Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/306

292 shaping the mental character of the sexes. Men reduced to a condition of eunuchism afford a wonderful contrast to men in the normal condition. It is upon the cerebrum and on its function of cerebration that some of its most marked effects are to be observed. He ceases to be fit for war, and is of service only in the pursuits of peace. He is no longer capable of daring to assert his rights, and, of all beings, is a fit subject for a slave. Not only is he made a coward, but the moral senses are weakened, and he may be safely delegated to execute the cruelty of others. It does not seem, then, to be any thing but a legitimate deduction that this radical difference, intellectually, between the normal man and eunuchism is the participation of the brain in the generic cycle, and one phase of sexual cerebration.

Through all the females of the mammalia, there exists a feeling toward their young called the maternal instinct. There is no necessity here of going into the question of instinct among animals, as to whether it partakes of the nature of an intellectual process. Whatever be its nature, it is evidently a part of generation, and as such is eminently sexual in its origin. In dealing with this feeling in the human female, although it may have a rudimentary intellectual source, yet it is lifted above the level of instinctive feeling, and becomes a part of her emotional nature. "The intimate and essential relation of emotions to the ideas, which they equal in number and variety, is sufficient to prove that the law of progress from the general and simple to the special and complex prevails in their development" (Maudsley). Thus it is that an instinctive feeling in lower animals, without which the reproductive faculty would be totally defeated, becomes the maternal emotion in its simplest form in the human being; and, by carrying on this evolution from the simple to the complex, produces a complete modification of the psychical tone. Here, also, we may gain a clearer insight into the nature of the maternal feeling by contrasting it with the paternal feeling. This emotion is a state of the mind which obtains the conditions of its existence from the same physical faculty—that of reproduction; and although it is closely related to the expression of the maternal feeling in the more developed state of the emotion, yet, in its fundamental form, it differs widely.

Thus, among the male of the mammalia in which it is not entirely absent, it mostly assumes the form of abstaining from injury, while in the female of the same species it exists as a protecting and maintaining instinct.

In the human race, the same emotion receives a shadow cast from its primal origin in animals. In the human female, in the child-bearing period, it exists as a love, active or passive, for all children; while in men, during the more active period of manhood, it exists as a gentle tolerance of children, until called out in its active form by his own