Feminism and Sex-Extinction Part 33

An athlete, in so-called "condition," is in the prime of Vigour; his muscular and nervous powers being at high levels of structure and of functioning. His Vital powers are proportionally at low ebb, however; as is proved by his notable lack of recuperative power in illness. He is bad subject, indeed, in respect of progress and recovery from disease.

Feeble-minded persons possess but little Vigour of brain or of body, yet their Vital power, as shown in healthy organic functioning and vitativeness, is often extraordinary. Vigour is an expression of nervous energy, and is generated by the brain. Vitability is Life-power, and results from vital organs efficient both in structure and in processes.

It is engendered in the Reproductive System; which may be regarded as the power-house of Life and vital function.

_Vigour_ is the power of Differentiation, or Individuation, of an organism, structural and functional, physical and mental, in terms of its relation to environment. _Vitability_ is the intensification of the individualism and of the functioning of an organism in terms of Life-power.

Vigour, being katabolic, a male and a Dominant trait, manifests in man (as in plants) as Tallness, or the expenditure of vital energy upon the material plane, in growth and stature; as too in functional initiative and activity, both physical and mental, on the material plane.

Vitability, being anabolic, a female and a Recessive trait, manifests as Dwarfness, or the conservation of vital energy upon the material plane, in respect of growth and stature; as too in weakness, or inhibition of vigour and activity, both physical and mental.

The male trait of Vigour makes men larger, stronger, hardier, and more resistant to disease than women are. The female trait of Vitability makes women healthier, more charged with vital power and temperament, more recuperative from disease, and longer-lived than men. The complementary inherences of Vigour and Vitability, derived respectively from the two parents, and supplementing one another in offspring, endow him or her with fine form and structure, healthy vital organs and efficient function, power of Life and nervous energy.

In the normal male, Vigour dominates Vitability; the maternal potential of Vitability being differentiated in him into its male equivalent.

While in the normal female, Vigour recedes within the Female traits of vital power and healthy functioning, endurance and womanly faculty.

The opposite modes of Vigour and Vitality are well shown in disease. In vigorous men, disease may a.s.sume the type known as "sthenic"; occasioning such violent re-activity, or rebellion, of the system, and such consequent severity of symptoms as speedily exhaust the resources, and tend to fatal ending. While Vital power, being anabolic and conservative, meets the foe pa.s.sively, and instead of wasting, economises the forces by moderation of symptoms; bending to the course and processes of sickness, and making thereby for recovery. Because of the lesser vitability of their cells, disease in men tends toward structural, or organic deteriorations. While disease in normal women is more often functional, merely.

In masculine women, disease is p.r.o.ne, as in men, to structural degenerations. Masculine women are very liable to cancer; a liability they transmit as heritage to offspring of both s.e.xes. Hence the increasing masculinity of latter-day women has entailed upon the race an increased liability to cancer and to other structural degeneration. This liability has a.s.sumed such grave proportions as to occur in children even, showing in the abnormal growths, "adenoids" now so prevalent as to have become "the normal" of modern childhood.

IX

_The living body is a highly-vitalised Vegetative organism with a highly-specialised Cerebro-nervous organism differentiated in it_

Professor Cuvier said, "The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole animal; the other systems are there only to serve it."

Professor Bergson amplifies the statement:

"A higher organism is essentially a sensori-motor system installed on systems of digestion, respiration, circulation, secretion, etc., whose function it is to repair, cleanse and protect it, to create an unvarying, internal environment for it, and above all to produce its potential energy for conversion into locomotive movement."

In both statements, is recognition of the Dual differentiation of the body into an organism of Life which functions in relation to its own intrinsic being, and an organism of Consciousness which functions in relation to exterior environment. That in death from starvation, the brain and the nerves remain almost unimpaired, while all the other organs and tissues lose weight, their cells undergoing profound degenerative changes, is further indication of two distinct and separate departments of development and processes in every animal existence.

As in its Mendelian phenomena of the Segregation of its Contrasting Traits, and the Dominance and Recessiveness of these in const.i.tution and heredity, so, in its living organisation, the human body is extraordinarily and in a number of ways essentially plant-like. The brain and the nervous system may be regarded, indeed, as a highly-differentiated Cerebro-Nervous organism grafted upon a simpler Vital, and vegetative body, from which, as from a soil, it draws its life and energy: and from which, as age advances, it gradually withdraws the power of further sustaining its existence.

This Cerebro-Nervous graft perishes only because the Vegetative body on which it is installed has come to the end of its power to sustain the life of the Nervous organism picketed upon it.

The close resemblances in structure and in processes between the Cells of vegetable and animal organisms, when taken in conjunction with a number of other biological indications, justify the conclusion that living bodies are actually vegetative organisms to which have been super-added, by progressive evolutionary differentiations, faculties of Motion and of Consciousness.

(Plants are recognised as possessing rudimentary consciousness. While Growth is a mode of Motion.)

The trunk, which contains the respiratory, circulatory, nutritive and reproductive organs represents the Vitative, or Vegetative, system. The brain with its tributary spinal cord and spinal-nervous system represents the Sensori-motor organism. While the limbs are highly-differentiated implements which the Cerebro-Nervous organism has developed in the Vitative organism; to serve it with means of locomotion and of action, for the achievement of intelligent purpose.

The lungs, with their ramifications of tubes and their air-cells, closely resemble the branches and leaves of a tree, which spread into and absorb from the atmosphere the oxygen whereby it lives. While the convoluted intestines are like the roots of a tree, absorbing nurture for it from environment.

The Vegetative organism, being the agency of Life, is female in origin and inherence.

The Cerebro-spinal organism, being the agency of Adaptation, is male in origin and inherence. In both, however, the inherences of the other s.e.x are represented.

The body resembles thus a bi-s.e.xual plant, its root-stock being female and Recessive, with a male Dominant and differentiating organism incorporated in it.

X

_Vegetative body has its own brain and nervous system and its (involuntary) muscles_

This Vegetative body has its own separate (organic) brain, in the Solar Plexus--or "Abdominal brain"--and its nervous system, in the intricate "Sympathetic" system of nerves; which, in addition to administering the nutrition of the body, is intimately and closely a.s.sociated, in psychology, with the brain and with the spinal-nervous system of the Psychical organism. Itself subconscious, this organic brain nevertheless contributes vital impulse and colour to Consciousness.

It possesses also its own specialised system of muscles, the "Involuntary muscles"; which are not under control of the conscious brain and will, but operate automatically--by so-called reflex action.

The motions they subtend are concerned with vital functions; nutrition, respiration, circulation, a.s.similation, elimination, reproduction.

The Vitative organism, being vegetative of growth and pa.s.sive of mode, needs rest and sun and wind and air and water for its nurture and development. With that rising of the sap in the world of vegetation which occurs in spring, kindred processes occur within the human vegetative body. It responds to the re-creative forces of its mother-earth.

With every recurring Spring-tide, youth turns again to thoughts of love, because of this natural renaissance of its vitative resources, for purposes of re-creation--both of Cells and individuals.

Old age is a permanent winter of this plant-body. Summer suns revive but little more than flickerings of its vegetative pulsings. Although the psychical life, intellectual and nervous, may be still vigorous, the sap of the plant-body no longer rises, quick and warm and fructifying, to earth's perennial call.

This plant-like body with its plant-like fruiting Cells, it is, that when charged with the graces and magnetic potences of health and high nurture, supplies the pleasing personality found not seldom in sinners, while often conspicuously lacking in saints--a seeming anomaly which has gone far to discredit the virtues.

By way of it, human personality resembles a mystical flowering plant that breathes and feels and moves; and a fruiting plant that reproduces.

The Cerebro-Nervous system animates and intelligises this beautiful vessel of flesh wherein it subsists.

The vigour of its Vegetative stock, supplementing brain and nervous system by fine structure, fine stature, organic vigour, native faculty, and reproductive power, has given the Anglo-Saxon race its world-wide rule. It is to this that its women have owed their shapely frames, their healthful const.i.tutions and their loveliness; the warm tints of hair and skin, the fresh and flower-like complexions, and the fruit-like form and bloom of cheek for which they once were famed.

Rich personal charm and sweetness of healthful condition which are all too swiftly pa.s.sing from our modern women, hag-ridden by a strenuousness that is wrecking the flower-body, with its vital joy and warmth, its grace of being and its bliss of sense, its temperamental thrill and colour.

The doctrine of Evolution is signally incomplete unless we realise it as a sequence of progressive developments, direct and without intermission, from the simplest forms of Elemental Matter to the highest, living orders of Creation--Mineral, Vegetable, Brute and Human being progressive stages in the evolution of Life and of Consciousness; graded by links so subtly and infinitesimally const.i.tuted as to belong equally to the kingdom below and to that above them.

The subject appears full of interest and suggestion, showing all the planes of Nature, from mineral to man, linked in an unbroken line by way of this half-vegetable body of flesh, with its roots in earth and its branches in Consciousness. No more than this briefest of mentions can be given here, however.

XI

_Mysterious "Internal Secretions"_

Biologists tell of Dual planes of operation in the processes of every organ of the body. Because some of these function on the external plane, in visible secretions or in other ways calculable by scientific methods, and they function, too, upon an Inner and occulted, plane; in the form of mysterious "Internal Secretions," the mode and nature whereof have long baffled and eluded the most intricate scientific appliances and intellections.

What is indicated if not an Inner, and Potential, plane of Life and vital processes--a _plane of Involution_, or Recession (centripetal)--whereon factors of environment, air, food, water and so forth are transformed by vital involutionary processes, into _potentials_ of living form and function? Which potentials remain latent, or Recessive, in the cells and glands secreting them, and available for transformation by evolutionary processes, into actualities of physical form and function on the Outer (centrifugal) plane of Life--the _plane of Evolution_.

And Life and health, together with normality of faculty and function, depend upon the perfect balance and co-ordination of these two contrary orders of factors and processes, which, I a.s.sume, are engendered, respectively, in the Male and the Female departments of living organisms of both s.e.xes.

All the vital functions--Respiration, Circulation, Digestion, Reproduction--may be cla.s.sed as Recessive functions, because they are characterised by a Recession, or withdrawal, from the Without to the Within. This is a phenomenon of the _Involution_ of Environment, for transformation thereof into potential Life, and potential Evolutionary output.

_Death_ is a centripetal withdrawal of the soul from the material Without to an Inner zone of Spiritual, or Potential, Being. And in due time, a.n.a.logy a.s.sures us, having a.s.similated and transformed the resultant of a terrestrial existence into a new potential of Life, Life issues forth again, by the centrifugal impulse of re-Birth, to differentiate itself once more in living form upon the Outer plane.

(_Re-incarnation_ is, obviously, the true interpretation of _Resurrection of the body_, which otherwise is scientifically impossible.)

Winter withdrawal, or Involution, of the sap of Vegetation from the outer plane of functioning to the inner plane of potential Life, whereby it derives such new increment of Vital potential as, with the outgoing of sap again in the renaissance of spring, evolves in increased growth and new foliage, is further example of the principle and processes of Dominance and Recessiveness--of the female Vital impulse and the male Developmental impetus, operating in an eternal tidal rhythm of ebb and flow.