322 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MATERNITY 



But let us not be diverted from the main stream 

 by these secondary results of the sex-distinction. 

 A far more important implication lies before us. 

 The problem that remains for us to settle is as to 

 how the merely physical forms of Other-ism began 

 to be accompanied or overlaid by ethical characters. 

 And the solution of this problem requires nothing 

 more than a consideration of the broad and funda- 

 mental fact of sex itself In what it is, and in 

 what it necessarily implies, we shall find the clue 

 to the beginnings of the social and moral order of 

 the world. For, rising on the one hand out of 

 maleness and on the other hand out of femaleness, 

 developments take place of such a kind as to con- 

 stitute this the turning-point of the world's moral 

 history. Let it be said at once that these develop- 

 ments are not to be sought for in the direction in 

 which, from the nature of the factors, one might 

 hastily suppose that they lay. What seems to be im- 

 minent at this stage, and as the natural end to 

 which all has led up, is the institution of affection in 

 definite forms between male and female. But we are 

 on a very different track. Affection between male 

 and female is a later, less fundamental, and, in its 

 beginnings, less essential growth ; and long prior 



