is issue specially
concerns the female as compared with the male sex, the distinguishing
character of femaleness being that in it a higher proportion of the
vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore,
necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual. It
is of service to one's thinking, perhaps, to regard Geddes and Thomson's
law as a special case of Spencer's, and Spencer's as a special case of
the law of the conservation of energy. First, then, somewhat of detail
regarding the law of balance between expenditure on the self and
expenditure upon the race; and then to the all-important application of
this to the case of womanhood--for upon this application the whole of
the subsequent argument depends.

When he set forth, with great daring, to write the "Principles of
Biology," Spencer was already at an advantage compared with the accepted
writers upon the subject, not merely because of his stupendous
intellectual endowment, but also because the idea of the conservation of
energy was a permanent guiding factor in all his thought. Thus it was,
one supposes, that this bold young amateur, for he was little more,
perceived in the light of the evolutionary idea of which he was one of
the original promulgators, a simple truth which had been unperceived by
all previous writers upon biology, from Aristotle onwards. It is in the
last section of his book that Spencer propounds his "law of
multiplication," depending upon what he calls the "antagonism between
individuation and genesis." As I have observed elsewhere, the word
antagonism is perhaps too harsh, and may certainly be misleading, for it
may induce us to suppose that there is no possible reconciliation of the
claims and demands of the race and the individual, the future and the
present. I believe most devoutly that there is such a reconciliation, as
indeed Spencer himself pointed out, and a central thesis of this book is
indeed that in the right expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood,
woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and
richest self-development. Thus one may be inclined to abandon the word
antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio
between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spencerian
terms. This principle has immense consequences--most notably that as
life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used
for the enrichment and dev