Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
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 assume 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 passively, 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 prone, as in men, to structural
degenerations. Masculine women are very liable to cancer; a liability
they transmit as heritage to offspring of both sexes. 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 assumed 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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