Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Rich personal charm and sweetness of healthful condition which are all
too swiftly passing from our modern women, hag-ridden by a strenuousness
that is wrecking the flower-body, with its vital joy and warmth, its
grace of being and its bliss of sense, its temperamental thrill and
colour.
* * * * *
The doctrine of Evolution is signally incomplete unless we realise it as
a sequence of progressive developments, direct and without intermission,
from the simplest forms of Elemental Matter to the highest, living
orders of Creation--Mineral, Vegetable, Brute and Human being
progressive stages in the evolution of Life and of Consciousness; graded
by links so subtly and infinitesimally constituted as to belong equally
to the kingdom below and to that above them.
The subject appears full of interest and suggestion, showing all the
planes of Nature, from mineral to man, linked in an unbroken line by way
of this half-vegetable body of flesh, with its roots in earth and its
branches in Consciousness. No more than this briefest of mentions can be
given here, however.
XI
_Mysterious "Internal Secretions"_
Biologists tell of Dual planes of operation in the processes of every
organ of the body. Because some of these function on the external plane,
in visible secretions or in other ways calculable by scientific methods,
and they function, too, upon an Inner and occulted, plane; in the form
of mysterious "Internal Secretions," the mode and nature whereof have
long baffled and eluded the most intricate scientific appliances and
intellections.
What is indicated if not an Inner, and Potential, plane of Life
and vital processes--a _plane of Involution_, or Recession
(centripetal)--whereon factors of environment, air, food, water and so
forth are transformed by vital involutionary processes, into
_potentials_ of living form and function? Which potentials remain
latent, or Recessive, in the cells and glands secreting them, and
available for transformation by evolutionary processes, into actualities
of physical form and function on the Outer (centrifugal) plane of
Life--the _plane of Evolution_.
And Life and health, together with normality of faculty and function,
depend upon the perfect balance and co-ordination of these two contrary
orders of factors and processes, which, I assume, are engendered,
respectively, in the Male and the Female departments of living organisms
of both sexes.
All the vital functions--Respiration, Circulation, Digestion,
Reproduction--may be classed as Recessive functions, because they are
characterised by a Recession, or withdrawal, from the Without to the
Within. This is a phenomenon of the _Involution_ of Environment, for
transformation thereof into potential Life, and potential Evolutionary
output.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account