[206] The mystery
has somewhat changed its form; it still remains. The future of the race is
bound up with our efforts to fathom the mystery of pregnancy. "The early
days of human life," it has been truly said, "are entirely one with the
mother. On her manner of life--eating, drinking, sleeping, and
thinking--what greatness may not hang?"[207] Schopenhauer observed, with
misapplied horror, that there is nothing a woman is less modest about than
the state of pregnancy, while Weininger exclaims: "Never yet has a
pregnant woman given expression in any form--poem, memoirs, or
gynaecological monograph--to her sensations or feelings."[208] Yet when we
contemplate the mystery of pregnancy and all that it involves, how trivial
all such considerations become! We are here lifted into a region where our
highest intelligence can only lead us to adoration, for we are gazing at a
process in which the operations of Nature become one with the divine task
of Creation.
FOOTNOTES:
[169] See, e.g., Groos, _AEsthetische Genuss_, p. 249. "We have to admit,"
Groos observes, "the entrance of another instinct, the impulse to tend and
foster, so closely connected with the sexual life. It is seemingly due to
the co-operation of this impulse that the little female bird during
courtship is so often fed by the male like a young fledgling.
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