must rest on that faith--that a new guiding impulse, reinforcing natural
instinct and becoming in time an inseparable accompaniment of it, will
lead civilized man on his racial course. Just as in the past the race has,
on the whole, been moulded by a natural, and in part sexual, selection,
that was unconscious of itself and ignorant of the ends it made towards,
so in the future the race will be moulded by deliberate selection, the
creative energy of Nature becoming self-conscious in the civilized brain
of man. This is not a faith which has its source in a vague hope. The
problems of the individual life are linked on to the fate of the racial
life, and again and again we shall find as we ponder the individual
questions we are here concerned with, that at all points they ultimately
converge towards this same racial end.

Since we have here, therefore, to follow out the sexual relationships of
the individual as they bear on society, it will be convenient at this
point to put aside the questions of ancestry and to accept the individual
as, with hereditary constitution already determined, he lies in his
mother's womb.

It is the mother who is the child's supreme parent. At various points in
zoölogical evolution it has seemed possible that the functions that we now
know as those of maternity would be largely and even equally shared by the
male parent. Nature has tried various experiments in this direction, among
the fishes, for instance, and even among birds. But reasonable and
excellent as these experiments were, and though they were sufficiently
sound to secure their perpetuation unto this day, it remains true that it
was not along these lines that Man was destined to emerge. Among all the
mammal predecessors of Man, the male is an imposing and important figure
in the early days of courtship, but after conception has once been secured
the mother plays the chief part in the racial life. The male must be