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THE INTERESTS OF POSTERITY 169
incurable maladies liable to be transmitted to posterity
should refrain from marriage, and not every man or woman
is in a position to enter upon such a state, and again, since
there are more women than men in the world a surplus of
women must necessarily remain single—but this does not
touch the argument ; there should be a solution to the
problem which would assure to every sound man and woman
their legitimate right to conjugal love.
Women who attach a predominating importance to
theoretical learning are prone to overlook the fact that
the procreation of gifted children, and their future education,
require the broadest and most extensive knowledge of the
world, forethought, and intelligence. All great men have
had pre-eminently gifted mothers. Goethe makes the
prototype of learning, Faust, apply to the mystical Realm of
Mothers for wisdom (" Das Reich der Mutter "). There is
indeed a mystical signification in the appearance of a
newborn child upon earth ! Each of us seeks self-expression
through some sort of channel—may it be in speech, literature,
art, or music—but the sublimest and most perfect utterance
of the soul is the child, the continuation, personification,
and embodiment of the parents’ physique and psyche. We
still know far too little about the mysterious laws of heredity,
but we do know that children do not fall from heaven like
meteors, the origin of which we cannot trace, for we
recognise children as the direct offspring of the foregoing
generation, a new link added to a chain, homogeneous in its
essence. It follows that the whole life of a man through
good and evil tendencies is reflected and reproduced in the
children he bears. Herein lies the secret of the
transmigration not only of the soul, but also of the body, which
is not yet sufficiently understood in the fullness of its details,
but the principle of which can be gauged with mathematical
accuracy. This points to the whole compass of the
responsibility towards the future generations and of producing"
children to be promoters of good, and workers for the
progress of humanity.
The momentous question as to how far women are ready
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