Essays in war-time / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1916
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Essays in war-time / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2l6 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME the existence of two sexes is, as Weismann insisted, simply an arrangement which renders possible the inter¬ mingling of two difíerent hereditary tendencies. The object of sex, that is to say, is by no means to aid repro¬ duction, but rather to subordinate and check repro¬ duction in order to evolve higher and more complex beings. Here we come to the great principle, which Herbert Spencer developed at length in his Principles of Biology, that, as he put it. Individuation and Genesis vary inversely, whence it followed that advancing evolu¬ tion must be accompanied by declining fertility. In¬ dividuation, which means complexity of structure, has advanced, as Genesis, the unrestricted tendency to mere multiplication, has receded. This involves a diminished number of ofíspring, but an increased amount of time and care in the creation and breeding of each ; it involves also that the reproductive life of the organism is shortened and more or less confined to special periods ; it begins much later, it usually ends earlier, and even in its period of activity it tends to fall into cycles. Nature, we see, who, at the outset, had endowed her children so lavishly with the aptitude for multiplication, grown wiser now, expends her fertile imagination in devising preventive checks on reproduction for her children's use. The result is that, though reproduction is greatly slackened, evolution is greatly accelerated. The signi¬ ficance of sex, as Coulter puts it, Hes in the fact that it makes organic evolution more rapid and far more varied.'' It is scarcely necessary to emphasise that a highly im¬ portant, and, indeed, essential aspect of this greater