THE GENERAL SCHEME 



Even in the lowest and simplest living things, in which it is 

 fanciful to speak of male and female, there is (as we shall 

 see) sexual mating or at least a process of renewal of life by 

 the mingling of living substances. 



In our day, however, science makes bold more than ever 

 to question fundamental assumptions. The concept that space 

 has three dimensions is as obvious as that animals have two 

 sexes, but physicists do not hesitate to calculate in four, five, 

 or n dimensions. We may boldly ask, therefore, why sex is 

 necessary at all ; or why there are not several sexes. If living 

 things must mate in order to reproduce why could not nature 

 have arranged some other system, for example a state of 

 sexual relativity, in which an individual might be (without 

 any change in itself) male with respect to one potential mate, 

 female with respect to another.? or it might take part in 

 reproduction in response to another of its species, neither of 

 them being either male or female. Such conjectures are not 

 more fantastic than the concepts of mathematical relativity, 

 with their notions of a warp in space, and of an expanding 

 universe. Similar questions have indeed long been asked by 

 the poets and philosophers. John Milton vigorously states an 

 unfavorable view of the two-sex system: 



why did God, 

 Creator wise, that peopVd highest Heav*n 

 With Spirits Masculine, create at last 

 This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect 

 Of Nature, and not fill the World at once 

 With Men as Angels without Feminine, 

 Or find some other way to generate 

 Mankind? This mischief had not then hefalVn. 



PARADISE LOST. 



and Sir Thomas Browne, the famous physician philosopher, 

 tough-minded as he was on many subjects, was personally 



i n } 



