find, as its physiological correlative, in the objectified will, thus in the human organism, the sperm or semen as the secretion of secretions, the quintessence of all animal fluids, the last result of all organic functions, and have in it a new proof of the fact that the body is only the objectivity of the will, i.e., is the will itself under the form of the idea.

With reproduction is connected the maintenance of the offspring, and with the sexual impulse, parental love; and thus through these the life of the species is carried on. Accordingly the love of the brute for its young has, like the sexual impulse, a strength which far surpasses that of the efforts which merely con- cerns itself as an individual. This shows itself in the fact that even the mildest animals are ready to undertake for the sake of their Chapter XLII. The Life Of The Species. 307 young even the most unequal battle for life and death, and with almost all species of animals the mother encounters any danger for the protection of her young, nay, in many cases even faces certain death. In the case of man this instinctive parental love is guided and directed by reason, i.e., by reflection. Sometimes, however, it is also in this way restricted, and with bad characters this may extend to the complete repudiation of it. Therefore we can observe its effects most purely in the lower animals. In itself, however, it is not less strong in man; here also, in particular cases, we see it entirely overcome self-love, and even extend to the sacrifice of life. Thus, for example, the French newspapers have just announced that at Cahors, in the department of Lot, a father has taken his own life in order that his son, who had been drawn for military service, should be the eldest son of a widow, and therefore exempt (Galignani’s Messenger of 22d June 1843).

Yet in the case of the lower animals, since they are capable of no reflection, the instinctive maternal affection (the male is generally ignorant of his paternity) shows itself directly and [316] unsophisticated, and therefore with perfect distinctness and in its whole strength. At bottom it is the expression of the conscious- ness in the brute that its true being lies more immediately in the species than in the individual, and therefore, when necessary, it sacrifices its life that the species may be maintained in the young. Thus here, as also in the sexual impulse, the will to live becomes to a certain extent transcendent, for its consciousness extends beyond the individual, in which it is inherent, to the species. In order to avoid expressing this second manifestation of the life of the species in a merely abstract manner, and to present it to the reader in its magnitude and reality, I will give a few examples of the extraordinary strength of instinctive maternal affection. The sea-otter, when pursued, seizes its young one and dives with it; when it comes up again to take breath, it covers the young one with its body, and receives the harpoon of the hunter while the young one is escaping. A young whale is killed merely to attract the mother, who hurries to it and seldom forsakes it so long as it still lives, even although she is struck with several harpoons (Scoresby’s “Journal of a Whaling Voyage;” from the English of Kreis, p. 196). At Three Kings Island, near New Zealand, there are colossal seals called sea-elephants (phoca pro- boscidea). They swim round the island in regular herds and feed upon fishes, but yet have certain terrible enemies below water unknown to us, by whom they are often severely wounded; hence their swimming together requires special tactics. The females bring forth their young upon the shore; while they are suckling them, which lasts from seven to eight weeks, all the males form a circle round them in order to prevent them, driven by hunger, from entering the sea, and if this is attempted they prevent it by biting. Thus they all fast together for between seven and eight weeks, and all become very thin, simply in order that the young may not enter the sea before they are able to swim well and[317] observe the necessary tactics which are then taught them with blows and bites (Freycinet, Voy. aux terres Australes, 1826). We also see here how parental affection, like every strong exertion of the will (cf. chap. xix. 6), heightens the intelligence. Wild ducks, white-throats, and many other birds, when the sportsman comes near their nest, fly in front of him with loud cries and flap about as if their wings were injured, in order to attract his attention from their young to themselves. The lark tries to entice the dog away from its nest by exposing itself. In the same way hinds and does induce the hunter to pursue them in order that their young may not be attacked. Swallows have flown into burning houses to rescue their young or perish with them. At Delft, in a great fire, a stork allowed itself to be burnt in its nest rather than forsake its tender young, which could not yet fly (Hadr. Junius, Descriptio Hollandiæ). Mountain-cocks and woodcocks allow themselves to be taken upon the nest when brooding. Muscicapa tyrannus protects its nest with remarkable courage, and defends itself against eagles. An ant has been cut in 2, and the fore half been seen to bring the pupæ to a place of safety. A bitch whose litter had been cut out of her belly crept up to them dying, caressed them, and began to whine violently only when they were taken from her (Burdach, Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft, vol. ii. and iii.).

The most ordinary experience teaches that in generation the combined seed of the parents not only propagates the peculiarities of the species, but also those of the individual, as far as bodily (objective, external) qualities are concerned, and this has also always been recognised—

“Naturæ sequitur semina quisque suæ.” —CATULL.

Now whether this also holds good of mental (subjective, in- ternal) qualities, so that these also are transmitted by the parents to the children, is a question which has already often been raised, and almost always answered in the affirmative. More difficult, however, is the problem whether it is possible to distinguish what belongs to the father and what to the mother, thus what is the mental inheritance which we receive from each of our parents. If now we cast upon this problem the light of our fundamental knowledge that the will is the true being, the kernel, the radical element in man, and the intellect, on the other hand, is what is secondary, adventitious, the accident of that substance; before questioning experience we will assume it as at least probable that the father, as sexus potior and the procreative principle, imparts the basis, the radical element, of the new life, thus the will, and the mother, as sexus sequior and merely conceiving principle, imparts the secondary element, the intellect; that thus the man inherits his moral nature, his character, his inclinations, his heart, from the father, and, on the other hand, the grade, quality, and tendency of his intelligence from the mother.

Now this assumption actually finds its confirmation in experience; only this cannot be decided by a physical experiment upon the table, but results partly from the careful and acute observation of many years, and partly from history.