1296 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



humanity again, and before too long, widely play their part ? — and 

 this time in increasing measure of unity as regards main principles, 

 and with due respect and appreciation of regional and cultural 

 differences? 



Human Individuality, How Developed? — That the babe 

 cries for milk, that growth needs corresponding quantity of food, 

 and that maturity may become more critical and exacting as to its 

 quality, are of course fundamental facts for economics as well as for 

 physiology: yet only as the beginning of these studies. Since these 

 nutritive and self-maintaining needs are of course fundamental to 

 each individual life, and throughout its course, the economist and 

 the politician are thus liable to arrest at this level of knowledge and 

 action: but the physiologist and the physician know better. As 

 clearly in their simple biological way as can priest and poet with 

 their psychological insight, they note how in the passage to puberty 

 and to adolescence new stages of individuality are reached; and 

 once more when pairing-time arrives. This too is followed by 

 further and fuller development with parentage, and this not for the 

 mother alone, but psychically and practically for the father also. 

 As offspring develop, collaboration towards the prolongation of the 

 age of protection and education involves both parents in endeavours 

 which further individualise them both. And when this younger 

 generation comes to have offspring of its own, the grand-parents 

 normally mature yet further, as well as rejuvenesce into a return 

 of their own early parental feelings. Hence not only a widened 

 interest in their various lines of progeny, but normally also a fuller 

 extension of this feeling to childhood and youth in general, which 

 in normal societies has ever been recognised as of patriarchal 

 character. Such sympathetic life-experience and its reflective 

 interpretation, with deepened moral intensity, and intensified 

 volition, tend to individualise the aged pair far beyond their former 

 selves; the male parent specially towards reflection, decision and 

 authority, and the female specially in memory, insight and influence. 

 With such culminant individualities recorded and recalled in serial 

 retrospect by their descendents, we understand more plainly the 

 ancestral reverence so often manifest, from the book of Genesis 

 onwards. We see here the origins of Chinese ancestor-worship, and 

 its analogues in Japan and elsewhere ; and which the pride of family 

 among Western peoples has at times approached. 



Here we may now conveniently summarise this outline in graphic 

 form, for the graduated rise of individuality (I) to the various levels 

 of our ascending series, from I to I^, I^ l4, etc., and with $ and S 

 for the two sexes, and O for their oflspring. So from unpaired indi- 

 viduals it reads upwards: 



