termining
with absolute distinction between the characters that belong
separately to the sexes. Moreover, it has been shown that there is no
such thing as a _fixed woman character_, but that women differ
according to the circumstances under which they live, just as men
differ. This brings us directly against the old problem, inferiority
cannot be accepted as the sole reason of woman's present restricted
position in society. Other causes must be sought for.

Many features of the social and psychic as well as the physical
phenomena of human life have what we may call an organismal
mainspring, and become more intelligible when traced back to these. No
one, for instance, can appreciate the social significance of sex, or
account for the existing sexual relationships in human societies, who
does not know something of their biological antecedents. Take again
the sex differences, which attain to such complexity and importance in
the human civilised races, these can be explained only if their origin
is recognisable. To comprehend the higher forms of life we must gain
an acquaintance with the lower and more formative types. In this way
we shall begin to see something of that continual upward change under
the action of love's-selection that has developed the female and the
male. Many problems that have brought sorrow and perplexity to us
to-day will become recognisable as we ascertain their causes, and then
we can do much to remove them. Thus the problem of woman must first be
considered from a biological point of view. Explorations must be made
into the remote and obscure beginnings of sex. We must carry our
investigations back beyond the cycle of man, and trace the growth and
uses of the differentiation of the sexes from the lowest forms of
life.

Biology, a science hardly more than a century old, is still in the
descriptive and comparative stage; it is the scientific study of the
present and past history of animal life for the purpose of
understanding its future history. It is of vital importance to human
welfare in the future that we should learn by this comparative study
of origins and of the potent past what are the lines along which
progress is to be expected.

This, then, will be the first path of our discovery. We shall have to
traverse many past ages of life and to consider certain humble
organisms, before we shall be able really to understand woman in her
true position in the sexual relationship as we find it to-day