It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest civilisation.  There is here needed an art in which those who have to exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.  Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure meant death.  In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the well-being of the parents.  Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the parents who are sacrificed to their offspring.  In our superior human civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which sometimes proves worse than abortive.  An avian philosopher would be unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child to which all such moral laws must conform.  To some would-be parents that necessity may seem hard.  In such a case it is well for them to remember that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent.  The world is not dying for lack of parents.  On the contrary we have far too many of them—­ignorant parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents—­and those who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as few as they will—­and perhaps at the present time the fewer the better—­must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains as well as its joys.

In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us—­the duties in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of others or in both—­are of three kinds:  the duties to oneself, the duties to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and to it we owe all that we are.  There are no maxims, there is only an art and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict.  We have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives.  To that extent George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right.  But the renunciation of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than is the absolute failure to renounce.  In a certain sense the duty towards the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which duties towards others possess any significance and worth.  In that sense, it is true according to the familiar saying of Shakespeare,—­though it was only Polonius, the man of maxims, who voiced it,—­that one cannot be true to others unless one is first true to oneself, and that one can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.