Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/625

Rh be regarded as satisfactorily sustained. There is the "earlier arrest" of physical growth; the "rather smaller growth of the nervo-muscular system;" the much longer nutritive tax demanded for the nourishment of fœtal and infant life; the "somewhat less of general power or massiveness" in feminine mental manifestations; there may be, "beyond this, a perceptible falling short in those two faculties, intellectual and emotional, which are the latest products of human evolution—the power of abstract reasoning, and that most abstract of the emotions, the sentiment of justice." It does not therefore follow that these results, any or all of them, are deductions made from the "cost of reproduction." Force modified and readjusted is not force subtracted or destroyed.

The smaller nervo-muscular system, and the diminished power or massiveness of mental action, may be supposed to arise as direct results of the larger nutritive cost of maternity. But the earlier arrest of physical growth may or may not be coupled with an earlier arrest of mental development; and one or both of these may offer to us very marked illustrations—not of process prematurely cut short to be handed over to offspring—but of process quickened by other related antecedents, and therefore more rapidly completed. This need not involve loss or transfer of individual force to offspring; but, rather, a modified system of the transfer of substance and force from the environment to the reproductive functions and their products.

If it could be shown that men or women who are the parents of many children have thereby lost something of individual power, we might then be forced to admit that the greater cost related to the reproductive system in women must be at their personal expense, not at the expense of the nutriment which they assimilate and eliminate.

The weaknesses resulting from a too early or an excessive tax of functions belong to a distinct class of considerations. I assume that every balanced constitutional activity, though including loss of nutritive elements, is yet a normal aid to constitutional strength. Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration; every use of faculty belongs to the latter class. There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing. The antagonism is only that of action and reaction, which are but two phases of the same process—opposing phases which exist everywhere, and which must exist, or action itself cease, and death reign universally.

Growth and eating are antagonistic; yet, one must eat to live as assuredly as children must be reared at the expense of nutrition, and of still more elaborated parental force. Nor is it true that one who expends least has the most remaining. Other things being equal, the law seems to be directly reversed. One activity initiates another;