ordinary
woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to
go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have
always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively.

"From this general, not from the individual, standpoint, I am
trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the
individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest
vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of
motherhood.

"But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only
be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and
man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin
together to bring up the new generation out of which some day
society will be formed. In it the completed man--the superman--will
be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the
horizon of to-day."

CHAPTER IV

THE LAW OF CONSERVATION

Students of the physical sciences discovered in the nineteenth century a
universal law of Nature, always believed by the wisest since the time of
Thales, but never before proven, which is now commonly known as the law
of the conservation of energy. When we say to a child, "You cannot eat
your cake and have it," we are expressing the law of the conservation of
matter, which is really a more or less accurate part-expression of the
law of the conservation of energy. The law that from nothing nothing is
made--and further, though here this concerns us less, that nothing is
ever destroyed--is the only firm foundation for any work or any theory
whether in science or philosophy. The chemist who otherwise bases his
account of a reaction is wrong; the sociologist who denies it Nature
will deny. It was the sure foundation upon which Herbert Spencer erected
the philosophy of evolution; and every page of this book depends upon
the certainty that this law applies to woman and to womanhood as it does
to the rest of the universe. Further, it may be shown that certain less
universal but most important generalizations made by two or three
biologists are indeed special cases of the universal law. There is,
first, the law of Herbert Spencer, which states that for every
individual there is an inevitable issue between the demands of
parenthood and the demands of self; and there is, secondly, the law of
Professors Geddes and Thomson, which asserts that th