1354 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



regarding phase, and its ever-widening applications, that the 

 higher development of the individual is realised, and with it that of 

 the species. It is but a misunderstanding — be it of free-thinker or 

 of Protestant, be it of scientist, of mechanist or mammonist — to 

 think of the Madonna with her child as an outworn symbol. So far 

 from that, the biologist has known, since Linnaeus, if not earlier, 

 and has ever been learning more fully from life-forms, extinct and 

 living, that the evolution of birds from reptiles, and that of mammals 

 too, was by no means one of mere tooth and claw, but by reason 

 of their profoundest evolutionary advance, that of mothering. It is 

 in terms of this progress, beyond all others, that Mammals are and 

 have to be classified, as from the egg-la3dng and all but bosomless 

 duck-bills to marsupials, and thence again, through more and more 

 effectively mothering types, to our own, so much the most mothering 

 of all. The "Matriarchate" of certain anthropologists was no doubt 

 in some respects exaggerated; but none the less there was and is 

 much in it, as existing peoples still show. And now, with that 

 increasing liberation of womanhood from ages of over-patriarchate 

 pushed to injustice, obscurantism, and oppression, a better age — 

 since increasingly biotechnic and bio-psychologic, is fairly beginning. 

 Hence it is for us as biologists to understand this ancient and 

 symbolic cult anew, from the rude mother-images of pre-history, 

 and through Magna Mater, to Madonna. Ignorantly though such 

 may have been worshipped, there is only the more need for the 

 recovery of their scientific and evolutionary significance. Nor is 

 this merely a task for biologists: the ancient priority of historic 

 religion is being recovered; witness Cardinal Lavigerie, the mis- 

 sionary Church- Prince of French Northern Africa, not only sending 

 out his priests to robe and ride like the Arabs the}^ went to preach 

 to, and forbidding to them the church- adornments of Europe, but 

 telling them that the Madonna for their preaching-tent must be 

 painted afresh from an Arab mother and child; and that when 

 they went further south among the negroes, she must be a negress 

 too, and with her swarthy child. Here in principle is Comte's 

 "Humanity", and "Santa Sophia" as well: so as biologists we can 

 thus but acknowledge all these teachings, otherwise contrasted as 

 they were, as essentially those of initiates of bio-psychology and 

 evolution; and before either technically equipped biologists or 

 psychologists had got so far. It is a mere survival of crude "funda- 

 mentalism" on one hand, and of no less crude "rationalism" on the 

 other, to doubt this incipient and renewing harmony of science and 

 religion. For here the highest scientific truth of the evolution- 

 process, and its idealistic and artistic expression by religion, are 

 essentialh^ and definitely at one. 



And as to practical policy in education, it is no real ground for 

 alarm that the teaching profession is so largely becoming a sister- 



