Читать книгу The Child in Human Progress - George Henry Payne - Страница 6

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MATERNAL AFFECTION THE BEGINNING OF HUMAN ALTRUISM—SYMPATHY AND PARENTAL LOVE THE BASIS OF OTHER VIRTUES—THE WEAKEST SACRIFICED IN ALL PRIMITIVE SOCIETY—NEGLECTED CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF THE ATTITUDE OF SOCIETY TOWARD CHILDREN.

IF it were possible to postulate the first definite concept of the first family that crossed the vague and age-consuming frontier between animality and humanity, it would be safe to say that this primitive and almost animal mind would reach for an approximation, on the part of the male, to the maternal affection.

In the gathering of food and the making of protective war, many animals are the rivals in instinct and intelligence of primitive man. Continued development in that regard might have produced a race of men “formidable among animals through sheer force of sharp-wittedness,” but not homo sapiens. In the passage from animality to humanity, there was not only mental evolution, but moral, and the developing mind would naturally exercise itself for days and years, and perhaps for long periods around that one emotion—the love of the female for its young—an emotion he was incapable of understanding, but the outward manifestations of which he would be bound to imitate.

Whether man was led to an understanding of the maternal affections by the “sensuous aspects of the newly-born progeny” appealing to man himself,1 or through pity and sympathy, as Spencer suggests, or still more through imitation of the maternal delight, he undoubtedly would be led to a higher mental plane as he slowly came to understand that the maternal affection was not self-gratifying in the sense that marked the entire gamut of his own emotions up to that time.

Even in recent times tribes have been found so low in the social scale that coition and child-birth have been assumed to have no relation, the latter phenomenon being explained by ascribing to certain trees the power to make women fructile. In a society as low in mentality as this, it would be easy to conceive that the woman’s unselfishness—her lack of the self-gratifying impulse—in protecting, nursing, and rearing a burden superimposed on her with no pleasurable antecedents, would be even more amazing than it would be to the male living in a state sufficiently advanced to understand the reproductive function.

In either state of society, there then begins in the human consciousness a disturbance “which is significant of something having another value than that of mere pleasure, and which is pregnant with the promise of another than the merely sensuous or merely intellectual life.”2 The words quoted are Prof. Ladd’s, discussing the philosophy of conduct of civilized man—but here, even in the primitive man, the rule applies—the moral idea is born, legitimately enough, out of the altruistic maternal affection.

Not infrequently one comes across such expressions as “when man became civilized,” starting always the baffling inquiry—what civilized man? The mystery of life, as Bergson suggests, may be its solution, for in the acquired tendency of looking on the world as containing one emotion at least that was not purely self-gratifying, man was preparing himself for the virtues that followed in the wake of his own first altruistic concept. The loyalty without which there could be no sociality has, on the one hand, a reasoned basis—the selfish and protecting one that may also explain the gregariousness of animals—but it differs from gregariousness by subordinating to the good of another one’s own pleasure, just as the mother subordinates her wishes to the pleasure and good of the infant. It is, in fact, the developed emotion that the male acquires through imitation and sympathy from the female, for, “when a tendency splits up in the course of its development, each of the special tendencies which thus arise, tries to preserve and develop everything in the primitive tendency that is not incompatible with the work for which it is specialized.”3

Back of this sociological “leap” is Nature’s long preparation. “The stability of animal marriage,” says Wundt,4 “seems in general to be proportional to affection for the young,” and yet the primitive instincts are sometimes so powerful that even among those animals in whom the maternal instinct is strongly developed, they will, even after facing great danger for their young, desert them when the time comes to migrate. This Darwin says is true of swallows, house martins, and swifts.5

But even in the lowest animals the “chief source of altrusim” is the family group as it revolves round the care of the young,6 while with the increase in the representative capacity that differentiates man from the brute, and the prolongation of the period of human infancy, there is born real altruism, the germ of morality, through the “knitting together of permanent relations between mother and infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male parent.”

How then does it happen that an instinct that has been productive of so much for humanity, an instinct that has given birth to most of those virtues that mark civilized from savage man,7 served apparently so little as a safeguard for the offspring that generated the moral evolution? Studying the cross currents and the ever-present struggle for existence of the various nations that worked out of barbarism to civilization, we see that after all it is by and through the very virtues, tenderness, sympathy, and humanity, that were first aroused by the helpless offspring, that the infant comes in turn to be protected, though the path is frequently a tortuous one.

The society that was able to exist in primitive times was always the one that sacrificed the individual,8 and the infant was naturally low in the scale of value. That very sacrifice of the weakest, stratified into a national characteristic, produced in the greatest civilization of ancient times, a narrow and egoistical morality, with little conception of what we call humanity. “No Greek ever attained the sublimity of such a point of view,” says George Henry Lewes.9

In this, the “century of the child,” there is a great conception of humanity, and even of children’s rights. Little attempt, however, has been made to trace in consecutive and co-ordinate fashion the development among races and nations of the progress of the human race in its attitude toward children. We who are so much interested in the betterment of the race and who are so much moved by humanitarian considerations that almost the first consideration of the state is to provide for the children, have reached this point of view only after a long struggle against blind ignorance and reckless selfishness.

The fact that less than fifty years have passed since we began a definite policy concerning the rights of children shows how rapidly the human race moves. The race may be, let us say, something like 240,000 years old; of that time civilized man—accepting the most generous figures on Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization—has existed only 10,000 years, or 1/240 of the life of the human species.

Humanized man has existed not more than a few hundred years, and it is within only fifty years that the race has been concerned with the protection of the child. How deeply ingrained are the habits of barbarity and darkness, may be seen from the fact that cannibalism broke out in Japan not more than a hundred years ago.

Unquestionably, this is the century of the child. Undoubtedly, more serious thought is being given in the present generation to the subject than has ever been given before in the entire history of the world. More has been written about the child in the last fifty years than had been written in the world in all civilized times up to the beginning of this half-century. In order to appreciate this statement one must remember that the best friends of the child—Jesus, the Jewish Prophets, and Mohammed—lived centuries before the human theories that they preached had really a living existence.

In this connection, it is germane to state that the theory that philosophy and religion go hand in hand with humanity, is shattered by the fact that Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Gautama affected, apparently, not a single jot, the ancient attitude of insufferance toward the undesired children.

There has ever been, on the question of his children, a struggle between man and nature. Endowed with the possibilities of a large offspring man has fought the burdens that nature has thrust upon him. On first view, it seems that parental affection never develops to great degree unless the economic conditions are favourable; yet the various artifices and “laws” used by tribes to get rid of children would show that parental affection kept struggling with the inclinations of men. In other words, if we find, as we do, female children sacrificed in one place because they are useless, and all first-born children sacrificed in another place because the gods must be propitiated, it is evident that parental affection (as represented by the women) was strong enough to force the male sovereigns to invent plausible excuses and taboos in order to have the women give up their offspring.

Considering all that is being done, said, and written on the subject of the child and the relation of the state and citizen toward the child, it would seem safe to assume that there would be some interest in the attitude of our predecessors toward children.

From the regulation of Romulus, as set forth by Dionysius Halicarnassus, to the story of Mary Ellen, as set forth by a settlement worker on the East Side of New York City, is a far cry, but the progress from the first to the second is steady. The Roman General, Agathocles, who made as a part of the terms of peace with the Carthaginians an agreement on the part of that branch of the Semitic race that they would cease to sacrifice children, was a legitimate sociological progenitor of the representative of the arm of the law that stops a drunken father from beating his child and creates a Children’s Court where the child gets gentleness with justice, not contamination and corruption.