Chapter I: The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents (2)

Then the child, who has received its life from sound, loving human beings and has been afterwards brought up wisely and lovingly, will be called legitimate, even if its parents have been united in complete freedom. Then will the child, who has been born in a loveless marriage, and has been burdened by the fault of its parents with bodily or mental disease, be regarded as illegitimate, even if its parents have been united in marriage by the Pope at St. Peter's. The shadow of contempt will not fall on the unmarried tender mother of a radiantly healthy child, but on the legitimate or illegitimate mother of a being made degenerate by the misdeeds of its forefathers.

In a much discussed drama called _The Lion's Whelp_, there occurs the following dialogue between an older and younger man:

THE OLDER MAN: The next century will be the century of the child,
just as this century has been the woman's century. When the child
gets his rights, morality will be perfected. Then every man will
know that he is bound to the life which he has produced with other
bonds, than those imposed by society and the laws. You understand
that a man cannot be released from his duty as father even if he
travels around the world; a kingdom can be given and taken away,
but not fatherhood.

THE YOUTH: I know this.

THE OLDER MAN: But in this all righteousness is still not
fulfilled--in man's carefully preserving the life which he has
called into existence. No man can early enough think over the other
question, whether and when he has the right to call life into
existence.

This dialogue has supplied me with a title for this book. It is the point of departure of my assertion, that the first right of the child is to select its own parents.

What here must be first considered is the thought constantly being brought out by Darwinian writers, that the natural sciences, in which must now be numbered psychology, should be the basis of juristic science as well as of pedagogy. Man must come to learn the laws of natural selection and act in the spirit of these laws. Man must arrange the punishments of society in the service of development; they must be protective measures for natural selection. In the first place this must be secured by hindering the criminal type from perpetuating itself. The characteristics of this type can only be determined by specialists. But the criminal must be prevented from handing on his characteristics to his posterity.

So the human race will be gradually freed from atavisms which reproduce lower and preceding stages of development. This is the first condition of that evolution by which mankind will be able to let the ape and tiger die. Then comes the requirement that those with inherited physical or psychical diseases shall not transmit them to an offspring.

As to this type of heredity opinions are still very much divided. Great authorities are in conflict with one another on the question of tuberculosis. Some contend that it is hereditary, others declare that it is only transmitted by infection. Accordingly when a child is born of a tuberculous mother, and is taken away from her, there is no danger for the child. Views are also divided on the subject of cancer. Regarding other diseases, however, there is complete certainty. Legislation has already interfered in the case of epilepsy, although the law in practice is not always applied. But in the case of syphilis, alcoholism, and many kinds of nervous complaints, diseases which afflict children most certainly, in various ways, legislation has yet done nothing.

There is an old axiom that we are obliged to thank our parents for life. Our parents, I know from my own experience, can themselves have been the heirs of bodily and mental health, resulting from the fact that maternal and paternal ancestors all made early, right, and happy marriages. But generally, parents must on their part, ask the children's pardon for the children's existence.

It makes no difference, whether we talk with people sunken in necessity or crime, or with those suffering from nervous and other diseases, or finally with people who are spiritually maimed. In most cases we are convinced that the main cause of their condition as indicated by them, goes back to their birth, or to the time of their childish consciousness. Sometimes their parents have been too young or too old, their fathers or mothers invalids. Sometimes they are the offspring of intemperance. Again their mother may have been overburdened by the torment of work, or by a large family of children; or they may have received their life in marriages concluded without love, or after the cessation of love. They have been unwelcome, or born under feelings of revulsion, bearing in their blood the germ of discord or disgust of life. Numerous abnormal tendencies, among them misanthropy in women, can be traced back to these causes. Finally they have been brought up in a home where they have suffered from the burden of bad examples, or conflicting influences.

So strong has the conviction of the meaning of heredity become that young men, who have themselves borne a burden, imposed by generations of one character or another, have begun to see that it is their duty rather to abstain from marriage than to transmit their unfortunate inheritence to a new generation. I knew a woman in whose family on her father's and mother's side, mental disease was inherited. Therefore, though healthy herself, she refused to marry the man she loved. I know of another who broke her engagement, because she was convinced that the man whom she loved was a drinker, and she did not want to give her children such a father. It is especially on this point that women sin in marrying from ignorance, because they do not know that epilepsy and other diseases, especially alcoholism, are often caused because the child has had a drunkard for a father. A young woman could have no more certain test for the continuance of her feelings for a man, than whether she feels exalted joy or tormenting distress, at the thought of seeing his characteristics transmitted to their child.

Men sin against the coming race not only by excessive drinking, but in other respects where the results are still more destructive.

Besides the conscience of men must begin to awaken. This will express itself partly in the requirement to abstain from marriage when they know that they have to transmit a bad inheritance, partly in other spheres of morality as in the following examples:

A young man, himself a physician, thought he was healthy when he married. He discovered his mistake and found himself confronting the choice of wronging his wife or separating from her. As they were deeply in love, the only possible way was separation. He chose death which he inflicted on himself in such a way that his wife thought it was caused by accident.

Another man acted in the same way after he had been married several years and had three children; he found out that he was his wife's half-brother.

But these incidents as the one before mentioned, where women are concerned, are notoriously only isolated examples. It will require the development of several generations before it will be the woman's instinct, an irresistibly mastering instinct, to allow no physically or psychically degenerated or perverted man to become the father of her children. The instinct of the man is far stronger in this direction, but it is dulled too by an antiquated legal conception, according to which the woman must subject herself as a duty to requirements against which her whole being revolts. In this respect a woman has only one duty, an unmistakable one, against which every transgression is a sin, namely that the new being to which she gives life, must be born in love and purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete common will, in a complete common happiness. Until women see this as a duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by beings, who in a moment of their existence have been robbed of the best pre-conditions of their life's happiness and their life's efficiency. Occasionally they show plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or of discord. Occasionally they seem for a long time to be healthy and powerful specimens of humanity, until in some critical moment they go to pieces through an insufficient supply of physical and psychical vitality caused by their very origin.

As to marriages between healthy and active individuals, legislation can do nothing. Ethics alone can exert an influence for betterment. Children must be taught from their earliest years about their existence and their future duties as men and women. So mothers and fathers together can impress on the conscience of the children not any abstract conception of purity, but the concrete commandment of chastity in letters of fire. So they will keep their health, their attractiveness, their guilelessness, for the being they are to love; for the children who from this love will receive their life.

The impulse to preserve the species, it is true, makes human beings low, small, or laughable; as poets like Maupassant, Tolstoi, and others have depicted from quite different points of view; but it only does so when the impulse appears without relation to the end given it in nature, or when this end is attained without consideration for the production of an offspring qualified to live. The kind of love which disturbs life is that which diminishes the value of an individual as a creator of life. This type of love really degrades human beings, is immoral from the standpoint of the modern view, which wills life to be, but above all, wills the progress of life to ever higher forms.

Young people must therefore learn to reverence their future duties. These they altogether miss, if they squander their spiritual and bodily obligations, in unions formed and dissolved thoughtlessly, without any intention of fidelity, without the worth of responsibility. But they must also know that it is a still greater transgression of their duty if the life of a child is called forth with cold hearts and cold temper, whether this happens in a marriage based on worldly motives or one maintained on moral grounds in which the previously existing discord is transmitted to a new being.

Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive, by the consciousness of numerous breaches of faith, towards their youthful dreams, their ideal convictions, are often precisely those, who in their children, struggle against the pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong feelings, its higher aims. They often teach that love as a rule ends after marriage, that marriages can be made without love. This is a process of thought resembling the conclusion that a vessel can quite well go into the sea with some defect, since it is possible in any event that it will be damaged. They speak of the impurity of the senses, of the advantages of a marriage based on friendship and reason, of the calming power of duty. All of these are chilly processes of reason by which souls, filled with the warmth of life, are killed. Daughters must be helped by their mothers, wisely and delicately, in order to be protected from hasty acts, in order to distinguish with open eyes, when their feelings themselves are uncertain. It must be branded upon their souls and their nerves that they will be fallen beings if they give themselves from other reasons than from reciprocated love. Under these convictions alone, will there be a great transformation of present ethical standards. Men think that they can do with marriage what they will; that they can enter upon it with any kind of motive; they think that they must marry from feelings of duty, to fulfil some given engagement, or to atone for some fault; that they have the right to enter upon a marriage without love because they long for home life. While these things are regarded as legitimate, men stand on the same ethical level as the person who commits murder because he has first stolen, or has stolen because he was hungry. The great crime against the holiness of generation is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the most sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where innumerable secret influences order the destiny of a new generation.

While children continue to be born in the cold atmosphere of duty, or in the stormy atmosphere of discord, while people continue to regard such marriages as moral, while people can transmit to their children all kinds of intellectual mutilation and bodily unsoundness, and their parents continue to be called honorable, so long will the world be without the slightest conception of that morality which will mould the new mankind.

This morality has still more exalted precepts. To-day it seldom happens that a young girl enters marriage in ignorance, but in my generation I know cases where the ignorance of the bride resulted in insanity. In another case this ignorance led to thoughts of suicide; in a third, the child was regarded with coldness by its mother; in the fourth, the child had abnormal psychic qualities. Still it is not sufficient for the ideal beauty of marriage and the harmony of the child that the woman knows in general what is before her. A young man said once to me that most marriages are spoilt at the very beginning, because the man brings with him the point of view and the habits of those degraded women, from whom he has received his initiation into love; frequently he annihilates forever the tenderest element in his relation to his wife. He damages the most beautiful factor in their mutual feelings. Man must learn to have reverence and patience, and I know men who have shown these characteristics really because they saw that their wives gave, as is not unfrequently the case, their souls and their hearts before their senses were awakened. Only the constant close association taught them to desire a completed marriage. A child should receive life only through this common impulse. Many children are born, as it is, in legalised prostitution, in legalised rape. Yet there is wanting in the consciences of many women and men, the slightest shadow of religious reverence, of æsthetic feeling before the greatest mystery of existence. And yet we continue in the name of morality to veil for youth the nakedness of nature and we neglect to inspire their feeling of devotion towards their own being as the shrine in which the mystery of life must some day be fulfilled.

In this mystery there are still hidden fields only penetrated by the intuition. Here and there a profound poet has surmised the innumerable affinities or repulsions which under changing spiritual and material dispositions with altering opinions, condition the life of love in modern human beings, the mystic influences which sometimes forever, sometimes partially, can change the deepest feeling. All these mystic influences, the tender woof of all these fine threads, will then be a part of the living fabric of the child. These secret processes explain the great differences between children of the same parents,--children who externally are born and brought up in quite similar conditions.

In all these promptings of instinct, in all these categorical imperatives of the nerves and the blood, human beings must be at the same time obedient listeners and strict masters. On this depends the future happiness of love, and with it a happier future race.

The people of to-day live under inherited morals and newly acquired transgressions of morality. Both must be conquered before soul and sense in love can become inseparable, or in other words, before this unity is recognised as the only possible moral basis of the relation between man and woman.

Talented men, as well as one-sided advocates of women's rights, think that the development will take quite a different course, after the low impulse which is at the basis of love has been laid bare and scientifically analysed. They say that the superior person will satisfy the impulse shamelessly and animally, without any emotional decoration; or he will isolate himself from its influence and devote to more noble purposes that vital power, that emotional capacity, which is now consumed by love.

Nothing impossible is to be found in this point of view. I have shown more than once that woman by her maternal functions, uses up so much physical and psychical energy, that in the sphere of intellectual production she must remain of less significance. What I at an earlier period assumed intuitively, has been substantiated since then by a specialist. A Finnish doctor has shown how the vital power of lower organisms, is concentrated in sexual production. But the higher man goes, so much more power is made free. This power which is not consumed in the production of new generations, can serve intellectual production. Each of the two different productive expressions of human vital action must to a certain extent limit the development of the power of the other, and restrict its capacity of work. The same writer contends that this is the natural cause of the more limited fertility of civilised man, and will be, according to the pessimists named above, the decisive factor in the prophesied downfall of love.

According to my conception of the word, it is love on the contrary, which will win the victory by the relative weakening of impulse, and by scientific analysis of the same. Men will no longer mistake impulse for love. Of course this impulse is always present in love, but in the same way in which the sculpture of the cave man is present in the work of Michael Angelo. Man will then, with all the powers of his being, be able to love, when love, according to the happy expression of Thoreau, is not a glow, but a light. Then he will see for the first time, what wealth life can have through love, when love becomes a happiness worthy of man because it becomes an æsthetic creation, a religious worship; when the completed unity of those who love is expressed in a new being,--a being that will some day be really grateful for the life it has received. Where the amelioration of the human race is concerned, the transformation of customs and feelings is always the essential thing. Influence of legislation in comparison with it is ever slight. But as has been said before, legislation has its role to play. Especially where there are diseases which can certainly be transmitted, society must interfere to restrict marriage. In Germany and America a good proposal has been made, for the period of transition in this direction. It is suggested that the law shall require as an obligatory condition for marriage, a certificate of a medical witness with complete data as to the health of both parties. Those who contract marriage will continue to have their freedom of choice but at least they would not enter ignorantly upon marriage as they do now, and expose themselves and their children to disastrous consequences. It appears to me to be at least as important for society to have a medical certificate as to capacity for marriage, as it is for military service. In the one case, we deal with giving life, in the other with taking it away. And although the latter has certainly been, up till now, regarded as a more serious occasion than the former, still an awakening social conscience should demand progress in this direction. It is conceivable that from this beginning new customs will develop; further legislation may be dispensed with; human beings will agree to sacrifice the most dangerous of all liberties, giving life to a defective offspring, while prohibition of marriage now would not hinder parenthood. For the great mass might continue, outside of marriage, to rob children of the possibilities of health and happiness, by burdening them with inherited diseases or bad tendencies.

Nietzsche, who knew little of love because he knew nothing of woman, and who therefore on this subject says little worthy of attention, has still spoken more profoundly on the subject of parenthood than any contemporary writer. He saw what impurity, what poverty are concealed under the name of marriage. He saw how meretricious, how ignorant education is. In his writings are to be found prophetical and poetical words describing the end aimed at in parenthood, and showing what true parenthood should be.

I will that thy victory and thy emancipation shall yearn for a
child. Living memorials shalt thou build for thy victory, and for
thy emancipation.

Thou must build upward to a height beyond thyself. But first I
would have thee thyself built with a square foundation, body and
soul.

See that through thee the race progresses, not continues only.

Let a true marriage help thee to this end.

A more exalted being must thou create, a being gifted with
initiative like a wheel that turns itself. A creative principle
shouldst thou create.

Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the
one,--the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence
for one another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for
those whose wills are united in this one act of will.