A PHYSIOLOGICAL THEORY

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1675, 6 April 1904, Page 19

A PHYSIOLOGICAL THEORY

“The Alternate Sex.” By Olias. Godfrey Leland. F.R.L.S., A. M., Harvard. Philip Well by. Covent Garden. London. v Whitcomb j and Tombs. Wellington.

The author of “The Breitmann Ballads” has written nothing that is moire striking or suggestive than this posthumous work which lies before us. It was only completed in manuscript a few months before lus death, and it was left to Mrs Joseph Pennell, his niece, to see the work of iier uncle through the press. It is accordingly presented to the public without the benefit of the author’s revision, but it is not to be supposed from this that the late author would have amended liis work in any particular, although it is possible that had he •lived he would have enlarged upon a theme which afforded his speculative intellect so wide a field for exercise. Mr Leland has not, perhaps, added in this philosophic book anything to the sum total of man’s knowledge concerning himself and his neighbour, but. he has given us some new aspects of old) truths, and to his readers his arguments and conclusions _ will probably suggest to tlreir minds more, much mere, than our author has stated. For this reason, then, we imagine that had lie been permitted to live for a year or two longer, Mr Leland would have enlarged and embellished his “Alternate Sex.” What are the views of Mr Leland on this remarkable subject. He contends, to start- with, that men and women are, in trict accordance with the opinion of the most recent physiologists, radically different as regards both body and mind, although social or domestic life has given them much in oommora. There is nothing strange or new in this, but it is the point from which some remarkably novel deductions are made and theories established. He raises the contention that in proportion to the female organs remaining in man, and the male in woman;, (there exists also in each just so much of their peculiar mental characteristics ; that this female mind in man, having free access to the images stored in the cells of memory, .calls them forth in dreams and reveries, the same being true as regards the masculine mind in woman; and that this casts much light on the true nature of the imagination, and all creative action of the mind, involving originality. It is our ajuthor’s notion, therefore, that what lias of late lyieaiß occupied nvucli thought as the Subliminal Self, the Inner Me, the Hidden Soul, Unconscious Cerebration, and tlfe like, may all be reduced ito or fully explained by “Alternate Sex’’ in man. Step by step he proceeds to unfold his theories of life, of growth, of sensitiveness, of intellect, of soul; and observes “That the immortality of the soul depends on the same conditions as the proof of the existence of God.” There is, according to Mr Leland, no lino of demarcation between the organic and the inorganic world; that, as shown by Schron, there is life in crystals, and no step in which mentality, though in lower forms, does not manifest itself. Admitting at onoe that forces have developed themselves from a Primary Force, our author considers that there are forces concerning the nature of which we are as yet ignorant. We almost yearly make fresh discoveries in the paths of nature and science. Wireless telegraphy was the sensation of last year, as radium is of this. Anri the law of growth in the animal world is that of accretion, or of attraction and repulsion beginning with, any chance group of molecules, guided by - certain forces, as seen in advanced organisms. Evolution in these pages moves rapidly. The work of millions of years is noted in ten lines. What h© calls “sensivity” is a force developed at first by polarisation of atoms, increased by attraction anjd repulsion, influenced by catabolism and anabolism, till sensation (whose true being must be found in the origin of motion) step by step, advanced to consciousness, and thence to mentality.

There is not muoh about “alternate sex’ J in these philosophic reasonings. but Mi* Lelancf, in his coincluding pages, ‘enters into more scientific and religioiuis debate, and! seems to take us even wider afield .from what onto w r oul|d superficially conclude was the chief theme and pun pose of his book. He argues “that there aro no proofs of the existence of God save on purely material grounds, and from the conclusions of science which all point to it.” Yet in another place, Mr I/eland declares that this proof can never be perfected “because as man advances in it he is ever raising a higher ideal of divinity unto himself.” Thus it haDt-

pons that to the ideal of to-day is not attributed the awfulness of the justice that was assigned the Dieiy two generations ago. But this aspect of the subject apart, the theory on which our author builds his work is that the fundamental condition or intelligence of the two .sexes, or man and woman, is radically different, or corresponds to their physical creation and development. Tne old theory, mryle fabulous by. Plato, is revived, and we are again told that at first man and woman formed a single, epicene being; but having been separated, each becomes the .complement of the cither, and “there exist in both radically different elements which require union to develop their strength/’ Mr Leland contends for much that is admitted by scientists and sociologists, yet there is freshness and vigour in Ins observations. These who read these pages will pause and reflect; and if it induces to the study of superior and more scientific works its object will surely have been accomplished.