The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics
Philosophy
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics
Economics; Philosophy
Including under individuation all those processes completing and
maintaining individual life, and under genesis all those aiding the
formation and perfecting of new individuals, the two are necessarily
antagonistic. Every higher degree of individual evolution is followed by
a lower degree of race multiplication, and _vice versâ_. Progress in
bulk, complexity or activity involves retrogress in fertility; and
progress in fertility involves retrogress in bulk, complexity, or
activity. The same quantity of matter may be divided into many small
wholes or few large wholes; but number negatives largeness, and
largeness negatives number.
It is a general physiological truth that while the building-up of the
individual is going on rapidly, the reproductive organs remain
imperfectly developed and inactive; and that the commencement of
reproduction at once indicates a declining rate of growth and becomes a
cause of arrest in growth.
It has now to be noticed how complexity of organisation is hindered by
reproductive activity and conversely. The hydra's power to produce young
ones from nearly all parts of its body is due to the comparative
homogeneity of its body, while it is not improbable that the smallness
of human fertility, compared with the fertility of large feline animals,
is due to the greater complexity of the human organisation--more
especially the organisation of the nervous system.
Of the inverse variation between activity and genesis we have examples
in the contrast between the fertility of birds and the fertility of
mammals. Comparing the large with the large and the small with the
small, we see that creatures which continually go through the muscular
exertion of sustaining themselves in the air and propelling themselves
rapidly through it are less prolific than creatures of equal weights
which go through the smaller exertion of moving about over solid
surfaces. The extreme infertility of the bat is most striking when
compared with the structurally similar but very prolific mouse; a
difference in the rate of multiplication which may fairly be ascribed to
the difference in the rate of expenditure.
_Interpretation and Qualification_
Derived as the self-sustaining and waste-sustaining forces are from a
common stock of force, it necessarily happens that, other things being
equal, increase of the one involves decrease of the other. It may
therefore be set down as a law that every higher degree of organic
evolution has for its concomitant a lower degree of the peculiar organic
dissolution which is seen in the production of new organisms.
How is the ratio between individuation and genesis established in each
case? All specialties of the reproductive process are due to the natural
selection of favourable variations. Given a certain surplus available
for race preservation, and it is clear that by indirect equilibration
only can there be established that peculiar distribution of this surplus
which is seen in each case.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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