D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Spermism

Although D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist in any conventional or objective sense of the term, that didn't stop him from sharing his often peculiar ideas on human reproduction and the development of the embryo. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst confessing his ignorance of the sex cells in terms of chemical composition and function, he's perfectly happy to describe how the parental gametes sparkle with potency and send forth dark currents of vital energy attracting one another.

But if he acknowledges the importance of the large and mysterious mother-germ, one gets the impression that it's the father-spark that really excites his interest and he is at heart something of a spermist. For it's the much smaller sperm cell, writes Lawrence, that is most vivid and even more intrinsic to procreation. So whilst we should readily admit our indebtedness to our mother and her ovum, we should not deny the father-quick of ourselves, which is maybe the most essential element.   
   
Of course, this is not to suggest that Lawrence fully subscribed to the now obsolete and ludicrous-seeming notion that the head of each sperm cell contains a tiny human being - a theory of preformationism, widely accepted in the late seventeenth century after sperm (or seminal animalcules) were first identified under the microscope c.1677.

Although never as dominant an idea as the opposing (and earlier) model of ovist preformationism, spermism nevertheless had some influential supporters, including the German philosopher Leibniz, whose writings on the subject helped shape the development of embryology long into the eighteenth century.

There were major concerns with the spermist theory, however, not the least of which was the fact that it implied a colossal waste of human life on the part of a supposedly loving God: there are around 100 million sperm in each millilitre of semen and a healthy male adult will normally ejaculate between two and five ml. Conception, of course, only requires a single sperm cell. Attempts to get around this problem - arguing, for example, that sperm cells which failed to penetrate the ovum evaporated into the air and floated around until such time they could be recycled - failed to convince most critics.             

Later spermists abandoned this idea of panspermism, and argued instead that the homunculus present in sperm, although perfectly formed physically, had no soul; this would enter either at, or soon after, conception. If this rather neatly solved the moral issue, it unfortunately invoked the competing theory of epigenesis by making both sperm and egg necessary for the development of full human life.  

Ultimately, spermism was abandoned by the scientific community, not least of all because no one ever managed to find a little person existing ready-made in a sperm cell. But it nevertheless forms an interesting and amusing episode in the history of embryology - one that writers such as Lawrence still seem to be drawn to many years after its debunking.      


See: 

Cera R. Lawrence, 'Spermism', entry in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University, 2008): click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).