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SEX & CHARACTER




THE GERMAN PRESS

ON “SEX AND CHARACTER.”


_Die Umschau._--“Dr. Otto Weininger’s book is destined to place the
relation of the sexes in a new light. He traces the contrast between man
and woman to a single principle, and makes an attempt to reduce the
spiritual differences of the sexes to a system.”

_Allgemeine Wiener Medizinische Zeitung._--“An extraordinary book, that
called forth the learned criticism of two faculties, and had appeared in
a third edition a few months after its publication, before the
scientific world had been able to pronounce upon it seriously, not to
say finally.... A book that will henceforth be in the hands of every
doctor who has occasion to study the antithetical character of the two
sexes.”

_Der Volkserzieher._--“There is no aspect of modern thought which he
(Weininger) has not touched upon in the course of his investigations, no
recess of the labyrinthine modern soul into which he does not invite us
to glance with him, no question on which he has not touched, or to which
he has not, indeed, offered a solution in accordance with his own
philosophy.”

_Allgemeine Zeitung._--“This book... is a sensational work, both by
reason of its contents and of the tragic fate of its author. Weininger,
as is commonly known, shot himself in the autumn of 1903 at the early
age of twenty-three, in the house in Vienna where Beethoven had died....
But it is the book itself, even more than its author’s individuality,
which is abnormal. It is nothing less than an attempt to construct a
system of sexual characterology on the broadest scientific basis, with
all the resources of the most modern philosophy.”

_Münchener Neueste Nachrichten._--“‘Sex and Character,’ by Dr.
Weininger, has none of the character of a youthful work. The learning
revealed in this book, and indeed its whole conception, are such that we
might take it for the strenuous achievement of a lifetime.”

_Neues Wiener Tageblatt._--“A great philosophical, biological, and
social question is here treated by a gifted and learned author with
perfect freedom and breadth, yet with a seriousness, a wealth of
scientific knowledge, that would ensure the book a place in the front
rank, even were the style less excellent, vivacious, and individual than
it is.”

_Die Wage._--“The author is a brilliant stylist. On every page I find
aphorisms, in which the form fits the thought like a veil of silver. And
these thoughts are no ordinary ones. The writer goes his own way, he
knows secret paths which no man has yet trodden, and he shrinks from no
obstacles. He lets himself down cautiously into the abyss, for he has
determined to sound the deepest depths; from time to time, however, he
looks up from the pit and rejoices in the light of the eternal stars,
even though they lie hid from his mortal vision. He carries his
arguments to their ultimate conclusion. We rebel against these
conclusions, but we admire the uncompromising logic of the thinker.”




  SEX & CHARACTER

  BY
  OTTO WEININGER

  AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE
  SIXTH GERMAN EDITION

  [Illustration]

  LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
  NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
  1906




  _All rights reserved_

  _Copyright, London: William Heinemann, 1906_

  _Copyright, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906_




PUBLISHER’S NOTE


On October 4, 1903, Otto Weininger died by his own hand, at the age of
twenty-three and a half years. There is perhaps in all history no other
instance of a man who had produced a work so mature in its scientific
character, and so original in its philosophical aspect as “Sex and
Character” when he was no more than twenty-one years old. We will not
attempt to decide whether this was the case of a genius, who, instead of
developing his intellectual powers gradually in the course of a
lifetime, concentrated them in one mighty achievement, and then cast off
the worn-out husk of the flesh, or of an unhappy youth, who could no
longer bear the burden of his own ghastly knowledge.

“Sex and Character” is undoubtedly one of those rare books that will be
studied long after its own times, and whose influence will not pass
away, but will penetrate deeper and deeper, compelling amazement and
inviting reflection in steadily expanding circles. It may be noted with
satisfaction that the book is by no means in harmony with contemporary
thought. The discussions, so much in favour nowadays, concerning the
emancipation of women, sexuality, the relation of women to culture, and
so forth, are deprived of their data by this publication; for here, laid
down with all the penetrating acumen of the trained logician, is a
characterisation of sexual types, “M” (the ideal man), and “W” (the
ideal woman), which traces all the much discussed psychological
phenomena back to a final source, and actually gives a definitive
solution to the feminine problem, a solution altogether alien to the
field of inquiry wherein the answer has hitherto been sought. In the
science of characterology, here formulated for the first time, we have a
strenuous scientific achievement of the first importance. All former
psychologies have been the psychology of the male, written by men, and
more or less consciously applicable only to man as distinguished from
humanity. “Woman does not betray her secret,” said Kant, and this has
been true till now. But now she has revealed it--by the voice of a man.
The things women say about themselves have been suggested by men; they
repeat the discoveries, more or less real, which men have made about
them. By a highly original method of analysis, a man has succeeded for
the first time in giving scientific and abstract utterance to that which
only some few great artists have suggested by concrete images hitherto.
Weininger, working out an original system of characterology
(psychological typology) rich in prospective possibilities, undertook
the construction of a universal psychology of woman which penetrates to
the nethermost depths, and is based not only on a vast systematic
mastery of scientific knowledge, but on what can only be described as an
appalling comprehension of the feminine soul in its most secret
recesses. This newly created method embraces the whole domain of human
consciousness; research must be carried out on the lines laid down by
Nature--in three stages, and from three distinct points of view: the
biologico-physiological, the psychologically descriptive, and the
philosophically appreciative. I will not dwell here on the equipment
essential for such a task, the necessary combination of a comprehensive
knowledge of natural history with a minute and exhaustive mastery of
psychological and philosophical science--a combination destined,
perhaps, to prove unique.

The general characterisation of the ideal woman, “W,” is followed by the
construction of individual types, which are finally resolved into two
elemental figures (Platonic conceptions to some extent), the Courtesan
and the Mother. These are differentiated by their pre-occupation with
the sexual act (the main, and in the ultimate sense, sole interest of
“W”), in the first case, as an end in itself, in the second as the
process which results in the possession of a child. The abnormal type,
the hysterical woman, leads up to a masterly psychological (not
physiological) theory of hysteria, which is acutely and convincingly
defined as “the organic mendacity of woman.”

Weininger himself attached the highest importance to the
ethico-philosophical chapters that conclude his work, in which he passes
from the special problem of sexuality to the problems of individual
talent, genius, æsthetics, memory, the _ego_, the Jewish race, and many
others, rising finally to the ultimate logical and moral principles of
judgment. From his most universal standpoint he succeeds in estimating
woman as a part of humanity, and, above all, subjectively. Here he
deliberately comes into sharp conflict with the fashionable tendencies
towards an unscientific monism and its accompanying phenomena,
pan-sexuality and the ethics of species, and characterises very aptly
the customary superficialities of the many non-philosophical modern
apostles, of whom Wilhelm Bölsche and Ellen Key are perhaps the most
representative types. Weininger, in defiance of all reigning fashions,
represents a consolidated dualism, closely related to the eternal
systems of Plato, of Christianity, and of Kant, which finds an original
issue in a bitterly tragic conception of the universe. Richard Wagner
(whom Weininger calls the greatest of human beings after Jesus) gives
artistic expression in his _Parsifal_ to the conception Weininger sets
forth scientifically. It is, in fact, the old doctrine of the divine
life and of redemption to which the whole book, with its array of
detail, is consecrated. In Kundry, Weininger recognises the most
profound conception of woman in all literature. In her redemption by the
spotless Parsifal, the young philosopher sees the way of mankind marked
out; he contrasts with this the programme of the modern feminist
movement, with its superficialities and its lies; and so, in conclusion,
the book returns to the problem, which, in spite of all its wealth of
thought, remains its governing idea: the problem of the sexes and the
possibility of a moral relation between them--a moral relation
fundamentally different from what is commonly understood by the term, of
course. In the two chapters: “The Nature of Woman and her significance
in the Universe,” and “Woman and Mankind,” we drink from a fountain of
the ripest wisdom. A tragic and most unhappy mind reveals itself here,
and no thoughtful man will lay down this book without deep emotion and
admiration; many, indeed, will close it with almost religious
reverence.




AUTHOR’S PREFACE


This book is an attempt to place the relations of Sex in a new and
decisive light. It is an attempt not to collect the greatest possible
number of distinguishing characters, or to arrange into a system all the
results of scientific measuring and experiment, but to refer to a single
principle the whole contrast between man and woman. In this respect the
book differs from all other works on the same subject. It does not
linger over this or that detail, but presses on to its ultimate goal; it
does not heap investigation on investigation, but combines the psychical
differences between the sexes into a system; it deals not with women,
but with woman. It sets out, indeed, from the most common and obvious
facts, but intends to reach a single, concrete principle. This is not
“inductive metaphysics”; it is a gradual approach to the heart of
psychology.

The investigation is not of details, but of principles; it does not
despise the laboratory, although the help of the laboratory, with regard
to the deeper problems, is limited as compared with the results of
introspective analysis. An artist who wishes to represent the female
form can construct a type without actually giving formal proof by a
series of measurements. The artist does not despise experimental
results; on the contrary, he regards it as a duty to gain experience;
but for him the collection of experimental knowledge is merely a
starting-point for self-exploration, and in art self-exploration is
exploration of the world.

The psychology used in this exposition is purely philosophical, although
its characteristic method, justified by the subject, is to set out from
the most trivial details of experience. The task of the philosopher
differs from that of the artist in one important respect. The one deals
in symbols, the other in ideas. Art and philosophy stand to one another
as expression and meaning. The artist has breathed in the world to
breathe it out again; the philosopher has the world outside him and he
has to absorb it.

There is always something pretentious in theory; and the real
meaning--which in a work of art is Nature herself and in a philosophical
system is a much condensed generalisation, a thesis going to the root of
the matter and proving itself--appears to strike against us harshly,
almost offensively. Where my exposition is anti-feminine, and that is
nearly everywhere, men themselves will receive it with little heartiness
or conviction; their sexual egoism makes them prefer to see woman as
they would like to have her, as they would like her to be.

I need not say that I am prepared for the answer women will have to the
judgment I have passed on their sex. My investigation, indeed, turns
against man in the end, and although in a deeper sense than the
advocates of women’s rights could anticipate, assigns to man the
heaviest and most real blame. But this will help me little and is of
such a nature that it cannot in the smallest way rehabilitate me in the
minds of women.

The analysis, however, goes further than the assignment of blame; it
rises beyond simple and superficial phenomena to heights from which
there opens not only a view into the nature of woman and its meaning in
the universe, but also the relation to mankind and to the ultimate and
most lofty problems. A definite relation to the problem of Culture is
attained, and we reach the part to be played by woman in the sphere of
ideal aims. There, also, where the problems of Culture and of Mankind
coincide, I try not merely to explain but to assign values, for, indeed,
in that region explanation and valuation are identical.

To such a wide outlook my investigation was as it were driven, not
deliberately steered, from the outset. The inadequacy of all empirical
psychological philosophy follows directly from empirical psychology
itself. The respect for empirical knowledge will not be injured, but
rather will the meaning of such knowledge be deepened, if man recognises
in phenomena, and it is from phenomena that he sets out, any elements
assuring him that there is something behind phenomena, if he espies the
signs that prove the existence of something higher than phenomena,
something that supports phenomena. We may be assured of such a first
principle, although no living man can reach it. Towards such a principle
this book presses and will not flag.

Within the narrow limits to which as yet the problem of woman and of
woman’s rights has been confined, there has been no place for the
venture to reach so high a goal. None the less the problem is bound
intimately with the deepest riddles of existence. It can be solved,
practically or theoretically, morally or metaphysically, only in
relation to an interpretation of the cosmos.

Comprehension of the universe, or what passes for such, stands in no
opposition to knowledge of details; on the other hand all special
knowledge acquires a deeper meaning because of it. Comprehension of the
universe is self-creative; it cannot arise, although the empirical
knowledge of every age expects it, as a synthesis of however great a sum
of empirical knowledge.

In this book there lie only the germs of a world-scheme, and these are
allied most closely with the conceptions of Plato, Kant and
Christianity. I have been compelled for the most part to fashion for
myself the scientific, psychological, philosophical, logical, ethical
groundwork. I think that at the least I have laid the foundations of
many things into which I could not go fully. I call special attention to
the defects of this part of my work because I attach more importance to
appreciation of what I have tried to say about the deepest and most
general problems than to the interest which will certainly be aroused by
my special investigation of the problem of woman.

The philosophical reader may take it amiss to find a treatment of the
loftiest and ultimate problems coinciding with the investigation of a
special problem of no great dignity; I share with him this distaste. I
may say, however, that I have treated throughout the contrast between
the sexes as the starting-point rather than the goal of my research. The
investigation has yielded a harvest rich in its bearing on the
fundamental problems of logic and their relations to the axioms of
thought, on the theory of æsthetics, of love, and of the beautiful and
the good, and on problems such as individuality and morality and their
relations, on the phenomena of genius, the craving for immortality and
Hebraism. Naturally these comprehensive interrelations aid the special
problem, for, as it is considered from so many points of view, its scope
enlarges. And if in this wider sense it be proved that culture can give
only the smallest hope for the nature of woman, if the final results are
a depreciation, even a negation of womanhood, there will be no attempt
in this to destroy what exists, to humble what has a value of its own.
Horror of my own deed would overtake me were I here only destructive and
had I left only a clean sheet. Perhaps the affirmations in my book are
less articulate, but he that has ears to hear will hear them.

The treatise falls into two parts, the first biological-psychological,
the second logical-philosophical. It may be objected that I should have
done better to make two books, the one treating of purely physical
science, the other introspective. It was necessary to be done with
biology before turning to psychology. The second part treats of certain
psychical problems in a fashion totally different from the method of any
contemporary naturalist, and for that reason I think that the removal of
the first part of the book would have been at some risk to many readers.
Moreover, the first part of the book challenges an attention and
criticism from natural science possible in a few places only in the
second part, which is chiefly introspective. Because the second part
starts from a conception of the universe that is anti-positivistic, many
will think it unscientific (although there is given a strong proof
against Positivism). For the present I must be content with the
conviction that I have rendered its due to Biology, and that I have
established an enduring position for non-biological, non-physiological
psychology.

My investigation may be objected to as in certain points not being
supported by enough proof, but I see little force in such an objection.
For in these matters what can “proof” mean? I am not dealing with
mathematics or with the theory of cognition (except with the latter in
two cases); I am dealing with empirical knowledge, and in that one can
do no more than point to what exists; in this region proof means no more
than the agreement of new experience with old experience, and it is much
the same whether the new phenomena have been produced experimentally by
men, or have come straight from the creative hand of nature. Of such
latter proofs my book contains many.

Finally, I should like to say that my book, if I may be allowed to judge
it, is for the most part not of a quality to be understood and absorbed
at the first glance. I point out this myself, to guide and protect the
reader.

The less I found myself able in both parts of the book (and especially
in the second) to confirm what now passes for knowledge, the more
anxious I have been to point out coincidences where I found myself in
agreement with what has already been known and said.

I have to thank Professor Dr. Laurenz Müllner for the great assistance
he has given me, and Professor Dr. Friedrich Jodl for the kindly
interest he has taken in my work from the beginning. I am specially
indebted to the kind friends who have helped me with correction of the
proofs.




CONTENTS


                                                                  _Page_

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION                        ix


  FIRST OR PREPARATORY PART

  SEXUAL COMPLEXITY

  INTRODUCTION                                                         1

  On the development of general conceptions -- Male and female --
  Contradictions -- Transitional forms -- Anatomy and natural
  endowment -- Uncertainty of anatomy


  CHAPTER I

  MALES AND FEMALES                                                    5

  Embryonic neutral condition -- Rudiments in the adult -- Degrees
  of “gonochorism” -- Principle of intermediate forms -- Male and
  female -- Need for typical conceptions -- Resumé -- Early
  anticipations


  CHAPTER II

  MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS                                             11

  Position of sexuality -- Steenstrup’s view adopted -- Sexual
  characters -- Internal secretions -- Idioplasm -- Arrhenoplasm
  -- Thelyplasm -- Variations -- Proofs from the effects of
  castration -- Transplantation and transfusion -- Organotherapy
  -- Individual differences between cells -- Origin of
  intermediate sexual conditions -- Brain -- Excess of male births
  -- Determination of sex -- Comparative pathology


  CHAPTER III

  THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION                                       26

  Sexual preference -- Probability of these being controlled by a
  law -- First formula -- First interpretation -- Proofs --
  Heterostylism -- Interpretation of heterostylism -- Animal
  kingdom -- Further laws -- Second formula -- Chemotaxis --
  Resemblances and differences -- Goethe, “elective affinities” --
  Marriage and free love -- Effects on progeny


  CHAPTER IV

  HOMO-SEXUALITY AND PEDERASTY                                        45

  Homo-sexuals as intermediate forms -- Inborn or acquired,
  healthy or diseased? -- A special instance of the law of
  attraction -- All men have the rudiments of homo-sexuality --
  Friendship and sexuality -- Animals -- Failure of medical
  treatment -- Homo-sexuality, punishment and ethics --
  Distinction between homo-sexuality and pederasty


  CHAPTER V

  THE SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND THE SCIENCE OF FORM                    53

  Principle of sexually intermediate forms as fundamental
  principle of the psychology of individuals -- Simultaneity or
  periodicity? -- Methods of psychological investigation --
  Examples -- Individualised education -- Conventionalising --
  Parallelism between morphology and characterology -- Physiognomy
  and the principles of psycho-physics -- Method of the doctrine
  of variation -- A new way of stating the problem -- Deductive
  morphology -- Correlation -- Outlook


  CHAPTER VI

  EMANCIPATED WOMEN                                                   64

  The woman question -- Claim for emancipation and maleness --
  Emancipation and homo-sexuality -- Sexual preferences of
  emancipated women -- Physiognomy of emancipated women -- Other
  celebrated women -- Femaleness and emancipation -- Practical
  rules -- Genius essentially male -- Movements of women in
  historical times -- Periodicity -- Biology and the conception of
  history -- Outlook of the woman movement -- Its fundamental
  error


  SECOND OR PRINCIPAL PART

  THE SEXUAL TYPES


  CHAPTER I

  MAN AND WOMAN                                                       79

  Bisexuality and unisexuality -- Man or woman, male or female --
  Fundamental difficulty in characterology -- Experiment, analysis
  of sensation and psychology -- Dilthey -- Conception of
  empirical character -- What is and what is not the object of
  psychology -- Character and individuality -- Problem of
  characterology and the problem of the sexes


  CHAPTER II

  MALE AND FEMALE SEXUALITY                                           85

  The problem of a female psychology -- Man as the interpreter of
  female psychology -- Differences in the sexual impulse -- The
  absorbing and liberating factors -- Intensity and activity --
  Sexual irritability of women -- Larger field of the sexual life
  in woman -- Local differences in the perception of sexuality --
  Local and periodical cessation of male sexuality -- Differences
  in the degrees of consciousness of sexuality


  CHAPTER III

  MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS                                       93

  Sensation and feeling -- Avenarius’ division into “element” and
  “character” -- These inseparable at the earliest stage --
  Process of “clarification” -- Presentiments -- Grades of
  understanding -- Forgetting -- Paths and organisation --
  Conception of “henids” -- The henid as the simplest, psychical
  datum -- Sexual differences in the organisation of the contents
  of the mind -- Sensibility -- Certainty of judgment -- Developed
  consciousness as a male character


  CHAPTER IV

  TALENT AND GENIUS                                                  103

  Genius and talent -- Genius and giftedness -- Methods --
  Comprehension of many men -- What is meant by comprehending men
  -- Great complexity of genius -- Periods in psychic life -- No
  disparagement of famous men -- Understanding and noticing --
  Universal consciousness of genius -- Greatest distance from the
  henid stage -- A higher grade of maleness -- Genius always
  universal -- The female devoid of genius or of hero-worship --
  Giftedness and sex


  CHAPTER V

  TALENT AND MEMORY                                                  114

  Organisation and the power of reproducing thoughts -- Memory of
  experiences a sign of genius -- Remarks and conclusions --
  Remembrance and apperception -- Capacity for comparison and
  acquisition -- Reasons for the masculinity of music, drawing and
  painting -- Degrees of genius -- Relation of genius to ordinary
  men -- Autobiography -- Fixed ideas -- Remembrance of personal
  creations -- Continuous and discontinuance memory -- Continuity
  and piety -- Past and present -- Past and future -- Desire for
  immortality -- Existing psychological explanations -- True
  origin -- Inner development of man until death -- Ontogenetic
  psychology or theoretical biography -- Woman lacking in the
  desire for immortality -- Further extension of relation of
  memory to genius -- Memory and time -- Postulate of timelessness
  -- Value as a timeless quality -- First law of the theory of
  value -- Proofs -- Individuation and duration constituents of
  value -- Desire for immortality a special case -- Desire for
  immortality in genius connected with timelessness, by his
  universal memory and the duration of his creations -- Genius and
  history -- Genius and nations -- Genius and language -- Men of
  action and men of science, not to be called men of genius --
  Philosophers, founders of religion and artists have genius


  CHAPTER VI

  MEMORY, LOGIC AND ETHICS                                           142

  Psychology and “psychologismus” -- Value of memory -- Theory of
  memory -- Doctrines of practice and of association -- Confusion
  with recognition -- Memory peculiar to man -- Moral significance
  -- Lies -- Transition to logic -- Memory and the principle of
  identity -- Memory and the syllogism -- Woman non-logical and
  non-ethical -- Intellectual and moral knowledge -- The
  intelligible ego


  CHAPTER VII

  LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO                                          153

  Critics of the conception of the Ego -- Hume: Lichtenberg, Mach
  -- The ego of Mach and biology -- Individuation and
  individuality -- Logic and ethics as witnesses for the existence
  of the ego -- Logic -- Laws of identity and of contraries --
  Their use and significance -- Logical axioms as the laws of
  essence -- Kant and Fichte -- Freedom of thought and freedom of
  the will -- Ethics -- Relation to logic -- The psychology of the
  Kantian ethics -- Kant and Nietzsche


  CHAPTER VIII

  THE “I” PROBLEM AND GENIUS                                         163

  Characterology and the belief in the “I” -- Awakening of the ego
  -- Jean Paul, Novalis, Schelling -- The awakening of the ego and
  the view of the world -- Self-consciousness and arrogance -- The
  view of the genius to be more highly valued than that of other
  men -- Final statements as to the idea of genius -- The
  personality of the genius as the perfectly-conscious microcosm
  -- The naturally-synthetic activity of genius -- Significant and
  symbolical -- Definition of the genius in relation to ordinary
  men -- Universality as freedom -- Morality or immorality of
  genius? -- Duties towards self and others -- What duty to
  another is -- Criticism of moral sympathy and social ethics --
  Understanding of other men as the one requirement of morality
  and knowledge -- I and thou -- Individualism and universalism --
  Morality only in monads -- The man of greatest genius as the
  most moral man -- Why man is ζωον πολιτικον -- Consciousness and
  morality -- The great criminal -- Genius as duty and submission
  -- Genius and crime -- Genius and insanity -- Man as his own
  creator


  CHAPTER IX

  MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY                                         186

  Soullessness of woman -- History of this knowledge -- Woman
  devoid of genius -- No masculine women in the true sense -- The
  unconnectedness of woman’s nature due to her want of an ego --
  Revision of the henid-theory -- Female “thought” -- Idea and
  object -- Freedom of the object -- Idea and judgment -- Nature
  of judgment -- Woman and truth as a criterion of thought --
  Woman and logic -- Woman non-moral, not immoral -- Woman and
  solitude -- Womanly sympathy and modesty -- The ego of women --
  Female vanity -- Lack of true self-appreciation -- Memory for
  compliments -- Introspection and repentance -- Justice and
  jealousy -- Name and individuality -- Radical difference between
  male and female mental life -- Psychology with and without soul
  -- Is psychology a science? -- Soul and psychology -- Problem of
  the influence of the psychical sexual characters of the male or
  the female


  CHAPTER X

  MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION                                        214

  Special characterology of woman -- Mother and prostitute --
  Relation of two types to the child -- Woman polygamous --
  Analogies between motherhood and sexuality -- Motherhood and the
  race -- Maternal love ethically indifferent -- The prostitute
  careless of the race -- The prostitute, the criminal and the
  conqueror -- Emperor and prostitute -- Motive of the prostitute
  -- Coitus an end in itself -- Coquetry -- The sensations of the
  woman in coitus in relation to the rest of her life -- The
  prostitute as the enemy -- The friend of life and its enemy --
  No prostitution amongst animals -- Its origin a mystery


  CHAPTER XI

  EROTICS AND ÆSTHETICS                                              236

  Women, and the hatred of women -- Erotics and sexuality --
  Platonic love -- The idea of love -- Beauty of women -- Relation
  to sexual impulse -- Love and beauty -- Difference between
  æsthetics, logic and ethics -- Modes of love -- Projection
  phenomena -- Beauty and morality -- Nature and ethics -- Natural
  and artistic beauty -- Sexual love as guilt -- Hate, love and
  morality -- Creation of the devil -- Love and sympathy -- Love
  and shyness -- Love and vanity -- Love of woman as a means to an
  end -- Relation between the child and love, the child and
  sexuality -- Love and murder -- Madonna-worship -- Madonna, a
  male idea, without basis in womanhood -- Woman sexual, not
  erotic -- Sense of beauty in women -- How man acts on woman --
  The fate of the woman -- Why man loves woman


  CHAPTER XII

  THE NATURE OF WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE IN THE UNIVERSE           252

  Meaning of womanhood -- Instinct for pairing or matchmaking --
  Man, and matchmaking -- High valuation of coitus -- Individual
  sexual impulse, a special case -- Womanhood as pairing or
  universal sexuality -- Organic falseness of woman -- Hysteria --
  Difference between man and beast, woman and man -- The higher
  and lower life -- Birth and death -- Freedom and happiness --
  Happiness and man -- Happiness and woman -- Woman and the
  problem of existence -- Non-existence of woman -- Male and
  female friendship -- Pairing identical with womanhood -- Why
  women must be regarded as human -- Contrast between subject --
  Object, matter, form, man, woman -- Meaning of henids --
  Formation of woman by man -- Significance of woman in the
  universe -- Man as something, woman as nothing -- Psychological
  problem of the fear of woman -- Womanhood and crime -- Creation
  of woman by man’s crime -- Woman as his own sexuality accepted
  by man -- Woman as the guilt of man -- What man’s love of woman
  is, in its deepest significance


  CHAPTER XIII

  JUDAISM                                                            301

  Differences amongst men -- Intermediate forms and racial
  anthropology -- Comparison of Judaism and femaleness -- Judaism
  as an idea -- Antisemitism -- Richard Wagner -- Similarities
  between Jews and women -- Judaism in science -- The Jew not a
  monad -- The Jew and the Englishman -- Nature of humour --
  Humour and satire -- The Jewess -- Deepest significance of
  Judaism -- Want of faith -- The Jew not non-mystical, yet
  impious -- Want of earnestness, and pride -- The Jew as opposed
  to the hero -- Judaism and Christianity -- Origin of
  Christianity -- Problem of the founders of religion -- Christ as
  the conqueror of the Judaism in Himself -- The founders of
  religions as the greatest of men -- Conquest of inherent Judaism
  necessary for all founders of religion -- Judaism and the
  present time -- Judaism, femaleness, culture and humanity


  CHAPTER XIV

  WOMAN AND MANKIND                                                  331

  The idea of humanity, and woman as the match-maker --
  Goethe-worship -- Womanising of man -- Virginity and purity --
  Male origin of these ideas -- Failure of woman to understand the
  erotic -- Woman’s relation to sexuality -- Coitus and love --
  Woman as the enemy of her own emancipation -- Asceticism immoral
  -- Sexual impulse as a want of respect -- Problem of the Jew --
  Problem of the woman -- Problem of slavery -- Moral relation to
  women -- Man as the opponent of emancipation -- Ethical
  postulates -- Two possibilities -- The problem of women as the
  problem of humanity -- Subjection of women -- Persistence or
  disappearance of the human race -- True ground of the immorality
  of the sexual impulse -- Earthly paternity -- Inclusion of women
  in the conception of humanity -- The mother and the education of
  the human race -- Last questions


  INDEX                                                              351




  FIRST OR PREPARATORY PART

  SEXUAL COMPLEXITY


INTRODUCTION

All thought begins with conceptions to a certain extent generalised, and
thence is developed in two directions. On the one hand, generalisations
become wider and wider, binding together by common properties a larger
and larger number of phenomena, and so embracing a wider field of the
world of facts. On the other hand, thought approaches more closely the
meeting-point of all conceptions, the individual, the concrete complex
unit towards which we approach only by thinking in an ever-narrowing
circle, and by continually being able to add new specific and
differentiating attributes to the general idea, “thing,” or “something.”
It was known that fishes formed a class of the animal kingdom distinct
from mammals, birds, or invertebrates, long before it was recognised on
the one hand that fishes might be bony or cartilaginous, or on the other
that fishes, birds and mammals composed a group differing from the
invertebrates by many common characters.

The self-assertion of the mind over the world of facts in all its
complexity of innumerable resemblances and differences has been compared
with the rule of the struggle for existence among living beings. Our
conceptions stand between us and reality. It is only step by step that
we can control them. As in the case of a madman, we may first have to
throw a net over the whole body so that some limit may be set to his
struggles; and only after the whole has been thus secured, is it
possible to attend to the proper restraint of each limb.

Two general conceptions have come down to us from primitive mankind, and
from the earliest times have held our mental processes in their leash.
Many a time these conceptions have undergone trivial corrections; they
have been sent to the workshop and patched in head and limbs; they have
been lopped and added to, expanded here, contracted there, as when new
needs pierce through and through an old law of suffrage, bursting bond
after bond. None the less, in spite of all amendment and alteration, we
have still to reckon with the primitive conceptions, male and female.

It is true that among those we call women are some who are meagre,
narrow-hipped, angular, muscular, energetic, highly mentalised; there
are “women” with short hair and deep voices, just as there are “men” who
are beardless and gossiping. We know, in fact, that there are unwomanly
women, man-like women, and unmanly, womanish, woman-like men. We assign
sex to human beings from their birth on one character only, and so come
to add contradictory ideas to our conceptions. Such a course is
illogical.

In private conversation or in society, in scientific or general
meetings, we have all taken part in frothy discussions on “Man and
Woman,” or on the “Emancipation of Women.” There is a pitiful monotony
in the fashion according to which, on such occasions, “men” and “women”
have been treated as if, like red and white balls, they were alike in
all respects save colour. In no case has the discussion been confined to
an individual case, and as every one had different individuals in their
mind, a real agreement was impossible. As people meant different things
by the same words, there was a complete disharmony between language and
ideas. Is it really the case that all women and men are marked off
sharply from each other, the women, on the one hand, alike in all
points, the men on the other? It is certainly the case that all previous
treatment of the sexual differences, perhaps unconsciously, has implied
this view. And yet nowhere else in nature is there such a yawning
discontinuity. There are transitional forms between the metals and
non-metals, between chemical combinations and mixtures, between animals
and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and
birds. It is only in obedience to the most general, practical demand for
a superficial view that we classify, make sharp divisions, pick out a
single tune from the continuous melody of nature. But the old
conceptions of the mind, like the customs of primitive commerce, become
foolish in a new age. From the analogies I have given, the improbability
may henceforward be taken for granted of finding in nature a sharp
cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is
feminine on the other; or that a living being is so simple in this
respect that it can be put wholly on one side or the other of the line.
Matters are not so clear.

In the controversy as to the woman question, appeal has been made to the
arbitration of anatomy, in the hope that by that aid a line could be
drawn between those characters of males or females that are unalterable
because inborn, and those that are acquired. (It was a strange adventure
to attempt to decide the differences between the natural endowment of
men and women on anatomical results; to suppose that if all other
investigation failed to establish the difference, the matter could be
settled by a few more grains of brain-weight on the one side.) However,
the answer of the anatomists is clear enough, whether it refer to the
brain or to any other portion of the body; absolute sexual distinctions
between all men on the one side and all women on the other do not exist.
Although the skeleton of the hand of most men is different from that of
most women yet the sex cannot be determined with certainty either from
the skeleton or from an isolated part with its muscles, tendons, skin,
blood and nerves. The same is true of the chest, sacrum or skull. And
what are we to say of the pelvis, that part of the skeleton in which, if
anywhere, striking sexual differences exist? It is almost universally
believed that in the one case the pelvis is adapted for the act of
parturition, in the other case is not so adapted. And yet the character
of the pelvis cannot be taken as an absolute criterion of sex. There are
to be found, and the wayfarer knows this as well as the anatomist, many
women with narrow male-like pelves and many men with the broad pelves
of women. Are we then to make nothing of sexual differences? That would
imply, almost, that we could not distinguish between men and women.

From what quarter are we to seek help in our problem? The old doctrine
is insufficient, and yet we cannot make shift without it. If the
received ideas do not suffice, it must be our task to seek out new and
better guides.


CHAPTER I

“MALES” AND “FEMALES”

In the widest treatment of most living things, a blunt separation of
them into males or females no longer suffices for the known facts. The
limitations of these conceptions have been felt more or less by many
writers. The first purpose of this work is to make this point clear.

I agree with other authors who, in a recent treatment of the facts
connected with this subject, have taken as a starting-point what has
been established by embryology regarding the existence in human beings,
plants, and animals of an embryonic stage neutral as regards sex.

In the case of a human embryo of less than five weeks, for instance, the
sex to which it would afterwards belong cannot be recognised. In the
fifth week of fœtal life processes begin which, by the end of the fifth
month of pregnancy, have turned the genital rudiments, at first alike in
the sexes, into one sex and have determined the sex of the whole
organism. The details of these processes need not be described more
fully here. It can be shown that however distinctly unisexual an adult
plant, animal or human being may be, there is always a certain
persistence of the bisexual character, never a complete disappearance of
the characters of the undeveloped sex. Sexual differentiation, in fact,
is never complete. All the peculiarities of the male sex may be present
in the female in some form, however weakly developed; and so also the
sexual characteristics of the woman persist in the man, although perhaps
they are not so completely rudimentary. The characters of the other sex
occur in the one sex in a vestigial form. Thus, in the case of human
beings, in which our interest is greatest, to take an example, it will
be found that the most womanly woman has a growth of colourless hair,
known as “lanugo” in the position of the male beard; and in the most
manly man there are developed under the skin of the breast masses of
glandular tissue connected with the nipples. This condition of things
has been minutely investigated in the true genital organs and ducts, the
region called the “urino-genital tract,” and in each sex there has been
found a complete but rudimentary set of parallels to the organs of the
other sex.

These embryological conclusions can be brought into relation with
another set of facts. Haeckel has used the word “gonochorism” for the
separation of the sexes, and in different classes and groups of
creatures different degrees of gonochorism may be noted. Different kinds
of animals and plants may be distinguished by the extent to which the
characters of one sex are rudimentary in the other. The most extreme
case of sexual differentiation, the sharpest gonochorism, occurs in
sexual dimorphism, that is to say, in that condition of affairs in which
(as for instance in some water-fleas) the males and females of the same
species differ as much or even more from each other as the members of
different species, or genera. There is not so sharply marked gonochorism
amongst vertebrates as in the case of crustacea or insects. Amongst the
former there does not exist a distinction between males and females so
complete as to reach sexual dimorphism. A condition much more frequent
amongst them is the occurrence of forms intermediate in regard to sex,
what is called abnormal hermaphroditism; whilst in certain fishes
hermaphroditism is the normal condition.

I must point out here that it must not be assumed that there exist only
extreme males with scanty remnants of the female condition, extreme
females with traces of the male, hermaphrodite or transitional forms,
and wide gaps between these conditions. I am dealing specially with
human beings, but what I have to say of them might be applied, with
more or less modification, to nearly all creatures in which sexual
reproduction takes place.

Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows: There exist
all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female--sexual
transitional forms. In physical inquiries an “ideal gas” is assumed,
that is to say, a gas, the behaviour of which follows the law of
Boyle-Gay-Lussac exactly, although, in fact, no such gas exists, and
laws are deduced from this so that the deviations from the ideal laws
may be established in the case of actually existing gases. In the same
fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal
woman, W, as sexual types although these types do not actually exist.
Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in
art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic
Idea. The science of physics investigates the behaviour of bodies that
are absolutely rigid or absolutely elastic, in the full knowledge that
neither the one nor the other actually exists. The intermediate
conditions actually existing between the two absolute states of matter
serve merely as a starting-point for investigation of the “types” and in
the practical application of the theory are treated as mixtures and
exhaustively analysed. So also there exist only the intermediate stages
between absolute males and females, the absolute conditions never
presenting themselves.

Let it be noted clearly that I am discussing the existence not merely of
embryonic sexual neutrality, but of a permanent bisexual condition. Nor
am I taking into consideration merely those intermediate sexual
conditions, those bodily or psychical hermaphrodites upon which, up to
the present, attention has been concentrated. In another respect my
conception is new. Until now, in dealing with sexual intermediates, only
hermaphrodites were considered; as if, to use a physical analogy, there
were in between the two extremes a single group of intermediate forms,
and not an intervening tract equally beset with stages in different
degrees of transition.

The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in
different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We
find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male
condition and the female condition. Any individual, “A” or “B,” is never
to be designated merely as a man or a woman, but by a formula showing
that it is a composite of male and female characters in different
proportions, for instance, as follows:

      { α M        { β W
  A = {        B = {
      { α´W        { β´M

always remembering that each of the factors α, α´, β, β´ must be greater
than 0 and less than unity.

Further proofs of the validity of this conception are numerous, and I
have already given, in the preface, a few of the most general. We may
recall the existence of “men” with female pelves and female breasts,
with narrow waists, overgrowth of the hair of the head; or of “women”
with small hips and flat breasts, with deep bass voices and beards (the
presence of hair on the chin is more common than is supposed, as women
naturally are at pains to remove it; I am not speaking of the special
growth that often appears on the faces of women who have reached middle
age). All such peculiarities, many of them coinciding in the same
individuals, are well known to doctors and anatomists, although their
general significance has not been understood.

One of the most striking proofs of the view that I have been unfolding
is presented by the great range of numerical variation to be found where
sexual characters have been measured either by the same or by different
anthropological or anatomical workers. The figures obtained by measuring
female characters do not begin where those got from males leave off, but
the two sets overlap. The more obvious this uncertainty in the theory of
sexual intermediate forms may be, the more is it to be deplored in the
interests of true science. Anatomists and anthropologists of the
ordinary type have by no means striven against the scientific
representation of the sexual types, but as for the most part they
regarded measurements as the best indications, they were overwhelmed
with the number of exceptions, and thus, so far, measurement has brought
only vague and indefinite results.

The course of statistical science, which marks off our industrial age
from earlier times, although perhaps on account of its distant relation
to mathematics it has been regarded as specially scientific, has in
reality hindered the progress of knowledge. It has dealt with averages,
not with types. It has not been recognised that in pure, as opposed to
applied, science it is the type that must be studied. And so those who
are concerned with the type must turn their backs on the methods and
conclusions of current morphology and physiology. The real measurements
and investigations of details have yet to be made. Those that now exist
are inapplicable to true science.

Knowledge must be obtained of male and female by means of a right
construction of the ideal man and the ideal woman, using the word ideal
in the sense of typical, excluding judgment as to value. When these
types have been recognised and built up we shall be in a position to
consider individual cases, and their analysis as mixtures in different
proportions will be neither difficult not fruitless.

I shall now give a summary of the contents of this chapter. Living
beings cannot be described bluntly as of one sex or the other. The real
world from the point of view of sex may be regarded as swaying between
two points, no actual individual being at either point, but somewhere
between the two. The task of science is to define the position of any
individual between these two points. The absolute conditions at the two
extremes are not metaphysical abstractions above or outside the world of
experience, but their construction is necessary as a philosophical and
practical mode of describing the actual world.

A presentiment of this bisexuality of life (derived from the actual
absence of complete sexual differentiation) is very old. Traces of it
may be found in Chinese myths, but it became active in Greek thought. We
may recall the mythical personification of bisexuality in the
Hermaphroditos, the narrative of Aristophanes in the Platonic dialogue,
or in later times the suggestion of a Gnostic sect (Theophites) that
primitive man was a “man-woman.”


CHAPTER II

MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS

The first thing expected of a book like this, the avowed object of which
is a complete revision of facts hitherto accepted, is that it should
expound a new and satisfactory account of the anatomical and
physiological characters of the sexual types. Quite apart from the
abstract question as to whether the complete survey of a subject so
enormous is not beyond the powers of one individual, I must at once
disclaim any intention of making the attempt. I do not pretend to have
made sufficient independent investigations in a field so wide, nor do I
think such a review necessary for the purpose of this book. Nor is it
necessary to give a compilation of the results set out by other authors,
for Havelock Ellis has already done this very well. Were I to attempt to
reach the sexual types by means of the probable inferences drawn from
his collected results, my work would be a mere hypothesis and science
might have been spared a new book. The arguments in this chapter,
therefore, will be of a rather formal and general nature; they will
relate to biological principles, but to a certain extent will lay stress
on the need for a closer investigation of certain definite points, work
which must be left to the future, but which may be rendered more easy by
my indications.

Those who know little of Biology may scan this section hastily, and yet
run little risk of failing to understand what follows.

The doctrine of the existence of different degrees of masculinity and
femininity may be treated, in the first place, on purely anatomical
lines. Not only the anatomical form, but the anatomical position of
male and female characters must be discussed. The examples already given
of sexual differences in other parts of the body showed that sexuality
is not limited to the genital organs and glands. But where are the
limits to be placed? Do they not reach beyond the primary and secondary
sexual characters? In other words, where does sex display itself, and
where is it without influence?

Many points came to light in the last decade, which bring fresh support
to a theory first put forward in 1840, but which at the time found
little support since it appeared to be in direct opposition to facts
held as established alike by the author of the theory and by his
opponents. The theory in question, first suggested by the zoologist J.
J. S. Steenstrup, of Copenhagen, but since supported by many others, is
that sexual characters are present in every part of the body.

Ellis has collected the results of investigations on almost every tissue
of the body, which serve to show the universal presence of sexual
differences. It is plain that there is a striking difference in the
coloration of the typical male and female. This fact establishes the
existence of sexual differences in the skin (cutis) and in the
blood-vessels, and also in the bulk of the colouring-matter in the blood
and in the number of red corpuscles to the cubic centimetre of the blood
fluid. Bischoff and Rudinger have proved the existence of sexual
differences in brain weight, and more recently Justus and Alice Gaule
have obtained a similar result with regard to such vegetative organs as
the liver, lungs and spleen. In fact, all parts of a woman, although in
different degrees in different zones, have a sexual stimulus for the
male organism, and similarly all parts of the male have their effect on
the female.

The direct logical inference may be drawn, and is supported by abundant
facts, that every cell in the body is sexually characteristic and has
its definite sexual significance. I may now add to the principle already
laid down in this book, of the universal presence of sexually
intermediate conditions, that these conditions may present different
degrees of development. Such a conception of the existence of different
degrees of development in sexuality makes it easy to understand cases of
false hermaphroditism or even of the true hermaphroditism, which, since
the time of Steenstrup, has been established for so many plants and
animals, although not certainly in the case of man. Steenstrup wrote:
“If the sex of an animal has its seat only in the genital organs, then
one might think it possible for an animal really to be bisexual, if it
had at the same time two sets of sexual organs. But sex is not limited
to one region, it manifests itself not merely by the presence of certain
organs; it pervades the whole being and shows itself in every point. In
a male body, everything down to the smallest part is male, however much
it may resemble the corresponding female part, and so also in the female
the smallest part is female. The presence of male and female sexual
organs in the same body would make the body bisexual only if both sexes
ruled the whole body and made themselves manifest in every point, and
such a condition, as the manifestations of the sexes are opposing
forces, would result simply in the negation of sex in the body in
question.” If, however, the principle of the existence of innumerable
sexually transitional conditions be extended to all the cells of the
body, and empirical knowledge supports such a view, Steenstrup’s
difficulty is resolved, and hermaphroditism no longer appears to be
unnatural. There may be conceived for every cell all conditions, from
complete masculinity through all stages of diminishing masculinity to
its complete absence and the consequent presence of complete femininity.
Whether we are to think of these gradations in the scale of sexual
differentiation as depending on two real substances united in different
proportions, or as a single kind of protoplasm modified in different
ways (as, for instance, by different spatial dispositions of its
molecules), it were wiser not to guess. The first conception is
difficult to apply physiologically; it is extremely difficult to imagine
that two sets of conditions should be able to produce the essential
physiological similarities of two bodies, one with a male and the other
a female diathesis. The second view recalls too vividly certain
unfortunate speculations on heredity. Perhaps both views are equally far
from the truth. At present empirical knowledge does not enable us to say
wherein the masculinity or the femininity of a cell really lies, or to
define the histological, molecular or chemical differences which
distinguish every cell of a male from every cell of a female. Without
anticipating any discovery of the future (it is plain already, however,
that the specific phenomena of living matter are not going to be
referred to chemistry and physics), it may be taken for granted that
individual cells possess sexuality in different degrees quite apart from
the sexuality of the whole body. Womanish men usually have the skin
softer, and in them the cells of the male organs have a lessened power
of division upon which depends directly the poorer development of the
male macroscopic characters.

The distribution of sexual characters affords an important proof of the
appearance of sexuality in different degrees. Such characters (at least
in the animal kingdom) may be arranged according to the strength of
their exciting influence on the opposite sex. To avoid confusion, I
shall make use of John Hunter’s terms for classifying sexual characters.
The primordial sexual characters are the male and female genital glands
(testes and epididymis, ovaries and epoophoron); the primary sexual
characters are the internal appendages of the sexual glands (vasa
deferentia vesiculæ seminales, oviducts and uterus), which may have
sexual characters quite distinct from those of the glands and the
external sexual organs, according to which alone the sex of human beings
is reckoned at birth (sometimes quite erroneously, as I shall show) and
their consequent fate in life decided. After the primary, come all those
sexual characters not directly necessary to reproduction. Such secondary
sexual characters are best defined as those which begin to appear at
puberty, and which cannot be developed except under the influence on the
system of the internal secretions of the genital glands. Examples of
these are the beards in men, the luxuriant growth of hair in women, the
development of the mammary glands, the character of the voice. As a
convenient mode of treatment, and for practical rather than theoretical
reasons, certain inherited characters, such as the development of
muscular strength or of mental obstinacy may be reckoned as tertiary
sexual characters. Under the designation “quaternary sexual characters”
may be placed such accessories as relative social position, difference
in habit, mode of livelihood, the smoking and drinking habit in man, and
the domestic duties of women. All these characters possess a potent and
direct sexual influence, and in my opinion often may be reckoned with
the tertiary characters or even with the secondary. This classification
of sexual characters must not be taken as implying a definite chain of
sequence, nor must it be assumed that the mental sexual characters
either determine the bodily characters or are determined by them in some
causal nexus. The classification relates only to the strength of the
exciting influence on the other sex, to the order in time in which this
influence is exerted, and to the degree of certainty with which the
extent of the influence may be predicted.

Study of secondary sexual characters is bound up with consideration of
the effect of internal secretions of the genital glands on general
metabolism. The relation of this influence or its absence (as in the
case of artificially castrated animals) has been traced out in the
degree of development of the secondary characters. The internal
secretions, however, undoubtedly have an influence on all the cells of
the body. This is clearly shown by the changes which occur at puberty in
all parts of the body, and not only in the seats of the secondary sexual
characters. As a matter of fact, the internal secretions of all the
glands must be regarded as affecting all the tissues.

The internal secretions of the genital glands must be regarded as
completing the sexuality of the individual. Every cell must be
considered as possessing an original sexuality, to which the influence
of the internal secretion in sufficient quantity is the final
determining condition under the influence of which the cell acquires its
final determinate character as male or female.

The genital glands are the organs in which the sex of the individual is
most obvious, and in the component cells of which it is most
conspicuously visible. At the same time it must be noted that the
distinguishing characters of the species, race and family to which an
organism belongs are also best marked in the genital cells. Just as
Steenstrup, on the one hand, was right in teaching that sex extends all
over the body and is not confined to the genital organs, so, on the
other hand, Naegeli, de Vries, Oskar Hertwig and others have propounded
the important theory, and supported it by weighty arguments, that every
cell in a multi-cellular organism possesses a combination of the
characters of its species and race, but that these characters are, as it
were, specially condensed in the sexual cells. Probably this view of the
case will come to be accepted by all investigators, since every living
being owes its origin to the cleavage and multiplication of a single
cell.

Many phenomena, amongst which may be noticed specially experiments on
the regeneration of lost parts and investigations into the chemical
differences between the corresponding tissues of nearly allied animals,
have led the investigators to whom I have just referred to conceive the
existence of an “Idioplasm,” which is the bearer of the specific
characters, and which exists in all the cells of a multi-cellular
animal, quite apart from the purposes of reproduction. In a similar
fashion I have been led to the conception of an “Arrhenoplasm” (male
plasm) and a “Thelyplasm” (female plasm) as the two modes in which the
idioplasm of every bisexual organism may appear, and which are to be
considered, because of reasons which I shall explain, as ideal
conditions between which the actual conditions always lie. Actually
existing protoplasm is to be thought of as moving from an ideal
arrhenoplasm through a real or imaginary indifferent condition (true
hermaphroditism) towards a protoplasm that approaches, but never
actually reaches, an ideal thelyplasm. This conception brings to a point
what I have been trying to say. I apologise for the new terms, but they
are more than devices to call attention to a new idea.

The proof that every single organ, and further, that every single cell
possesses a sexuality lying somewhere between arrhenoplasm and
thelyplasm, and further, that every cell received an original sexual
endowment definite in kind and degree, is to be found in the fact that
even in the same organism the different cells do not always possess
their sexuality identical in kind and degree. In fact each cell of a
body neither contains the same proportion of M and W nor is at the same
approximation to arrhenoplasm or thelyplasm; similar cells of the same
body may indeed lie on different sides of the sexually neutral point.
If, instead of writing “masculinity” and “femininity” at length, we
choose signs to express these, and without any malicious intention
choose the positive sign (+) for M and the negative (-) for W, then our
proposition may be expressed as follows: The sexuality of the different
cells of the same organism differs not only in absolute quantity but is
to be expressed by a different sign. There are many men with a poor
growth of beard and a weak muscular development who are otherwise
typically males; and so also many women with badly developed breasts are
otherwise typically womanly. There are womanish men with strong beards
and masculine women with abnormally short hair who none the less possess
well-developed breasts and broad pelves. I know several men who have the
upper part of the thigh of a female with a normally male under part, and
some with the right hip of a male and the left of a female. In most
cases these local variations of the sexual character affect both sides
of the body, although of course it is only in ideal bodies that there is
complete symmetry about the middle line. The degree to which sexuality
displays itself, however, as, for instance, in the growth of hair, is
very often unsymmetrical. This want of uniformity (and the sexual
manifestations never show complete uniformity) can hardly depend on
differences of the internal secretion; for the blood goes to all the
organs, having in it the same amount of the internal secretion; although
different organs may receive different quantities of blood, in all
normal cases its quality and quantity being proportioned to the needs of
the part.

Were we not to assume as the cause of these variations the presence of a
sexual determinant generally different in every cell but stable from its
earliest embryonic development, then it would be simple to describe the
sexuality of any individual by estimating how far its sexual glands
conformed to the normal type of its sex, and the facts would be much
simpler than they really are. Sexuality, however, cannot be regarded as
occurring in an imaginary normal quantity distributed equally all over
an individual so that the sexual character of any cell would be a
measure of the sexual characters of any other cells. Whilst, as an
exception, there may occur wide differences in the sexual characters of
different cells or organs of the same body, still as a rule there is the
same specific sexuality for all the cells. In fact it may be taken as
certain that an approximation to a complete uniformity of sexual
character over the whole body is much more common than the tendency to
any considerable divergences amongst the different organs or still more
amongst the different cells. How far these possible variations may go
can be determined only by the investigation of individual cases.

There is a popular view, dating back to Aristotle and supported by many
doctors and zoologists, that the castration of an animal is followed by
the sudden appearance of the characters of the other sex; if the gelding
of a male were to bring about the appearance of female characteristics
then doubt would be thrown on the existence in every cell of a
primordial sexuality independent of the genital glands. The most recent
experimental results of Sellheim and Foges, however, have shown that the
type of a gelded male is distinct from the female type, that gelding
does not induce the feminine character. It is better to avoid too
far-reaching and radical conclusions on this matter; it may be that a
second latent gland of the other sex may awake into activity and
sexually dominate the deteriorating organism after the removal or
atrophy of the normal gland. There are many cases (too readily
interpreted as instances of complete assumption of the male character)
in which after the involution of the female sexual glands at the
climacteric the secondary sexual characters of the male are acquired.
Instances of this are the beard of the human grandam, the occasional
appearance of short antlers in old does, or of a cock’s plumage in an
old hen. But such changes are practically never seen except in
association with senile decay or with operative interference.

In the case of certain crustacean parasites of fish, however (the genera
_Cymothoa_, _Anilocra_ and _Nerocila_ of the family _Cymothoidæ_), the
changes I have just mentioned are part of the normal life history. These
creatures are hermaphrodites of a peculiar kind; the male and female
organs co-exist in them but are not functional at the same period. A
sort of protandry exists; each individual exercises first the functions
of a male and afterwards those of the female. During the time of their
activity as males they possess ordinary male reproductive organs which
are cast off when the female genital ducts and brood organs develop.
That similar conditions may exist in man has been shown by those cases
of “eviratio” and “effeminatio” which the sexual pathology of the old
age of men has brought to light. So also we cannot deny altogether the
actual occurrence of a certain degree of effeminacy when the crucial
operation of extirpation of the human testes has been performed.[1] On
the other hand, the fact that the relation is not universal or
inevitable, that the castration of an individual does not certainly
result in the appearance of the characters of the other sex, may be
taken as a proof that it is necessary to assume the original presence
throughout the body of cells determined by arrhenoplasm or thelyplasm.

  [1] So also in the opposite case; it cannot be wholly denied that
  ovariotomy is followed by the appearance of masculine characters.

The possession by every cell of primitive sexuality on which the
secretion of the sexual glands has little effect might be shown further
by consideration of the effects of grafting male genital glands on
female organisms. For such an experiment to be accurate it would be
necessary that the animal from which the testis was to be transplanted
should be as near akin as possible to the female on which the testis was
to be grafted, as, for instance, in the case of a brother and sister;
the idioplasm of the two should be as alike as possible. In this
experiment much would depend on limiting the conditions of the
experiment as much as possible so that the results would not be confused
by conflicting factors. Experiments made in Vienna have shown that when
an exchange of the ovaries has been made between unrelated female
animals (chosen at random) the atrophy of the ovaries follows, but that
there is no failure of the secondary sexual characters (_e.g._,
degeneration of the mammæ). Moreover, when the genital glands of an
animal are removed from their natural position and grafted in a new
position in the same animal (so that it still retains its own tissues)
the full development of the secondary sexual characters goes on
precisely as if there had been no interference, at least in cases where
the operation is successful. The failure of the transplantation of
ovaries from one animal to another may be due to the absence of family
relationship between the tissues; the influence of the idioplasm
probably is of primary importance.

These experiments closely resemble those made in the transfusion of
alien blood. It is a practical rule with surgeons that when a dangerous
loss of blood has to be made good, the blood required for transfusion
must be obtained from an individual not only of the same species and
family, but also of the same sex as that of the patient. The parallel
between transfusion and transplantation is at once evident. If I am
correct in my views, when surgeons seek to transfuse blood, instead of
being content with injections of normal salt solution they must take
the blood not merely from one of the same species, family and sex, but
of a similar degree of masculinity or femininity.

Experiments on transfusion not only lend support to my belief in the
existence of sex characters in the blood corpuscles, but they furnish
additional explanations of the failure of experiments in grafting
ovaries or testis on individuals of the opposite sex. The internal
secretions of the genital glands are operative only in their appropriate
environment of arrhenoplasm or thelyplasm.

In this connection, I may say a word as to the curative value of
organotherapy. Although, as I have shown to be the case, the
transplantation of freshly extirpated genital glands into subjects of
the opposite sex has no effect, it does not follow that the injection of
the ovarian secretion into the blood of a male might not have a most
injurious effect. On the other hand, the principle of organotherapy has
been opposed on the ground that organic preparations procured from
non-allied species could not possibly be expected to yield good results.
It is more than likely that the medical exponents of organotherapy have
lost many valuable discoveries in healing because of their neglect of
the biological theory of idioplasm.

The theory of an idioplasm, the presence of which gives the specific
race characters to those tissues and cells which have lost the
reproductive faculty, is by no means generally accepted. But at the
least all must admit that the race characters are collected in the
genital glands, and that if experiments with extracts from these are to
provide more than a good tonic, the nearest possible relationship
between the animals experimented upon must be observed. Parallel
experiments might be made as to the effect of transplantation of the
genital glands and injections of their extracts on two castrated cocks
of the same strain. For instance, the effects of the transplantation of
the testes of one of them into any other part of its own body or
peritoneal cavity or into any similar part of the other cock might be
compared with the effects of intravenous injection of testis extract of
the one on the other. Such parallel investigations would also increase
our knowledge as to the most suitable media and quantities of the
extracts. It is also to be desired, from the theoretical point of view,
that knowledge may be gained as to whether the internal secretion of the
genital glands enters into chemical union with the protoplasm of the
cells or whether it acts as a physiological stimulus independent of the
quantity supplied. So far we know nothing that would enable us to come
to a definite opinion on this point.

The limited influence of the internal secretions of the sexual glands in
forming the sexual characters must be realised to warrant the theory of
a primary, generally slight, difference in each cell, but still
determinate sexual influence.[2] If the existence of distinct
graduations of these primary characteristics in all the cells and
tissues can be recognised, there follow many important and far-reaching
conclusions. The individual egg-cells and spermatozoa may be found to
possess different degrees of maleness and femaleness, not only in
different individuals, but in the ovaries and testes of the same
individual, especially at different times; for instance, the spermatozoa
differ in size and activity. We are still quite ignorant on these
matters, as no one has worked on the requisite lines.

  [2] The existence of sexual distinctions before puberty shows that the
  power of the internal secretions of the sexual glands does not account
  for everything.

It is extremely interesting to recall in this connection that many times
different investigators have observed in the testes of amphibia not only
the different stages in the development of spermatozoa, but mature eggs.
This interpretation of the observations was at first disputed, and it
was suggested that the presence of unusually large cells in the tubes of
the testes had given rise to the error, but the matter has now been
fully confirmed. Moreover, in these Amphibia, sexually intermediate
conditions are very common, and this should lead us to be careful in
making statements as to the uniform presence of arrhenoplasm or
thelyplasm in a body. The methods of assigning sex to a new-born infant
seem most unsatisfactory in the light of these facts. If the child is
observed to possess a male organ, even although there may be complete
epi- or hypo-spadism, or a double failure of descent of the testes, it
is at once described as a boy and is henceforth treated as one, although
in other parts of the body, for instance in the brain, the sexual
determinant may be much nearer thelyplasm than arrhenoplasm. The sooner
a more exact method of sex discrimination is insisted upon the better.

As a result of these long inductions and deductions we may rest assured
that all the cells possess a definite primary sexual determinant which
must not be assumed to be alike or nearly alike throughout the same
body. Every cell, every cell-complex, and every organ have their
distinctive indices on the scale between thelyplasm and arrhenoplasm.
For the exact definition of the sex, an estimation of the indices over
the whole body would be necessary. I should be content to bear the blame
of all the theoretical and practical errors in this book did I believe
myself to have made the working out of a single case possible.

Differences in the primary sexual determinants, together with the
varying internal secretions (which differ in quantity and quality in
different individuals) produce the phenomena of sexually intermediate
forms. Arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm, in their countless modifications,
are the microscopic agencies which, in co-operation with the internal
secretions, give rise to the macroscopic differences cited in the last
chapter.

If the correctness of the conclusions so far stated may be assumed, the
necessity is at once evident for a whole series of anatomical,
physiological, histological and histo-chemical investigations into those
differences between male and female types, in the structure and function
of the individual organs by which the dowers of arrhenoplasm and
thelyplasm express themselves in the tissues. The knowledge we possess
at the present time on these matters comes from the study of averages,
but averages fail to satisfy the modern statistician, and their
scientific value is very small. Investigations into the sex-differences
in the weight of the brain, for instance, have so far proved very
little, probably because no care was taken to choose typical conditions,
the assignment of sex being dependent on baptismal certificates or on
superficial glances at the outward appearance. As if every “John” or
“Mary” were representative of their sexes because they had been dubbed
“male” and “female!” It would have been well, even if exact
physiological data were thought unnecessary, at least to make certain as
to a few facts as to the general condition of the body, which might
serve as guides to the male or female condition, such as, for instance,
the distance between the great trochanters, the iliac spines, and so
forth, for a sexual harmony in the different parts of the body is
certainly more common than great sexual divergence.

This source of error, the careless acceptance of sexually intermediate
forms as representative subjects for measurement, has maimed other
investigations and seriously retarded the attainment of genuine and
useful results. Those, for instance, who wish to speculate about the
cause of the superfluity of male births have to reckon with this source
of error. In a special way this carelessness will revenge itself on
those who are investigating the ultimate causes that determine sex.
Until the exact degree of maleness or femaleness of all the living
individuals of the group on which he is working can be determined, the
investigator will have reason to distrust both his methods and his
hypotheses. If he classify sexually intermediate forms, for instance,
according to their external appearance, as has been done hitherto, he
will come across cases which fuller investigation would show to be on
the wrong side of his results, whilst other instances, apparently on the
wrong side, would right themselves. Without the conception of an ideal
male and an ideal female, he lacks a standard according to which to
estimate his real cases, and he gropes forward to a superficial and
doubtful conclusion. Maupas, for instance, who made experiments on the
determination of sex in _Hydatina senta_, a Rotifer, found that there
was always an experimental error of from three to five per cent. At low
temperatures the production of females was expected, but always about
the above proportion of males appeared; so also at the higher
temperatures a similar proportion of females appeared. It is probable
that this error was due to sexually intermediate stages, arrhenoplasmic
females at the high temperature, thelyplasmic males at the low
temperature. Where the problem is more complicated, as in the case of
cattle, to say nothing of human beings, the process of investigation
will yield still less harmonious results, and the correction of the
interpretation which will have to be made by allowing for the
disturbance due to the existence of sexually intermediate forms will be
much more difficult.

The study of comparative pathology of the sexual types is as necessary
as their morphology, physiology and development. In this region of
inquiry as elsewhere, statistics would yield certain results. Diseases
manifestly much more abundant in one sex might be described as peculiar
to or idiopathic of thelyplasm or arrhenoplasm. Myxœdema, for instance,
is idiopathic of the female, hydrocele of the male.

But no statistics, however numerous and accurate, can be regarded as
avoiding a source of theoretical error until it has been shown from the
nature of any particular affection dealt with that it is in
indissoluble, functional relation with maleness or femaleness. The
theory of such associated diseases must supply a reason why they occur
almost exclusively in the one sex, that is to say, in the phrase of this
treatise, why they are thelyplasmic or arrhenoplasmic.


CHAPTER III

THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION

  CARMEN:

  “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,
  Que nul ne peut apprivoiser:
  Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle
  S’il lui convient de refuser.
  Rien n’y fait; menace ou prière:
  L’un parle, l’autre se tait;
  Et c’est l’autre que je préfère;
  Il n’a rien dit, mais il me plaît.

         *       *       *       *       *

  L’amour est enfant de Bohême
  Il n’a jamais connu de loi.”

It has been recognised from time immemorial that, in all forms of
sexually differentiated life, there exists an attraction between males
and females, between the male and the female, the object of which is
procreation. But as the male and the female are merely abstract
conceptions which never appear in the real world, we cannot speak of
sexual attraction as a simple attempt of the masculine and the feminine
to come together. The theory which I am developing must take into
account all the facts of sexual relations if it is to be complete;
indeed, if it is to be accepted instead of the older views, it must give
a better interpretation of all these sexual phenomena. My recognition of
the fact that M and F (maleness and femaleness) are distributed in the
living world in every possible proportion has led me to the discovery of
an unknown natural law, of a law not yet suspected by any philosopher, a
law of sexual attraction. As observations on human beings first led me
to my results, I shall begin with this side of the subject.

Every one possesses a definite, individual taste of his own with regard
to the other sex. If we compare the portrait of the women which some
famous man has been known to love, we shall nearly always find that they
are all closely alike, the similarity being most obvious in the contour
(more precisely in the “figure”) or in the face, but on closer
examination being found to extend to the minutest details, _ad unguem_,
to the finger-tips. It is precisely the same with every one else. So,
also, every girl who strongly attracts a man recalls to him the other
girls he has loved before. We see another side of the same phenomenon
when we recall how often we have said of some acquaintance or another,
“I can’t imagine how that type of woman pleases him.” Darwin, in the
“Descent of Man,” collected many instances of the existence of this
individuality of the sexual taste amongst animals, and I shall be able
to show that there are analogous phenomena even amongst plants.

Sexual attraction is nearly always, as in the case of gravitation,
reciprocal. Where there appear to be exceptions to this rule, there is
nearly always evidence of the presence of special influences which have
been capable of preventing the direct action of the special taste, which
is almost always reciprocal, or which have left an unsatisfied craving,
if the direct taste were not allowed its play.

The common saying, “Waiting for Mr. Right,” or statements such as that
“So-and-so are quite unsuitable for one another,” show the existence of
an obscure presentiment of the fact that every man or woman possesses
certain individual peculiarities which qualify or disqualify him or her
for marriage with any particular member of the opposite sex; and that
this man cannot be substituted for that, or this woman for the other
without creating a disharmony.

It is a common personal experience that certain individuals of the
opposite sex are distasteful to us, that others leave us cold; whilst
others again may stimulate us until, at last, some one appears who
seems so desirable that everything in the world is worthless and empty
compared with union with such a one. What are the qualifications of that
person? What are his or her peculiarities? If it really be the case--and
I think it is--that every male type has its female counterpart with
regard to sexual affinity, it looks as if there were some definite law.
What is this law? How does it act? “Like poles repel, unlike attract,”
was what I was told when, already armed with my own answer, I resolutely
importuned different kinds of men for a statement, and submitted
instances to their power of generalisation. The formula, no doubt, is
true in a limited sense and for a certain number of cases. But it is at
once too general and too vague; it would be applied differently by
different persons, and it is incapable of being stated in mathematical
terms.

This book does not claim to state all the laws of sexual affinity, for
there are many; nor does it pretend to be able to tell every one exactly
which individual of the opposite sex will best suit his taste, for that
would imply a complete knowledge of all the laws in question. In this
chapter only one of these laws will be considered--the law which stands
in organic relation to the rest of the book. I am working at a number of
other laws, but the following is that to which I have given most
investigation, and which is most elaborated. In criticising this work,
allowance must be made for the incomplete nature of the material
consequent on the novelty and difficulty of the subject.

Fortunately it is not necessary for me to cite at length either the
facts from which I originally derived this law of sexual affinity or to
set out in detail the evidence I obtained from personal statements. I
asked each of those who helped me, to make out his own case first, and
then to carry out observations in his circle of acquaintances. I have
paid special attention to those cases which have been noticed and
remembered, in which the taste of a friend has not been understood, or
appeared not to be present, or was different from that of the observer.
The minute degree of knowledge of the external form of the human body
which is necessary for the investigation is possessed by every one.

I have come to the law which I shall now formulate by a method the
validity of which I shall now have to prove.

The law runs as follows: “For true sexual union it is necessary that
there come together a complete male (M) and a complete female (F), even
although in different cases the M and F are distributed between the two
individuals in different proportions.”

The law may be expressed otherwise as follows:

If we take μ, any individual regarded in the ordinary way as a male, and
denote his real sexual constitution as Mμ, so many parts really male,
plus Wμ, so many parts really female; if we also take ω, any individual
regarded in the ordinary way as a female, and denote _her_ real sexual
constitution as Wω, so many parts really female, plus Mω, so many parts
really male; then, if there be complete sexual affinity, the greatest
possible sexual attraction between the two individuals, μ and ω,

  (1) Mμ (the truly male part in the “male”) + Mω (the truly male part
  in the “female”) will equal a constant quantity, M, the ideal male;
  and

  (2) Wμ + Wω (the ideal female parts in respectively the “male” and the
  “female”) will equal a second constant quantity, W, the ideal female.

This statement must not be misunderstood. Both formulas refer to one
case, to a single sexual relation, the second following directly from
the first and adding nothing to it, as I set out from the point of view
of an individual possessing just as much femaleness as he lacks of
maleness. Were he completely male, his requisite complement would be a
complete female, and _vice versâ_. If, however, he is composed of a
definite inheritance of maleness, and also an inheritance of femaleness
(which must not be neglected), then, to complete the individual, his
maleness must be completed to make a unit; but so also must his
femaleness be completed.

If, for instance, an individual be composed thus:

    { ³⁄₄ M
  μ { and
    { ¹⁄₄ W,

then the best sexual complement of that individual will be another
compound as follows:

    { ¹⁄₄ M
  ω { and
    { ³⁄₄ W.

It can be seen at once that this view is wider in its reach than the
common statement of the case. That male and female, as sexual types,
attract each other is only one instance of my general law, an instance
in which an imaginary individual,

    { 1 M
  χ {
    { 0 W,

finds its complement in an equally imaginary individual,

    { 0 M
  γ {
    { 1 W.

There can be no hesitation in admitting the existence of definite,
individual sexual preferences, and such an admission carries with it
approval of the necessity of investigating the laws of the preference,
and its relation to the rest of the bodily and mental characters of an
individual. The law, as I have stated it, can encounter no initial sense
of impossibility, and is contrary neither to scientific nor common
experience. But it is not self-evident. It might be that the law, which
cannot yet be regarded as fully worked out, might run as follows:

  Mμ - Mω = a constant;

that is to say, it may be the difference between the degrees of
masculinity and not the sum of the degrees of masculinity that is a
constant quality, so that the most masculine man would stand just as far
removed from his complement (who in this case would lie nearly midway
between masculinity and femininity) as the most feminine man would be
removed from his complement who would be near the extreme of femininity.
Although, as I have said, this is conceivable, it is not borne out by
experience. Recognising that we have to do here with an empirical law,
and trying to observe a wise scientific restraint, we shall do well to
avoid speaking as if there were any “force” pulling the two individuals
together as if they were puppets; the law is no more than the statement
that an identical relation can be made out in each case of maximum
sexual attraction. We are dealing, in fact, with what Ostwald termed an
“invariant” and Avenarius a “multiponible”; and this is the constant sum
formed by the total masculinity and the total femininity in all cases
where a pair of living beings come together with the maximum sexual
attraction.

In this matter we may neglect altogether the so-called æsthetic factor,
the stimulus of beauty. For does it not frequently happen that one man
is completely captivated by a particular woman and raves about her
beauty, whilst another, who is not the sexual complement of the woman in
question, cannot imagine what his friend sees in her to admire. Without
discussing the laws of æsthetics or attempting to gather together
examples of relative values, it may readily be admitted that a man may
consider a woman beautiful who, from the æsthetic standpoint, is not
merely indifferent but actually ugly, that in fact pure æsthetics deal
not with absolute beauty, but merely with conceptions of beauty from
which the sexual factor has been eliminated.

I have myself worked out the law in, at the lowest, many hundred cases,
and I have found that the exceptions were only apparent. Almost every
couple one meets in the street furnishes a new proof. The exceptions
were specially instructive, as they not only suggested but led to the
investigation of other laws of sexuality. I myself made special
investigations in the following way. I obtained a set of photographs of
æsthetically beautiful women of blameless character, each of which was
a good example of some definite proportion of femininity, and I asked a
number of my friends to inspect these and select the most beautiful. The
selection made was invariably that which I had predicted. With other
male friends, who knew on what I was engaged, I set about in another
fashion. They provided me with photographs from amongst which I was to
choose the one I should expect them to think most beautiful. Here, too,
I was uniformly successful. With others, I was able to describe most
accurately their ideal of the opposite sex, independently of any
suggestions unconsciously given by them, often in minuter detail than
they had realised. Sometimes, too, I was able to point out to them, for
the first time, the qualities that repelled them in individuals of the
opposite sex, although for the most part men realise more readily the
characters that repel them than the characters that attract them.

I believe that with a little practice any one could readily acquire and
exercise this art on any circle of friends. A knowledge of other laws of
sexual affinity would be of great importance. A number of special
constants might be taken as tests of the existence of complementary
individuals. For instance, the law might be caricatured so as to require
that the sum of the length of the hairs of any two perfect lovers should
always be the same. But, as I have already shown in chapter ii., this
result is not to be expected, because all the organs of the same body do
not necessarily possess the same degree of maleness or femaleness. Such
heuristic rules would soon multiply and bring the whole subject into
ridicule, and I shall therefore abstain from further suggestions of the
kind.

I do not deny that my exposition of the law is somewhat dogmatical and
lacks confirmation by exact detail. But I am not so anxious to claim
finished results as to incite others to the study, the more so as the
means for scientific investigations are lacking in my own case. But even
if much remains theoretical, I hope that I shall have firmly riveted the
chief beams in my edifice of theory by showing how it explains much
that hitherto has found no explanation, and so shall have, in a fashion,
proved it retrospectively by showing how much it would explain if it
were true.

A most remarkable confirmation of my law may be found in the vegetable
kingdom, in a group of facts hitherto regarded as isolated and to be so
strange as to have no parallel. Every botanist must have guessed already
that I have in mind the phenomena of heterostylism, first discovered by
Persoon, then described by Darwin and named by Hildebrand. Many
Dicotyledons, and a few Monocotyledons, for instance, species of
Primulaceæ and Geraneaceæ and many Rubiaceæ, phanerogams in the flowers
of which both the pollen and the stigma are functional, although only in
cross-fertilisation, so that the flowers are hermaphrodite in structure
but unisexual physiologically, display the peculiarity that in different
individuals the stamens and the stigma have different lengths. The
individuals, all the flowers of which have long styles and therefore
high stigmas and short anthers, are, in my judgment, the more female,
whilst the individuals with short styles and long anthers are more male.
In addition to such dimorphic plants, there are also trimorphic plants,
such as _Lythrum salicaria_, in which the sexual organs display three
forms differing in length. There are not only long-styled and
short-styled forms, but flowers with styles of a medium length.

Although only dimorphism and trimorphism have been recognised in the
books, these conditions do not exhaust the actual complexities of
structure. Darwin himself pointed out that if small differences were
taken into account, no less than five different situations of the
anthers could be distinguished. Alongside such plain cases of
discontinuity, of the separation of the different degrees of maleness
and femaleness in plainly distinct individuals, there are also cases in
which the different degrees grade into each other without breaks in the
series. There are analogous cases of discontinuity in the animal
kingdom, although they have always been thought of as unique and
isolated phenomena, as the parallel with heterostylism had not been
suggested. In several genera of insects, as, for instance, some Earwigs
(_Forficulæ_) and Lamellicorn Beetles (_Lucanus cervus_), the
Stag-beetle (_Dynastes Hercules_), and _Xylotrupes gideon_, there are
some males in which the antennæ, the secondary sexual characters by
which they differ most markedly from the females, are extremely long,
and others in which they are very short. Bateson, who has written most
on this subject, distinguishes the two forms as “high males” and “low
males.” It is true that a continuous series of intermediate forms links
the extreme types, but, none the less, the vast majority of the
individuals are at one extreme or the other. Unfortunately, Bateson did
not investigate the relations between these different types of males and
the females, and so it is not known if there be female types with
special sexual affinity for these male types. Thus these observations
can be taken only as a morphological parallel to heterostylism and not
as cases of the law of complementary sexual attraction.

Heterostylous plants may possibly be the means of establishing my view
that the law of sexual complements holds good for every kind of living
thing. Darwin first, and after him many other investigators have proved
that in heterostylous plants fertilisation has the best results, or,
indeed, may be possible only when the pollen from a macrostylous flower
(a flower with the shortest form of anthers and longest pistil) falls on
the stigma of a microstylous blossom (one where the pistil is the
shortest possible and the stamens at their greatest length), or _vice
versâ_. In other words, if the best result is to be attained by the
cross-fertilisation of a pair of flowers, one flower with a long pistil,
and therefore high degree of femaleness, and short stamens must be mated
with another possessing a correspondingly short pistil, and so, with the
amount of femaleness complementary to the first flower, and with long
stamens complementary to the short stamens of the first flower. In the
case of flowers where there are three pistil lengths, the best results
may be expected when the pollen of one blossom is transmitted to another
blossom in which the stigma is the nearest complement of the stigma of
the flower from which the pollen came; if another combination is made,
either naturally or by artificial fertilisation, then, if a result
follows at all, the seedlings are scanty, dwarfed and sometimes
infertile, much as when hybrids between species are formed.

It is to be noticed that the authors who have discussed heterostylism
are not satisfied with the usual explanation, which is that the insects
which visit the flowers carry the pollen at different relative positions
on their bodies corresponding to the different lengths of the sexual
organs and so produce the wonderful result. Darwin, moreover, admits
that bees carry all sorts of pollen on every part of their bodies; so
that it has still to be made clear how the female organs dusted with two
or three kinds of pollen make their choice of the most suitable. The
supposition of a power of choice, however interesting and wonderful it
is, does not account for the bad results which follow artificial dusting
with the wrong kind of pollen (so-called “illegitimate fertilisation”).
The theory that the stigmas can only make use of, or are capable of
receiving only “legitimate pollen” has been proved by Darwin to be
erroneous, inasmuch as the insects which act as fertilisers certainly
sometimes start various cross-breedings.

The hypothesis that the reason for this selective retention on the part
of individuals is a special quality, deep-seated in the flowers
themselves, seems more probable. We have probably here to do with the
presence, just as in human beings, of a maximum degree of sexual
attraction between individuals, one of which possesses just as much
femaleness as the other possesses maleness, and this is merely another
mode of stating my sexual law. The probability of this interpretation is
increased by the fact that in the short-styled, long-anthered, more male
flowers, the pollen grains are larger and the papillæ on the stigmas are
smaller than the corresponding parts of the long-styled, short-anthered,
more female flowers. Here we have certainly to do with different degrees
of maleness and femaleness. These circumstances supply a strong
corroboration of my law of sexual affinity, that in the vegetable
kingdom as well as in the animal kingdom (I shall return later to this
point) fertilisation has the best results when it occurs between parents
with maximum sexual affinity.[3]

  [3] For special purposes the breeder, whose object frequently is to
  modify natural tendencies, will often disregard this law.

Consideration of sexual aversion affords the readiest proof that the law
holds good throughout the animal kingdom. I should like to suggest here
that it would be extremely interesting to make observations as to
whether the larger, heavier and less active egg-cells exert a special
attraction on the smaller and more active spermatozoa, whilst those
egg-cells with less food-yolk attract more strongly the larger and less
active spermatozoa. It may be the case, as L. Weill has already
suggested in a speculation as to the factors that determine sex, that
there is a correlation between the rates of motion or kinetic energies
of conjugating sexual cells. It has not yet been determined, although
indeed it would be difficult to determine, if the sexual cells, apart
from the streams and eddies of their fluid medium, approach each other
with equal velocities or sometimes display special activity. There is a
wide field for investigation here.

As I have repeatedly remarked, my law is not the only law of sexual
affinity, otherwise, no doubt, it would have been discovered long ago.
Just because so many other actors are bound up with it,[4] because
another, perhaps many other laws sometimes overshadow it, cases of
undisturbed action of sexual affinity are rare. As the necessary
investigations have not yet been finished, I will not speak at length of
such laws, but rather by way of illustration I shall refer to a few
factors which as yet cannot be demonstrated mathematically.

  [4] In speaking of the sexual taste in men and women, one thinks at
  once of the usual but not invariable preference individuals show for a
  particular colour of hair. It would certainly seem as if the reason
  for so strongly marked a preference must lie deep in human nature.

I shall begin with some phenomena which are pretty generally
recognised. Men when quite young, say under twenty, are attracted by
much older women (say those of thirty-five and so on), whilst men of
thirty-five are attracted by women much younger than themselves. So
also, on the other hand, quite young girls (sweet seventeen) generally
prefer much older men, but, later in life, may marry striplings. The
whole subject deserves close attention and is both popular and easily
noticed.

In spite of the necessary limitation of this work to the consideration
of a single law, it will make for exactness if I try to state the
formula in a more definite fashion, without the deceptive element of
simplicity. Even without being able to state in definite quantities the
other factors and the co-operating laws, we may reach a satisfactory
exactness by the use of a variable factor.

The first formula was only an abstract general statement of what is
common to all cases of maximum sexual attraction so far as the sexual
relation is governed by the law. I must now try to find an expression
for the strength of the sexual affinity in any conceivable case, an
expression which on account of its general form, can be used to describe
the relationship between any two living beings, even if these belong to
different species or to the same sex.

If

    { α M          { β W
  χ {       and  γ {
    { α´ W         { β´ M

(where α, α´, β, and β´ are each greater than 0 and less than unity)
define the sexual constitutions of any two living beings between which
there is an attraction, then the strength of the attraction may be
expressed thus:

        K
  A = -----_f^t_
      α - β

where _f^t_ is an empirical or analytical function of the period during
which it is possible for the individuals to act upon one another, what
may be called the “reaction-time”; whilst K is the variable factor in
which we place all the known and unknown laws of sexual affinity, and
which also varies with the degree of specific, racial and family
relationship, and with the health and absence of deformity in the two
individuals, and which, finally, will become smaller as the actual
spacial distance between the two is greater, and which can be determined
in any individual case.

When in this formula α = β A must be infinity; this is the extreme case;
it is sexual attraction as an elemental force, as it has been described
with a weird mastercraft by Lynkeus in the novel “Im Postwagen.” Such
sexual attraction is as much a natural law as the downward growth of a
rootlet towards the earth, or the migration of bacteria to the oxygen at
the edge of a microscopic cover-glass. But it takes some time to grow
accustomed to such a view. I shall refer to this point again.

If α - β has its maximum value, which is when it equals unity, then A =
K. _f^t_.

This would be the extreme case of the action of all the sympathetic and
antipathetic relations between human beings (leaving out of account
social relations in their narrowest sense, which are merely the
safeguards of communities) which are not included in the law of sexual
affinity. As K generally increases with the strength of congenital
relationship, A has a greater value when the individuals are of the same
nationality than when they belong to different nationalities. The value
of _f^t_ is great in this case, and one can investigate its
fluctuations, as, for instance, when two domestic animals of different
species are in association; at first it usually stands for violent
enmity, or fear of each other (and A has a negative value), whilst later
on a friendship may come about.

When K = 0 in the formula

      K . _f^t_
  A = ---------,
        α - β

then A = 0, which means that between two living beings of origin too
remote there may be no trace of sexual attraction.

The provisions of the criminal statute-books, however, in reference to
sodomy and bestiality show plainly that even in the case of very remote
species K has a value greater than nothing. The formula may apply to two
individuals not only not of the same species, but even not of the same
order.

It is a new theory that the union of male and female organisms is no
mere matter of chance, but is guided by a definite law; and the actual
complexities which I have merely suggested show the need for complete
investigation into the mysterious nature of sexual attraction.

The experiments of Wilhelm Pfeffer have shown that the male cells of
many cryptogams are naturally attracted not merely by the female cells,
but also by substances which they have come in contact with under
natural conditions, or which have been introduced to them
experimentally, in the latter case the substances being sometimes of a
kind with which they could not possibly have come in contact, except
under the conditions of experiment. Thus the male cells of ferns are
attracted not only by the malic acid secreted naturally by the
archegonia, but by synthetically prepared malic acid, whilst the male
cells of mosses are attracted either by the natural acid of the female
cells or by acid prepared from cane sugar. A male cell, which, we know
not how, is influenced by the degree of concentration of a solution,
moves towards the most concentrated part of the fluid. Pfeffer named
such movements “chemotactic” and coined the word “chemotropism” to
include these and many other asexual cases of motion stimulated by
chemical bodies. There is much to support the view that the attraction
exercised by females on males which perceive them at a distance by sense
organs is to be regarded as analogous in certain respects with
chemotropism.

It seems highly probable that chemotropism is also the explanation of
the restless and persistent energy with which for days together the
mammalian spermatozoa seek the entrance to the uterus, although the
natural current produced from the mucous membrane of the uterus is from
within outwards. The spermatozoon, in spite of all mechanical and other
hindrances, makes for the egg-cell with an almost incredible certainty.
In this connection we may call to mind the prodigious journeys made by
many fish; salmon travel for months together, practically without taking
any food, from the open sea to the sources of the Rhine, against the
current of the river, in order to spawn in localities that are safe and
well provided with food.

I have recently been looking at the beautiful sketches which P.
Falkenberg has made of the processes of fertilisation in some of the
Mediterranean seaweeds. When we speak of the lines of force between the
opposite poles of magnets we are dealing with a force no more natural
than that which irresistibly attracts the spermatozoon and the egg-cell.
The chief difference seems to be that in the case of the attraction
between the inorganic substances, strains are set up in the media
between the two poles, whilst in the living matter the forces seem
confined to the organisms themselves. According to Falkenberg’s
observations, the spermatozoa, in moving towards the egg-cells, are able
to overcome the force which otherwise would be exercised upon them by a
source of light. The sexual attraction, the chemotactic force, is
stronger than the phototactic force.

When a union has taken place between two individuals who, according to
my formula, are not adapted to each other, if later, the natural
complement of either appears the inclination to desert the makeshift at
once asserts itself in accordance with an inevitable law of nature. A
divorce takes place, as much constitutional, depending on the nature of
things, as when, if iron sulphate and caustic potash are brought
together, the SO₄ ions leave the iron to unite with the potassium. When
in nature an adjustment of such differences of potential is about to
take place, he who would approve or disapprove of the process from the
moral point of view would appear to most to play a ridiculous part.

This is the fundamental idea in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften”
(Elective Affinities), and in the fourth chapter of the first part of
that work he makes it the subject of a playful introduction which was
full of undreamed of future significance, and the full force of which he
was fated himself to experience in later life. I must confess to being
proud that this book is the first work to take up his ideas. None the
less, it is as little my intention as it was the intention of Goethe to
advocate divorce; I hope only to explain it. There are human motives
which indispose man to divorce and enable him to withstand it. This I
shall discuss later on. The physical side of sex in man is less
completely ruled by natural law than is the case with lower animals. We
get an indication of this in the fact that man is sexual throughout the
year, and that in him there is less trace than even in domestic animals
of the existence of a special spring breeding-season.

The law of sexual affinity is analogous in another respect to a
well-known law of theoretical chemistry, although, indeed, there are
marked differences. The violence of a chemical reaction is proportionate
to the mass of the substances involved, as, for instance, a stronger
acid solution unites with a stronger basic solution with greater
avidity, just as in the case of the union of a pair of living beings
with strong maleness and femaleness. But there is an essential
difference between the living process and the reaction of the lifeless
chemical substances. The living organism is not homogeneous and
isotropic in its composition; it is not divisible into a number of small
parts of identical properties. The difference depends on the principle
of individuality, on the fact that every living thing is an individual,
and that its individuality is essentially structural. And so in the
vital process it is not as in inorganic chemistry; there is no
possibility of a larger proportion forming one compound, a smaller
proportion forming another. The organic chemotropism, moreover, may be
negative. In certain cases the value of A may result in a negative
quantity, that is to say, the sexual attraction may appear in the form
of sexual repulsion. It is true that in purely chemical processes the
same reaction may take place at different rates. Taking, however, the
total failure of some reaction by catalytic interference as the
equivalent of a sexual repulsion, it never happens, according to the
latest investigations at least, that the interference merely induces the
reaction after a longer or shorter interval. On the other hand, it
happens frequently that a compound which is formed at one temperature
breaks up at another temperature. Here the “direction” of the reaction
is a function of the temperature, as, in the vital process, it may be a
function of time.

In the value of the factor “_t_,” the time of reaction, a final analogy
of sexual attraction with chemical processes may be found, if we are
willing to trace the comparison without laying too much stress upon it.
Consider the formula for the rapidity of the reaction, the different
degrees of rapidity with which a sexual attraction between two
individuals is established, and reflect how the value of “A” varies with
the value of “_t_.” However, what Kant termed mathematical vanity must
not tempt us to read into our equations complicated and difficult
processes, the validity of which is uncertain. All that can be implied
is simple enough; sensual desire increases with the time during which
two individuals are in propinquity; if they were shut up together, it
would develop if there were no repulsion, or practically no repulsion
between them, in the fashion of some slow chemical process which takes
much time before its result is visible. Such a case is the confidence
with which it is said of a marriage arranged without love, “Love will
come later; time will bring it.”

It is plain that too much stress must not be laid on the analogy between
sexual affinity and purely chemical processes. None the less, I thought
it illuminating to make the comparison. It is not yet quite clear if the
sexual attraction is to be ranked with the “tropisms,” and the matter
cannot be settled without going beyond mere sexuality to discuss the
general problem of erotics. The phenomena of love require a different
treatment, and I shall return to them in the second part of this book.
None the less, there are analogies that cannot be denied when human
attractions and chemotropism are compared. I may refer as an instance to
the relation between Edward and Ottilie in Goethe’s
“Wahlverwandtschaften.”

Mention of Goethe’s romance leads naturally to a discussion of the
marriage problem, and I may here give a few of the practical inferences
which would seem to follow from the theoretical considerations of this
chapter. It is clear that a natural law, not dissimilar to other natural
laws, exists with regard to sexual attraction; this law shows that,
whilst innumerable gradations of sexuality exist, there always may be
found pairs of beings the members of which are almost perfectly adapted
to one another. So far, marriage has its justification, and, from the
standpoint of biology, free love is condemned. Monogamy, however, is a
more difficult problem, the solution of which involves other
considerations, such as periodicity, to which I shall refer later, and
the change of the sexual taste with advancing years.

A second conclusion may be derived from heterostylism, especially with
reference to the fact that “illegitimate fertilisation” almost
invariably produces less fertile offspring. This leads to the
consideration that amongst other forms of life the strongest and
healthiest offspring will result from unions in which there is the
maximum of sexual suitability. As the old saying has it, “love-children”
turn out to be the finest, strongest, and most vigorous of human beings.
Those who are interested in the improvement of mankind must therefore,
on purely hygienic grounds, oppose the ordinary mercenary marriages of
convenience.

It is more than probable that the law of sexual attraction may yield
useful results when applied to the breeding of animals. More attention
will have to be given to the secondary sexual characters of the animals
which it is proposed to mate. The artificial methods made use of to
secure the serving of mares by stallions unattractive to them do not
always fail, but are followed by indifferent results. Probably an
obvious result of the use of a substituted stallion in impregnating a
mare is the extreme nervousness of the progeny, which must be treated
with bromide and other drugs. So, also, the degeneration of modern Jews
may be traced in part to the fact that amongst them marriages for other
reasons than love are specially common.

Amongst the many fundamental principles established by the careful
observations and experiments of Darwin, and since confirmed by other
investigators, is the fact that both very closely related individuals,
and those whose specific characters are too unlike, have little sexual
attraction for each other, and that if in spite of this sexual union
occurs, the offspring usually die at an early stage or are very feeble,
or are practically infertile. So also, in heterostylous plants
“legitimate fertilisation” brings about more numerous and vigorous seeds
than come from other unions.

It may be said in general that the offspring of those parents which
showed the greatest sexual attraction succeed best.

This rule, which is certainly universal, implies the correctness of a
conclusion which might be drawn from the earlier part of this book. When
a marriage has taken place and children have been produced, these have
gained nothing from the conquest of sexual repulsion by the parents, for
such a conquest could not take place without damage to the mental and
bodily characters of the children that would come of it. It is certain,
however, that many childless marriages have been loveless marriages. The
old idea that the chance of conception is increased where there is a
mutual participation in the sexual act is closely connected with what we
have been considering as to the greater intensity of the sexual
attraction between two complementary individuals.


CHAPTER IV

HOMO-SEXUALITY AND PEDERASTY

The law of Sexual Attraction gives the long-sought-for explanation of
sexual inversion, of sexual inclination towards members of the same sex,
whether or no that be accompanied by aversion from members of the
opposite sex. Without reference to a distinction which I shall deal with
later on, I may say at once that it is exceedingly probable that, in all
cases of sexual inversion, there will be found indications of the
anatomical characters of the other sex. There is no such thing as a
genuine “psycho-sexual hermaphroditism”; the men who are sexually
attracted by men have outward marks of effeminacy, just as women of a
similar disposition to those of their own sex exhibit male characters.
That this should be so is quite intelligible if we admit the close
parallelism between body and mind, and further light is thrown upon it
by the facts explained in the second chapter of this book; the facts as
to the male or female principle not being uniformly present all over the
same body, but distributed in different amounts in different organs. In
all cases of sexual inversion, there is invariably an anatomical
approximation to the opposite sex.

Such a view is directly opposed to that of those who would maintain that
sexual inversion is an acquired character, and one that has superseded
normal sexual impulses. Schrenk-Notzing, Kraepelin, and Féré are amongst
those writers who have urged the view that sexual inversion is an
acquired habit, the result of abstinence from normal intercourse and
particularly induced by example. But what about the first offender? Did
the god Hermaphroditos teach him? It might equally be sought to prove
that the sexual inclination of a normal man for a normal woman was an
unnatural, acquired habit--a habit, as some ancient writers have
suggested, that arose from some accidental discovery of its agreeable
nature. Just as a normal man discovers for himself what a woman is, so
also, in the case of a sexual “invert” the attraction exercised on him
by a person of his own sex is a normal product of his development from
his birth. Naturally the opportunity must come in which the individual
may put in practice his desire for inverted sexuality, but the
opportunity will be taken only when his natural constitution has made
the individual ready for it. That sexual abstinence (to take the second
supposed cause of inversion) should result in anything more than
masturbation may be explained by the supposition that inversion is
acquired, but that it should be coveted and eagerly sought can only
happen when the demand for it is rooted in the constitution. In the same
fashion normal sexual attraction might be said to be an acquired
character, if it could be proved definitely that, to fall in love, a
normal man must first see a woman or a picture of a woman. Those who
assert that sexual inversion is an acquired character, are making a
merely incidental or accessory factor responsible for the whole
constitution of an organism.

There is little reason for saying that sexual inversion is acquired, and
there is just as little for regarding it as inherited from parents or
grandparents. Such an assertion, it is true, has not been made, and
seems contrary to all experience; but it has been suggested that it is
due to a neuropathic diathesis, and that general constitutional weakness
is to be found in the descendants of those who have displayed sexual
inversion. In fact sexual inversion has usually been regarded as
psycho-pathological, as a symptom of degeneration, and those who exhibit
it have been considered as physically unfit. This view, however, is
falling into disrepute, especially as Krafft-Ebing, its principal
champion, abandoned it in the later editions of his work. None the
less, it is not generally recognised that sexual inverts may be
otherwise perfectly healthy, and with regard to other social matters
quite normal. When they have been asked if they would have wished
matters to be different with them in this respect, almost invariably
they answer in the negative.

It is due to the erroneous conceptions that I have mentioned that
homo-sexuality has not been considered in relation with other facts. Let
those who regard sexual inversion as pathological, as a hideous anomaly
of mental development (the view accepted by the populace), or believe it
to be an acquired vice, the result of an execrable seduction, remember
that there exist all transitional stages reaching from the most
masculine male to the most effeminate male and so on to the sexual
invert, the false and true hermaphrodite; and then, on the other side,
successively through the sapphist to the virago and so on until the most
feminine virgin is reached. In the interpretation of this volume, sexual
inverts of both sexes are to be defined as individuals in whom the
factor α (see page 8, chap. i.) is very nearly 0.5 and so is practically
equal to α´; in other words, individuals in whom there is as much
maleness as femaleness, or indeed who, although reckoned as men, may
contain an excess of femaleness, or as women and yet be more male than
female. Because of the want of uniformity in the sexual characters of
the body, it is fairly certain that many individuals have their sex
assigned them on account of the existence of the primary male sexual
characteristic, even although there may be delayed _descensus
testiculorum_, or epi- or hypo-spadism, or, later on, absence of active
spermatozoa, or even, in the case of assignment of the female sex,
absence of the vagina, and thus male avocations (such as compulsory
military service) may come to be assigned to those in whom α is less
than 0.5 and α´ greater than 0.5. The sexual complement of such
individuals really is to be found on their own side of the sexual line,
that is to say, on the side on which they are reckoned, although in
reality they may belong to the other.

Moreover, and this not only supports my view but can be explained only
by it, there are no inverts who are completely sexually inverted. In all
of them there is from the beginning an inclination to both sexes; they
are, in fact, bisexual. It may be that later on they may actively
encourage a slight leaning towards one sex or the other, and so become
practically unisexual either in the normal or in the inverted sense, or
surrounding influence may bring about this result for them. But in such
processes the fundamental bisexuality is never obliterated and may at
any time give evidence of its suppressed presence.

Reference has often been made, and in recent years has increasingly been
made, to the relation between homo-sexuality and the presence of
bisexual rudiments in the embryonic stages of animals and plants. What
is new in my view is that according to it, homo-sexuality cannot be
regarded as an atavism or as due to arrested embryonic development, or
incomplete differentiation of sex; it cannot be regarded as an anomaly
of rare occurrence interpolating itself in customary complete separation
of the sexes. Homo-sexuality is merely the sexual condition of these
intermediate sexual forms that stretch from one ideally sexual condition
to the other sexual condition. In my view all actual organisms have both
homo-sexuality and hetero-sexuality.

That the rudiment of homo-sexuality, in however weak a form, exists in
every human being, corresponding to the greater or smaller development
of the characters of the opposite sex, is proved conclusively from the
fact that in the adolescent stage, while there is still a considerable
amount of undifferentiated sexuality, and before the internal secretions
have exerted their stimulating force, passionate attachments with a
sensual side are the rule amongst boys as well as amongst girls.

A person who retains from that age onwards a marked tendency to
“friendship” with a person of his own sex must have a strong taint of
the other sex in him. Those, however, are still more obviously
intermediate sexual forms, who, after association with both sexes, fail
to have aroused in them the normal passion for the opposite sex, but
still endeavour to maintain confidential, devoted affection with those
of their own sex.

There is no friendship between men that has not an element of sexuality
in it, however little accentuated it may be in the nature of the
friendship, and however painful the idea of the sexual element would be.
But it is enough to remember that there can be no friendship unless
there has been some attraction to draw the men together. Much of the
affection, protection, and nepotism between men is due to the presence
of unsuspected sexual compatibility.

An analogy with the sexual friendship of youth may be traced in the case
of old men, when, for instance, with the involution following old age,
the latent amphisexuality of man appears. This may be the reason why so
many men of fifty years and upwards are guilty of indecency.

Homo-sexuality has been observed amongst animals to a considerable
extent. F. Karsch has made a wide, if not complete, compilation from
other authors. Unfortunately, practically no observations were made as
to the grades of maleness or femaleness to be observed in such cases.
But we may be reasonably certain that the law holds good in the animal
world. If bulls are kept apart from cows for a considerable time,
homo-sexual acts occur amongst them; the most female are the first to
become corrupted, the others later, some perhaps never. (It is amongst
cattle that the greatest number of sexually intermediate forms have been
recorded.) This shows that the tendency was latent in them, but that at
other times the sexual demand was satisfied in normal fashion. Cattle in
captivity behave precisely as prisoners and convicts in these matters.
Animals exhibit not merely onanism (which is known to them as to human
beings), but also homo-sexuality; and this fact, together with the fact
that sexually intermediate forms are known to occur amongst them, I
regard as strong evidence for my law of sexual attraction.

Inverted sexual attraction, then, is no exception to my law of sexual
attraction, but is merely a special case of it. An individual who is
half-man, half-woman, requires as sexual complement a being similarly
equipped with a share of both sexes in order to fulfil the requirements
of the law. This explains the fact that sexual inverts usually associate
only with persons of similar character, and rarely admit to intimacy
those who are normal. The sexual attraction is mutual, and this explains
why sexual inverts so readily recognise each other. This being so, the
normal element in human society has very little idea of the extent to
which homo-sexuality is practised, and when a case becomes public
property, every normal young profligate thinks that he has a right to
condemn such “atrocities.” So recently as the year 1900 a professor of
psychiatry in a German university urged that those who practised
homo-sexuality should be castrated.

The therapeutical remedies which have been used to combat
homo-sexuality, in cases where such treatment has been attempted, are
certainly less radical than the advice of the professor; but they serve
to show only how little the nature of homo-sexuality was understood. The
method used at present is hypnotism, and this can rest only on the
theory that homo-sexuality is an acquired character. By suggesting the
idea of the female form and of normal congress, it is sought to accustom
those under treatment to normal relations. But the acknowledged results
are very few.

The failure is to be expected from our standpoint. The hypnotiser
suggests to the subject the image of a “typical” woman, ignorant of the
innate differences in the subject and unaware that such a type is
naturally repulsive to him. And as the normal typical woman is not his
complement, it is fruitless of the doctor to advise the services of any
casual Venus, however attractive, to complete the cure of a man who has
long shunned normal intercourse. If our formula were used to discover
the complement of the male invert, it would point to the most man-like
woman, the Lesbian or Sapphist type. Probably such is the only type of
woman who would attract the sexual invert or please him. If a cure for
sexual inversion must be sought because it cannot be left to its own
extinction, then this theory offers the following solution. Sexual
inverts must be brought to sexual inverts, from homo-sexualists to
Sapphists, each in their grades. Knowledge of such a solution should
lead to repeal of the ridiculous laws of England, Germany and Austria
directed against homo-sexuality, so far at least as to make the
punishments the lightest possible. In the second part of this book it
will be made clear why both the active and the passive parts in male
homo-sexuality appear disgraceful, although the desire is greater than
in the case of the normal relation of a man and woman. In the abstract
there is no ethical difference between the two.

In spite of all the present-day clamour about the existence of different
rights for different individualities, there is only one law that governs
mankind, just as there is only one logic and not several logics. It is
in opposition to that law, as well as to the theory of punishment
according to which the legal offence, not the moral offence, is
punished, that we forbid the homo-sexualist to carry on his practices
whilst we allow the hetero-sexualist full play, so long as both avoid
open scandal. Speaking from the standpoint of a purer state of humanity
and of a criminal law untainted by the pedagogic idea of punishment as a
deterrent, the only logical and rational method of treatment for sexual
inverts would be to allow them to seek and obtain what they require
where they can, that is to say, amongst other inverts.

My theory appears to me quite incontrovertible and conclusive, and to
afford a complete explanation of the entire set of phenomena. The
exposition, however, must now face a set of facts which appear quite
opposed to it, and which seem absolutely to contradict my reference of
sexual inversion to the existence of sexually intermediate types, and my
explanation of the law governing the attraction of these types for each
other. It is probably the case that my explanation is sufficient for all
female sexual inverts, but it is certainly true that there are men with
very little taint of femaleness about them who yet exert a very strong
influence on members of their own sex, a stronger influence than that of
other men who may have more femaleness--an influence which can be
exerted even on very male men, and an influence which, finally, often
appears to be much greater than the influence any woman can exert on
these men. Albert Moll is justified in saying as follows: “There exist
psycho-sexual hermaphrodites who are attracted by members of both sexes,
but who in the case of each sex appear to care only for the characters
peculiar to that sex; and, on the other hand, there are also
psycho-sexual (?) hermaphrodites who, in the case of each sex, are
attracted, not by the characteristics peculiar to that sex, but by those
which are either sexually indifferent or even antagonistic to the sex in
question.” Upon this distinction depends the difference between the two
sets of phenomena indicated in the title of this chapter--Homo-sexuality
and Pederasty. The distinction may be expressed as follows: The
homo-sexualist is that type of sexual invert who prefers very female men
or very male women, in accordance with the general law of sexual
attraction. The pederast, on the other hand, may be attracted either by
very male men or by very female women, but in the latter case only in so
far as he is not pederastic. Moreover, his inclination for the male sex
is stronger than for the female sex, and is more deeply seated in his
nature. The origin of pederasty is a problem in itself and remains
unsolved by this investigation.


CHAPTER V

THE SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND THE SCIENCE OF FORM

In view of the admitted close correspondence between matter and mind, we
may expect to find that the conception of sexually intermediate forms,
if applied to mental facts, will yield a rich crop of results. The
existence of a female mental type and a male mental type can readily be
imagined (and the quest of these types has been made by many
investigators), but such perfect types never occur as actual
individuals, simply because in the mind, as in the body, all sorts of
sexually intermediate conditions exist. My conception will also be of
great service in helping us to discriminate between the different mental
qualities, and to throw some light into what has always been a dark
corner for psychologists--the differences between different individuals.
A great step will be made if we are able to supply graded categories for
the mental diathesis of individuals; if it shall cease to be scientific
to say that the character of an individual is merely male or female; but
if we can make a measured judgment and say that such and such an one is
so many parts male and so many parts female. Which element in any
particular individual has done, said, or thought this or the other? By
making the answer to such a question possible, we shall have done much
towards the definite description of the individual, and the new method
will determine the direction of future investigation. The knowledge of
the past, which set out from conceptions which were really confused
averages, has been equally far from reaching the broadest truths as from
searching out the most intimate detailed knowledge. This failure of
past methods gives us hope that the principle of sexually intermediate
forms may serve as the foundation of a scientific study of character and
justifies the attempt to make of it an illuminating principle for the
psychology of individual differences. Its application to the science of
character, which, so far, has been in the hands of merely literary
authors, and is from the scientific point of view an untouched field, is
to be greeted more warmly as it is capable of being used quantitatively,
so that we venture to estimate the percentage of maleness and femaleness
which an individual possesses even in the mental qualities. The answer
to this question is not given even if we know the exact anatomical
position of an organism on the scale stretching from male to female,
although as a matter of fact congruity between bodily and mental
sexuality is more common than incongruity. But we must remember what was
stated in chap. ii. as to the uneven distribution of sexuality over the
body.

The proportion of the male to the female principle in the same human
being must not be assumed to be a constant quantity. An important new
conclusion must be taken into account, a conclusion which is necessary
to the right application of the principle which clears up in a striking
fashion earlier psychological work. The fact is that every human being
varies or oscillates between the maleness and the femaleness of his
constitution. In some cases these oscillations are abnormally large, in
other cases so small as to escape observation, but they are always
present, and when they are great they may even reveal themselves in the
outward aspect of the body. Like the variations in the magnetism of the
earth, these sexual oscillations are either regular or irregular. The
regular forms are sometimes minute; for instance, many men feel more
male at night. The large and regular oscillations correspond to the
great divisions of organic life to which attention is only now being
directed, and they may throw light upon many puzzling phenomena. The
irregular oscillations probably depend chiefly upon the environment, as
for instance on the sexuality of surrounding human beings. They may
help to explain some curious points in the psychology of a crowd which
have not yet received sufficient attention.

In short, bi-sexuality cannot be properly observed in a single moment,
but must be studied through successive periods of time. This
time-element in psychological differences of sexuality may be regularly
periodic or not. The swing towards one pole of sexuality may be greater
than the following swing to the other side. Although theoretically
possible, it seems to be extremely rare for the swing to the male side
to be exactly equal to the swing towards the female side.

It may be admitted in principle, before proceeding to detailed
investigation, that the conception of sexually intermediate forms makes
possible a more accurate description of individual characters in so far
as it aids in determining the proportion of male and female in each
individual, and of measuring the oscillations to each side of which any
individual is capable. A point of method must be decided at once, as
upon it depends the course the investigation will pursue. Are we to
begin by an empirical investigation of the almost innumerable
intermediate conditions in mental sexuality, or are we to set out with
the abstract sexual types, the ideal psychological man and woman, and
then investigate deductively how far such ideal pictures correspond with
concrete cases? The former method is that which the development of
psychological knowledge has pursued; ideals have been derived from
facts, sexual types constructed from observation of the manifold
complexity of nature; it would be inductive and analytic. The latter
mode, deductive and synthetic, is more in accordance with formal logic.

I have been unwilling to pursue the second method as fully as is
possible, because every one can apply for himself to concrete facts the
two well-defined extreme types; once it is understood that actual
individuals are mixtures of the types, it is simple to apply theory to
practice, and the actual pursuit of detailed cases would involve much
repetition and bring little theoretical advantage. The second method,
however, is impracticable. The collection of the long series of details
from which the inductions would be made would simply weary the reader.

In the first or biological part of my work, I give little attention to
the extreme types, but devote myself to the fullest investigation of the
intermediate stages. In the second part, I shall endeavour to make as
full a psychological analysis as possible of the characters of the male
and female types, and will touch only lightly on concrete instances.

I shall first mention, without laying too much stress on them, some of
the more obvious mental characteristics of the intermediate conditions.

Womanish men are usually extremely anxious to marry, at least (I mention
this to prevent misconception) if a sufficiently brilliant opportunity
offers itself. When it is possible, they nearly always marry whilst they
are still quite young. It is especially gratifying to them to get as
wives famous women, artists or poets, or singers and actresses.

Womanish men are physically lazier than other men in proportion to the
degree of their womanishness. There are “men” who go out walking with
the sole object of displaying their faces like the faces of women,
hoping that they will be admired, after which they return contentedly
home. The ancient “Narcissus” was a prototype of such persons. These
people are naturally fastidious about the dressing of their hair, their
apparel, shoes, and linen; they are concerned as to their personal
appearance at all times, and about the minutest details of their toilet.
They are conscious of every glance thrown on them by other men, and
because of the female element in them, they are coquettish in gait and
demeanour. Viragoes, on the other hand, frequently are careless about
their toilet, and even about the personal care of their bodies; they
take less time in dressing than many womanish men. The dandyism of men
on the one hand, and much of what is called the emancipation of women,
are due to the increase in the numbers of these epicene creatures, and
not merely to a passing fashion.

Indeed, if one inquires why anything becomes the fashion it will be
found that there is a true cause for it.

The more femaleness a woman possesses the less will she understand a
man, and the sexual characters of a man will have the greater influence
on her. This is more than a mere application of the law of sexual
attraction, as I have already stated it. So also the more manly a man is
the less will he understand women, but the more readily be influenced by
them as women. Those men who claim to understand women are themselves
very nearly women. Womanish men often know how to treat women much
better than manly men. Manly men, except in most rare cases, learn how
to deal with women only after long experience, and even then most
imperfectly.

Although I have been touching here in a most superficial way on what are
no more than tertiary sexual characters, I wish to point out an
application of my conclusions to pedagogy. I am convinced that the more
these views are understood the more certainly will they lead to an
individual treatment in education. At the present time shoemakers, who
make shoes to measure, deal more rationally with individuals than our
teachers and schoolmasters in their application of moral principles. At
present the sexually intermediate forms of individuals (especially on
the female side) are treated exactly as if they were good examples of
the ideal male or female types. There is wanted an “orthopædic”
treatment of the soul instead of the torture caused by the application
of ready-made conventional shapes. The present system stamps out much
that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and distorts much
into artificial and unnatural forms.

From time immemorial there have been only two systems of education; one
for those who come into the world designated by one set of characters as
males, and another for those who are similarly assumed to be females.
Almost at once the “boys” and the “girls” are dressed differently, learn
to play different games, go through different courses of instruction,
the girls being put to stitching and so forth. The intermediate
individuals are placed at a great disadvantage. And yet the instincts
natural to their condition reveal themselves quickly enough, often even
before puberty. There are boys who like to play with dolls, who learn to
knit and sew with their sisters, and who are pleased to be given girls’
names. There are girls who delight in the noisier sports of their
brothers, and who make chums and playmates of them. After puberty, there
is a still stronger display of the innate differences. Manlike women
wear their hair short, affect manly dress, study, drink, smoke, are fond
of mountaineering, or devote themselves passionately to sport. Womanish
men grow their hair long, wear corsets, are experts in the toilet
devices of women, and show the greatest readiness to become friendly and
intimate with them, preferring their society to that of men.

Later on, the different laws and customs to which the so-called sexes
are subjected press them as by a vice into distinctive moulds. The
proposals which should follow from my conclusions will encounter more
passive resistance, I fear, in the case of girls than in that of boys. I
must here contradict, in the most positive fashion, a dogma that is
authoritatively and widely maintained at the present time, the idea that
all women are alike, that no individuals exist amongst women. It is true
that amongst those individuals whose constitutions lie nearer the female
side than the male side, the differences and possibilities are not so
great as amongst those on the male side; the greater variability of
males is true not only for the human race but for the living world, and
is related to the principles established by Darwin. None the less, there
are plenty of differences amongst women. The psychological origin of
this common error depends chiefly on a fact that I explained in chap.
iii., the fact that every man in his life becomes intimate only with a
group of women defined by his own constitution, and so naturally he
finds them much alike. For the same reason, and in the same way, one may
often hear a woman say that all men are alike. And the narrow uniform
view about men, displayed by most of the leaders of the women’s rights
movement depends on precisely the same cause.

It is clear that the principle of the existence of innumerable
individual proportions of the male and female principles is a basis of
the study of character which must be applied in any rational scheme of
pedagogy.

The science of character must be associated with some form of psychology
that takes into account some theory of the real existence of mental
phenomena in the same fashion that anatomy is related to physiology. And
so it is necessary, quite apart from theoretical reasons, to attempt to
pursue a psychology of individual differences. This attempt will be
readily enough followed by those who believe in the parallelism between
mind and matter, for they will see in psychology no more than the
physiology of the central nervous system, and will readily admit that
the science of character must be a sister of morphology. As a matter of
fact there is great hope that in future characterology and morphology
will each greatly help the other. The principle of sexually intermediate
forms, and still more the parallelism between characterology and
morphology in the widest application, make us look forward to the time
when physiognomy will take its honourable place amongst the sciences, a
place which so many have attempted to gain for it but as yet
unsuccessfully.

The problem of physiognomy is the problem of the relation between the
static mental forces and the static bodily forces, just as the problem
of physiological psychology deals with the dynamic aspect of the same
relations. It is a great error in method, and in fact, to treat the
study of physiognomy, because of its difficulty, as impracticable. And
yet this is the attitude of contemporary scientific circles,
unconsciously perhaps rather than consciously, but occasionally becoming
obvious as for instance in the case of the attempt of von Möbius to
pursue the work of Gall with regard to the physiognomy of those with a
natural aptitude for mathematics. If it be possible, and many have shown
that it is possible, to judge correctly much of the character of an
individual merely from the examination of his external appearance,
without the aid of cross-examination or guessing, it cannot be
impossible to reduce such modes of observation to an exact method. There
is little more required than an exact study of the expression of the
characteristic emotions and the tracking (to use a rough analogy) of the
routes of the cables passing to the speech centres.

None the less it will be long before official science ceases to regard
the study of physiognomy as illegitimate. Although people will still
believe in the parallelism of mind and body, they will continue to treat
the physiognomist as as much of a charlatan as until quite recently the
hypnotist was thought to be. None the less, all mankind at least
unconsciously, and intelligent persons consciously, will continue to be
physiognomists, people will continue to judge character from the nose,
although they will not admit the existence of a science of physiognomy,
and the portraits of celebrated men and of murderers will continue to
interest every one.

I am inclined to believe that the assumption of a universally acquired
correspondence between mind and body may be a hitherto neglected
fundamental function of our mind. It is certainly the case that every
one believes in physiognomy and actually practises it. The principle of
the existence of a definite relation between mind and body must be
accepted as an illuminating axiom for psychological research, and it
will be for religion and metaphysics to work out the details of a
relationship which must be accepted as existing.

Whether or no the science of character can be linked with morphology, it
will be valuable not only to these sciences but to physiognomy if we can
penetrate a little deeper into the confusion that now reigns in order to
find if wrong methods have not been responsible for it. I hope that the
attempt I am about to make will lead some little way into the labyrinth,
and will prove to be of general application.

Some men are fond of dogs and detest cats; others are devoted to cats
and dislike dogs. Inquiring minds have delighted to ask in such cases,
Why are cats attractive to one person, dogs to another? Why?

I do not think that this is the most fruitful way of stating the
problem. I believe it to be more important to ask in what other respects
lovers of dogs and of cats differ from one another. The habit, where one
difference has been detected, of seeking for the associated differences,
will prove extremely useful not only to pure morphology and to the
science of character, but ultimately to physiognomy, the meeting-point
of the two sciences. Aristotle pointed out long ago that many
characteristics of animals do not vary independently of each other.
Later on Cuvier, in particular, but also Geoffrey St. Hilaire and Darwin
made a special study of these “correlations.” Occasionally the
association of the characters is easy to understand on obvious
utilitarian principles; where for instance the alimentary canal is
adapted to the digestion of flesh, the jaws and body must be adapted for
the capture of the prey. But association such as that between ruminant
stomachs and the presence of cloven hoofs and of horns in the male, or
of immunity to certain poisons with particular colouring of the hair, or
among domestic pigeons of short bills with small feet, of long bills
with large feet, or in cats of deafness with white fur and blue
eyes--such are extremely difficult to refer to a single purpose.

I do not in the least mean to assert that science must be content with
no more than the mere discovery of correlations. Such a position would
be little better than that of a person who was satisfied by finding out
that the placing of a penny in the slot of a particular automatic
machine always was followed by the release of a box of matches. It would
be making resignation the leading principle of metaphysics. We shall get
a good deal further by such correlations, as, for instance, that of long
hair and normal ovaries; but these are within the sphere of physiology,
not of morphology. Probably the goal of an ideal morphology could be
reached best not by deductions from an attempted synthesis of
observations on all the animals that creep on the land or swim in the
sea (in the fashion of collectors of postage stamps), but by a complete
study of a few organisms. Cuvier by a kind of guess-work used to
reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone: full knowledge would
enable us to do this in a complete, definite, qualitative and
quantitative fashion. When such a knowledge has been attained, each
single character will at once define and limit for us the possibilities
of the other characters. Such a true and logical extension of the
principle of correlation in morphology is really an application of the
theory of functions to the living world. It would not exclude the study
of causation, but limit it to its proper sphere. No doubt the “causes”
of the correlations of organisms must be sought for in the idioplasm.

The possibility of applying the principle of correlated variation to
psychology depends on differential psychology, the study of
psychological variation. I believe, moreover, that a combination of
study of the anatomical “habit,” and the mental characteristics will
lead to a statical psycho-physics, a true science of physiognomy. The
rule of investigation in all the three sciences will have to be that the
question is posed as follows; given that two organisms are known to
differ in one respect, in what other respects are they different? This
will be the golden rule of discovery, and, following it, we shall no
longer lose ourselves hopelessly in the dark maze that surrounds the
answer to the question “Why?” As soon as we are informed as to one
difference, we must diligently seek out the others, and the mere putting
of the question in this form will directly bring about many discoveries.

The conscious pursuit of this rule of investigation will be particularly
valuable in dealing with problems of the mind. Mental actions are not
co-existent in the sense of physical characters, and it has been only by
accidental and fortunate chances, when the phenomena have presented
themselves in rapid succession in an individual, that discoveries of
correlation in mental phenomena have been noticed. The correlated mental
phenomena may be very different in kind, and it is only when we know
what we are after and deliberately seek for them that we shall be able
to transcend the special difficulties of the kind of material we are
investigating, and so secure for psychology what is comparatively simple
in anatomy.


CHAPTER VI

EMANCIPATED WOMEN

As an immediate application of the attempt to establish the principle of
intermediate sexual forms by means of a differential psychology, we must
now come to the question which it is the special object of this book to
answer, theoretically and practically, I mean the woman question,
theoretically so far as it is not a matter of ethnology and national
economics, and practically in so far as it is not merely a matter of law
and domestic economy, that is to say, of social science in the widest
sense. The answer which this chapter is about to give must not be
considered as final or as exhaustive. It is rather a necessary
preliminary investigation, and does not go beyond deductions from the
principles that I have established. It will deal with the exploration of
individual cases and will not attempt to found on these any laws of
general significance. The practical indications that it will give are
not moral maxims that could or would guide the future; they are no more
than technical rules abstracted from past cases. The idea of male and
female types will not be discussed here; that is reserved for the second
part of my book. This preliminary investigation will deal with only
those charactero-logical conclusions from the principle of sexually
intermediate forms that are of significance in the woman question.

The general direction of the investigation is easy to understand from
what has already been stated. A woman’s demand for emancipation and her
qualification for it are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness
in her. The idea of emancipation, however, is many-sided, and its
indefiniteness is increased by its association with many practical
customs which have nothing to do with the theory of emancipation. By the
term emancipation of a woman I imply neither her mastery at home nor her
subjection of her husband. I have not in mind the courage which enables
her to go freely by night or by day unaccompanied in public places, or
the disregard of social rules which prohibit bachelor women from
receiving visits from men, or discussing or listening to discussions of
sexual matters. I exclude from my view the desire for economic
independence, the becoming fit for positions in technical schools,
universities and conservatoires or teachers’ institutes. And there may
be many other similar movements associated with the word emancipation
which I do not intend to deal with. Emancipation, as I mean to discuss
it, is not the wish for an outward equality with man, but what is of
real importance in the woman question, the deep-seated craving to
acquire man’s character, to attain his mental and moral freedom, to
reach his real interests and his creative power. I maintain that the
real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity for
emancipation in this sense. All those who are striving for this real
emancipation, all women who are truly famous and are of conspicuous
mental ability, to the first glance of an expert reveal some of the
anatomical characters of the male, some external bodily resemblance to a
man. Those so-called “women” who have been held up to admiration in the
past and present, by the advocates of woman’s rights, as examples of
what women can do, have almost invariably been what I have described as
sexually intermediate forms. The very first of the historical examples,
Sappho herself, has been handed down to us as an example of the sexual
invert, and from her name has been derived the accepted terms for
perverted sexual relations between women. The contents of the second and
third chapter thus at once become important with regard to the woman
question. The characterological material at our disposal with regard to
celebrated and emancipated women is too vague to serve as the
foundation of any satisfactory theory. What is wanted is some principle
which would enable us to determine at what point between male and female
such individuals were placed. My law of sexual affinity is such a
principle. Its application to the facts of homo-sexuality showed that
the woman who attracts and is attracted by other women is herself half
male. Interpreting the historical evidence at our disposal in the light
of this principle, we find that the degree of emancipation and the
proportion of maleness in the composition of a woman are practically
identical. Sappho was only the forerunner of a long line of famous women
who were either homo-sexually or bisexually inclined. Classical scholars
have defended Sappho warmly against the implication that there was
anything more than mere friendship in her relations with her own sex, as
if the accusation were necessarily degrading. In the second part of my
book, however, I shall show reasons in favour of the possibility that
homo-sexuality is a higher form than hetero-sexuality. For the present,
it is enough to say that homo-sexuality in a woman is the outcome of her
masculinity and presupposes a higher degree of development. Catherine
II. of Russia, and Queen Christina of Sweden, the highly gifted although
deaf, dumb and blind, Laura Bridgman, George Sand, and a very large
number of highly gifted women and girls concerning whom I myself have
been able to collect information, were partly bisexual, partly
homo-sexual.

I shall now turn to other indications in the case of the large number of
emancipated women regarding whom there is no evidence as to
homo-sexuality, and I shall show that my attribution of maleness is no
caprice, no egotistical wish of a man to associate all the higher
manifestations of intelligence with the male sex. Just as homo-sexual or
bisexual women reveal their maleness by their preference either for
women or for womanish men, so hetero-sexual women display maleness in
their choice of a male partner who is not preponderatingly male. The
most famous of George Sand’s many affairs were those with de Musset, the
most effeminate and sentimental poet, and with Chopin, who might be
described almost as the only female musician, so effeminate are his
compositions.[5] Vittoria Colonna is less known because of her own
poetic compositions than because of the infatuation for her shown by
Michael Angelo, whose earlier friendships had been with youths. The
authoress, Daniel Stern, was the mistress of Franz Liszt, whose life and
compositions were extremely effeminate, and who had a dubious friendship
with Wagner, the interpretation of which was made plain by his later
devotion to King Ludwig II. of Bavaria. Madame de Staal, whose work on
Germany is probably the greatest book ever produced by a woman, is
supposed to have been intimate with August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was a
homo-sexualist, and who had been tutor to her children. At certain
periods of his life, the face of the husband of Clara Schumann might
have been taken as that of a woman, and a good deal of his music,
although certainly not all, was effeminate.

  [5] Chopin’s portraits show his effeminacy plainly. Merimée describes
  George Sand as being as thin as a nail. At the first meeting of the
  two, the lady behaved like a man, and the man like a girl. He blushed
  when she looked at him and began to pay him compliments in her bass
  voice.

When there is no evidence as to the sexual relations of famous women, we
can still obtain important conclusions from the details of their
personal appearance. Such data support my general proposition.

George Eliot had a broad, massive forehead; her movements, like her
expression, were quick and decided, and lacked all womanly grace. The
face of Lavinia Fontana was intellectual and decided, very rarely
charming; whilst that of Rachel Ruysch was almost wholly masculine. The
biography of that original poetess, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, speaks
of her wiry, unwomanly frame, and of her face as being masculine, and
recalling that of Dante. The authoress and mathematician, Sonia
Kowalevska, like Sappho, had an abnormally scanty growth of hair, still
less than is the fashion amongst the poetesses and female students of
the present day. It would be a serious omission to forget Rosa Bonheur,
the very distinguished painter; and it would be difficult to point to a
single female trait in her appearance or character. The notorious Madame
Blavatsky is extremely masculine in her appearance.

I might refer to many other emancipated women at present well known to
the public, consideration of whom has provided me with much material for
the support of my proposition that the true female element, the abstract
“woman,” has nothing to do with emancipation. There is some historical
justification for the saying “the longer the hair the smaller the
brain,” but the reservations made in chap. ii. must be taken into
account.

It is only the male element in emancipated women that craves for
emancipation.

There is, then, a stronger reason than has generally been supposed for
the familiar assumption of male pseudonyms by women writers. Their
choice is a mode of giving expression to the inherent maleness they
feel; and this is still more marked in the case of those who, like
George Sand, have a preference for male attire and masculine pursuits.
The motive for choosing a man’s name springs from the feeling that it
corresponds with their own character much more than from any desire for
increased notice from the public. As a matter of fact, up to the
present, partly owing to interest in the sex question, women’s writings
have aroused more interest, _ceteris paribus_, than those of men; and,
owing to the issues involved, have always received a fuller
consideration and, if there were any justification, a greater meed of
praise than has been accorded to a man’s work of equal merit. At the
present time especially many women have attained celebrity by work
which, if it had been produced by a man, would have passed almost
unnoticed. Let us pause and examine this more closely.

If we attempt to apply a standard taken from the names of men who are of
acknowledged value in philosophy, science, literature and art, to the
long list of women who have achieved some kind of fame, there will at
once be a miserable collapse. Judged in this way, it is difficult to
grant any real degree of merit to women like Angelica Kaufmann or Madame
Lebrun, Fernan Caballero or Hroswitha von Gandersheim, Mary Somerville
or George Egerton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Sophie Germain, Anna
Maria Schurmann or Sybilla Merian. I will not speak of names (such as
that of Droste-Hülshoff) formerly so over-rated in the annals of
feminism, nor will I refer to the measure of fame claimed for or by
living women. It is enough to make the general statement that there is
not a single woman in the history of thought, not even the most manlike,
who can be truthfully compared with men of fifth or sixth-rate genius,
for instance with Rückert as a poet, Van Dyck as a painter, or
Scheirmacher as a philosopher. If we eliminate hysterical
visionaries,[6] such as the Sybils, the Priestesses of Delphi,
Bourignon, Kettenberg, Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon, Joanna Southcote, Beate
Sturmin, St. Teresa, there still remain cases like that of Marie
Bashkirtseff. So far as I can remember from her portrait, she at least
seemed to be quite womanly in face and figure, although her forehead was
rather masculine. But to any one who studies her pictures in the Salle
des Etrangers in the Luxemburg Gallery in Paris, and compares them with
those of her adored master, Bastien Lepage, it is plain that she simply
had assimilated the style of the latter, as in Goethe’s “Elective
Affinities” Ottilie acquired the handwriting of Eduard.

  [6] Hysteria is the principal cause of much of the intellectual
  activity of many of the women above mentioned. But the usual view,
  that these cases are pathological, is too limited an interpretation,
  as I shall show in the second part of this work.

There remain the interesting and not infrequent cases where the talent
of a clever family seems to reach its maximum in a female member of the
family. But it is only talent that is transmitted in this way, not
genius. Margarethe van Eyck and Sabina von Steinbach form the best
illustrations of the kind of artists who, according to Ernst Guhl, an
author with a great admiration for women-workers, “have been undoubtedly
influenced in their choice of an artistic calling by their fathers,
mothers, or brothers. In other words, they found their incentive in
their own families. There are two or three hundred of such cases on
record, and probably many hundreds more could be added without
exhausting the numbers of similar instances.” In order to give due
weight to these statistics it may be mentioned that Guhl had just been
speaking of “roughly, a thousand names of women artists known to us.”

This concludes my historical review of the emancipated women. It has
justified the assertion that real desire for emancipation and real
fitness for it are the outcome of a woman’s maleness.

The vast majority of women have never paid special attention to art or
to science, and regard such occupations merely as higher branches of
manual labour, or if they profess a certain devotion to such subjects,
it is chiefly as a mode of attracting a particular person or group of
persons of the opposite sex. Apart from these, a close investigation
shows that women really interested in intellectual matters are sexually
intermediate forms.

If it be the case that the desire for freedom and equality with man
occurs only in masculine women, the inductive conclusion follows that
the female principle is not conscious of a necessity for emancipation;
and the argument becomes stronger if we remember that it is based on an
examination of the accounts of individual cases and not on psychical
investigation of an “abstract woman.”

If we now look at the question of emancipation from the point of view of
hygiene (not morality) there is no doubt as to the harm in it. The
undesirability of emancipation lies in the excitement and agitation
involved. It induces women who have no real original capacity but
undoubted imitative powers to attempt to study or write, from various
motives, such as vanity or the desire to attract admirers. Whilst it
cannot be denied that there are a good many women with a real craving
for emancipation and for higher education, these set the fashion and are
followed by a host of others who get up a ridiculous agitation to
convince themselves of the reality of their views. And many otherwise
estimable and worthy wives use the cry to assert themselves against
their husbands, whilst daughters take it as a method of rebelling
against maternal authority. The practical outcome of the whole matter
would be as follows; it being remembered that the issues are too mutable
for the establishment of uniform rules or laws. Let there be the freest
scope given to, and the fewest hindrances put in the way of all women
with masculine dispositions who feel a psychical necessity to devote
themselves to masculine occupations and are physically fit to undertake
them. But the idea of making an emancipation party, of aiming at a
social revolution, must be abandoned. Away with the whole “woman’s
movement,” with its unnaturalness and artificiality and its fundamental
errors.

It is most important to have done with the senseless cry for “full
equality,” for even the malest woman is scarcely more than 50 per cent.
male, and it is only to that male part of her that she owes her special
capacity or whatever importance she may eventually gain. It is absurd to
make comparisons between the few really intellectual women and one’s
average experience of men, and to deduce, as has been done, even the
superiority of the female sex. As Darwin pointed out, the proper
comparison is between the most highly developed individuals of two
stocks. “If two lists,” Darwin wrote in the “Descent of Man,” “were made
of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture,
music--comprising composition and performance, history, science, and
philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists
would not bear comparison.” Moreover, if these lists were carefully
examined it would be seen that the women’s list would prove the
soundness of my theory of the maleness of their genius, and the
comparison would be still less pleasing to the champions of woman’s
rights.

It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a public feeling
in favour of the full and unchecked mental development of women. Such an
argument overlooks the fact that “emancipation,” the “woman question,”
“women’s rights movements,” are no new things in history, but have
always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times
in history. It also largely exaggerates the difficulties men place in
the way of the mental development of women, especially at the present
time.[7] Furthermore it neglects the fact that at the present time it is
not the true woman who clamours for emancipation, but only the masculine
type of woman, who misconstrues her own character and the motives that
actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name of woman.

  [7] There have been many celebrities amongst men who received
  practically no education--for instance, Robert Burns and Wolfram von
  Eschenbach; but there are no similar cases amongst women to compare
  with them.

As has been the case with every other movement in history, so also it
has been with the contemporary woman’s movement. Its originators were
convinced that it was being put forward for the first time, and that
such a thing had never been thought of before. They maintained that
women had hitherto been held in bondage and enveloped in darkness by
man, and that it was high time for her to assert herself and claim her
natural rights.

But the prototype of this movement, as of other movements, occurred in
the earliest times. Ancient history and mediæval times alike give us
instances of women who, in social relations and intellectual matters,
fought for such emancipation, and of male and female apologists of the
female sex. It is totally erroneous to suggest that hitherto women have
had no opportunity for the undisturbed development of their mental
powers.

Jacob Burckhardt, speaking of the Renaissance, says: “The greatest
possible praise which could be given to the Italian women-celebrities of
the time was to say that they were like men in brains and disposition!”
The virile deeds of women recorded in the epics, especially those of
Boiardo and Ariosto, show the ideal of the time. To call a woman a
“virago” nowadays would be a doubtful compliment, but it originally
meant an honour.

Women were first allowed on the stage in the sixteenth century, and
actresses date from that time. “At that period it was admitted that
women were just as capable as men of embodying the highest possible
artistic ideals.” It was the period when panegyrics on the female sex
were rife; Sir Thomas More claimed for it full equality with the male
sex, and Agrippa von Nettesheim goes so far as to represent women as
superior to men! And yet this was all lost for the fair sex, and the
whole question sank into the oblivion from which the nineteenth century
recalled it.

Is it not very remarkable that the agitation for the emancipation of
women seems to repeat itself at certain intervals in the world’s
history, and lasts for a definite period?

It has been noticed that in the tenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, and now
again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the agitation for the
emancipation of women has been more marked, and the woman’s movement
more vigorous than in the intervening periods. It would be premature to
found a hypothesis on the data at our disposal, but the possibility of a
vastly important periodicity must be borne in mind, of regularly
recurring periods in which it may be that there is an excess of
production of hermaphrodite and sexually intermediate forms. Such a
state of affairs is not unknown in the animal kingdom.

According to my interpretation, such a period would be one of minimum
“gonochorism,” cleavage of the sexes; and it would be marked, on the one
hand, by an increased production of male women, and on the other, by a
similar increase in female men. There is strong evidence in favour of
such a periodicity; if it occurs it may be associated with the
“secessionist taste,” which idealised tall, lanky women with flat chests
and narrow hips. The enormous recent increase in a kind of dandified
homo-sexuality may be due to the increasing effeminacy of the age, and
the peculiarities of the Pre-Raphaelite movement may have a similar
explanation.

The existence of such periods in organic life, comparable with stages in
individual life, but extending over several generations, would, if
proved, throw much light on many obscure points in human history,
concerning which the so-called “historical solutions,” and especially
the economic-materialistic views now in vogue have proved so futile. The
history of the world from the biological standpoint has still to be
written; it lies in the future. Here I can do little more than indicate
the direction which future work should take.

Were it proved that at certain periods fewer hermaphrodite beings were
produced, and at certain other periods more, it would appear that the
rising and falling, the periodic occurrence and disappearance of the
woman movement in an unfailing rhythm of ebb and flow, was one of the
expressions of the preponderance of masculine and feminine women with
the concomitant greater or lesser desire for emancipation.

Obviously I do not take into account in relation to the woman question
the large number of womanly women, the wives of the prolific artisan
class whom economic pressure forces to factory or field labour. The
connection between industrial progress and the woman question is much
less close than is usually realised, especially by the Social Democratic
Group. The relation between the mental energy required for intellectual
and for industrial pursuits is even less. France, for instance, although
it can boast three of the most famous women, has never had a successful
woman’s movement, and yet in no other European country are there so many
really businesslike, capable women. The struggle for the material
necessities of life has nothing to do with the struggle for intellectual
development, and a sharp distinction must be made between the two.

The prospects of the movement for intellectual advance on the part of
women are not very promising; but still less promising is another view,
sometimes discussed in the same connection, the view that the human race
is moving towards a complete sexual differentiation, a definite sexual
dimorphism.

The latter view seems to me fundamentally untenable, because in the
higher groups of the animal kingdom there is no evidence for the
increase of sexual dimorphism. Worms and rotifers, many birds and the
mandrills amongst the apes, have more advanced sexual dimorphism than
man. On the view that such an increased sexual dimorphism were to be
expected, the necessity for emancipation would gradually disappear as
mankind became separated into the completely male and the completely
female. On the other hand, the view that there will be periodical
resurrections of the woman’s movement would reduce the whole affair to
ridiculous impotence, making it only an ephemeral phase in the history
of mankind.

A complete obliteration will be the fate of any emancipation movement
which attempts to place the whole sex in a new relation to society, and
to see in man its perpetual oppressor. A corps of Amazons might be
formed, but as time went on the material for the corps would cease to
occur. The history of the woman movement during the Renaissance and its
complete disappearance contains a lesson for the advocates of women’s
rights. Real intellectual freedom cannot be attained by an agitated
mass; it must be fought for by the individual. Who is the enemy? What
are the retarding influences?

The greatest, the one enemy of the emancipation of women is woman
herself. It is left to the second part of my work to prove this.




  SECOND OR PRINCIPAL PART

  THE SEXUAL TYPES


CHAPTER I

MAN AND WOMAN

  “All that a man does is physiognomical of him.”

  CARLYLE.

A free field for the investigation of the actual contrasts between the
sexes is gained when we recognise that male and female, man and woman,
must be considered only as types, and that the existing individuals,
upon whose qualities there has been so much controversy, are mixtures of
the types in different proportions. Sexually intermediate forms, which
are the only actually existing individuals, were dealt with in a more or
less schematic fashion in the first part of this book. Consideration of
the general biological application of my theory was entered upon there;
but now I have to make mankind the special subject of my investigation,
and to show the defects of the results gained by the method of
introspective analysis, as these results must be qualified by the
universal existence of sexually intermediate conditions. In plants and
animals the presence of hermaphroditism is an undisputed fact; but in
them it appears more to be the juxtaposition of the male and female
genital glands in the same individual than an actual fusion of the two
sexes, more the co-existence of the two extremes than a quite neutral
condition. In the case of human beings, however, it appears to be
psychologically true that an individual, at least at one and the same
moment, is always either man or woman. This is in harmony with the fact
that each individual, whether superficially regarded as male or female,
at once can recognise his sexual complement in another individual
“woman” or “man.”[8] This uni-sexuality is demonstrated by the fact, the
theoretical value of which can hardly be over-estimated, that, in the
relations of two homo-sexual men one always plays the physical and
psychical roll of the man, and in cases of prolonged intercourse retains
his male first-name, or takes one, whilst the other, who plays the part
of the woman, either assumes a woman’s name or calls himself by it,
or--and this is sufficiently characteristic--receives it from the
former.

  [8] I once heard a bi-sexual man exclaim, when he saw a bi-sexual
  actress with a slight tendency to a beard, a deep sonorous voice, and
  very little hair on her head, “There is a fine woman.” “Woman” means
  something different for every man or for every poet, and yet it is
  always the same, the sexual complement of their own constitution.

In the same way, in the sexual relations of two women, one always plays
the male and the other the female part, a fact of deepest significance.
Here we encounter, in a most unexpected fashion, the fundamental
relationship between the male and female elements. In spite of all
sexually intermediate conditions, human beings are always one of two
things, either male or female. There is a deep truth underlying the old
empirical sexual duality, and this must not be neglected, even although
in concrete cases there is not a necessary harmony in the anatomical and
morphological conditions. To realise this is to make a great step
forward and to advance towards most important results. In this way we
reach a conception of a real “being.” The task of the rest of this book
is to set forth the significance of this “existence.” As, however, this
existence is bound up with the most difficult side of characterology, it
will be well, before setting out on our adventurous task, to attempt
some preliminary orientation.

The obstacles in the way of characterological investigation are very
great, if only on account of the complexity of the material. Often and
often it happens that when the path through the jungle appears to have
been cleared, it is lost again in impenetrable thickets, and it seems
impossible to recover it. But the greatest difficulty is that when the
systematic method of setting out the complex material has been proceeded
with and seems about to lead to good results, then at once objections of
the most serious kind arise and almost forbid the attempt to make types.
With regard to the differences between the sexes, for instance, the most
useful theory that has been put forward is the existence of a kind of
polarity, two extremes separated by a multitude of intermediate
conditions. The characterological differences appear to follow this rule
in a fashion not dissimilar to the suggestion of the Pythagorean,
Alcmæon of Kroton, and recalling the recent chemical resurrection of
Schelling’s “Natur-philosophie.”

But even if we are able to determine the exact point occupied by an
individual on the line between two extremes, and multiply this
determination by discovering it for a great many characters, would this
complex system of co-ordinate lines really give us a conception of the
individual? Would it not be a relapse to the dogmatic scepticism of Mach
and Hume, were we to expect that an analysis could be a full description
of the human individual? And in a fashion it would be a sort of
Weismannistic doctrine of particulate determinants, a mosaic psychology.

This brings us in a new way directly against the old, over-ripe problem.
Is there in a man a single and simple existence, and, if so, in what
relation does that stand to the complex psychical phenomena? Has man,
indeed, a soul? It is easy to understand why there has never been a
science of character. The object of such a science, the character
itself, is problematical. The problem of all metaphysics and theories of
knowledge, the fundamental problem of psychology, is also the problem of
characterology. At the least, characterology will have to take into
account the theory of knowledge itself with regard to its postulates,
claims, and objects, and will have to attempt to obtain information as
to all the differences in the nature of men.

This unlimited science of character will be something more than the
“psychology of individual differences,” the renewed insistence upon
which as a goal of science we owe to L. William Stern; it will be more
than a sort of polity of the motor and sensory reactions of the
individual, and in so far will not sink so low as the usual “results” of
the modern experimental psychologists, which, indeed, are little more
than statistics of physical experiments. It will hope to retain some
kind of contact with the actualities of the soul which the modern school
of psychology seems to have forgotten, and will not have to fear that it
will have to offer to ardent students of psychology no more than
profound studies of words of one syllable, or of the results on the mind
of small doses of caffein. It is a lamentable testimony to the
insufficiency of modern psychology that distinguished men of science,
who have not been content with the study of perception and association,
have yet had to hand over to poetry the explanation of such fundamental
facts as heroism and self-sacrifice.

No science will become shallow so quickly as psychology if it deserts
philosophy. Its separation from philosophy is the true cause of its
impotency. Psychology will have to discover that the doctrine of
sensations is practically useless to it. The empirical psychologists of
to-day, in their search for the development of character, begin with
investigation of touch and the common sensations. But the analysis of
sensations is simply a part of the physiology of sense, and any attempt
to bring it into relation with the real problems of psychology must
fail.

It is a misfortune of the scientific psychology of the day that it has
been influenced so deeply by two physicists, Fechner and von Helmholtz,
with the result that it has failed to recognise that only the external
and not the internal world can be reconstructed from sensations. The two
most intelligent of the empirical psychologists of recent times, William
James and R. Avenarius, have felt almost instinctively that psychology
cannot really rest upon sensations of the skin and muscles, although,
indeed, all modern psychology does depend upon study of sensations.
Dilthey did not lay enough stress on his argument that existing
psychology does nothing towards problems that are eminently
psychological, such as murder, friendship, loneliness, and so forth. If
anything is to be gained in the future there must be a demand for a
really psychological psychology, and its first battle-cry must be: “Away
with the study of sensations.”

In attempting the broad and deep characterology that I have indicated, I
must set out with a conception of character itself as a unit existence.
As in the fifth chapter of Part I., I tried to show that behind the
fleeting physiological changes there is a permanent morphological form,
so in characterology we must seek the permanent, existing something
through the fleeting changes.

The character, however, is not something seated behind the thoughts and
feelings of the individual, but something revealing itself in every
thought and feeling. “All that a man does is physiognomical of him.”
Just as every cell bears within it the characters of the whole
individual, so every psychical manifestation of a man involves not
merely a few little characteristic traits, but his whole being, of which
at one moment one quality, at another moment another quality, comes into
prominence.

Just as no sensation is ever isolated, but is set in a complete field of
sensation, the world of the Ego, of which now one part and now the
other, stands out more plainly, so the whole man is manifest in every
moment of the psychical life, although, now one side, now the other, is
more visible. This existence, manifest in every moment of the psychical
life, is the object of characterology. By accepting this, there will be
completed for the first time a real psychology, existing psychology, in
manifest contradiction of the meaning of the word, having concerned
itself almost entirely with the motley world, the changing field of
sensations, and overlooked the ruling force of the Ego. The new
psychology would be a doctrine of the whole, and would become fresh and
fertile inasmuch as it would combine the complexity of the subject and
of the object, two spheres which can be separated only in abstraction.
Many disputed points of psychology (perhaps the most important) would
be settled by an application of such characterology, as that would
explain why so many different views have been held on the same subject.
The same psychical process appears from time to time in different
aspects, merely because it takes tone and colouring from the individual
character. And so it well may be that the doctrine of differential
psychology may receive its completion in the domain of general
psychology.

The confusion of characterology with the doctrine of the soul has been a
great misfortune, but because this has occurred in actual history, is no
reason why it should continue. The absolute sceptic differs only in a
word from the absolute dogmatist. The man who dogmatically accepts the
position of absolute phenomenalism, believing it to relieve him of all
the burden of proof that the mere entering on another standpoint would
itself entail, will be ready to dismiss without proof the existence
which characterology posits, and which has nothing to do with a
metaphysical “essence.”

Characterology has to defend itself against two great enemies. The one
assumes that character is something ultimate, and as little the
subject-matter of science as is the art of a painter. The other looks on
the sensations as the only realities, on sensation as the ground-work of
the world of the Ego, and denies the existence of character. What is
left for characterology, the science of character? On the one hand,
there are those who cry, “De individuo nulla scientia,” and “Individuum
est ineffabile”; on the other hand, there are those sworn to science,
who maintain that science has nothing to do with character.

In such a cross-fire, characterology has to take its place, and it may
well be feared that it may share the fate of its sisters and remain a
trivial subject like physiognomy or a diviner’s art like graphology.


CHAPTER II

MALE AND FEMALE SEXUALITY

  “Woman does not betray her secret.”

  KANT.

  “From a woman you can learn nothing of women.”

  NIETZSCHE.

By psychology, as a whole, we generally understand the psychology of the
psychologists, and these are exclusively men! Never since human history
began have we heard of a female psychology! None the less the psychology
of woman constitutes a chapter as important with regard to general
psychology as that of the child. And inasmuch as the psychology of man
has always been written with unconscious but definite reference to man,
general psychology has become simply the psychology of men, and the
problem of the psychology of the sexes will be raised as soon as the
existence of a separate psychology of women has been realised. Kant said
that in anthropology the peculiarities of the female were more a study
for the philosopher than those of the male, and it may be that the
psychology of the sexes will disappear in a psychology of the female.

None the less the psychology of women will have to be written by men. It
is easy to suggest that such an attempt is foredoomed to failure,
inasmuch as the conclusions must be drawn from an alien sex and cannot
be verified by introspection. Granted the possibility that woman could
describe herself with sufficient exactness, it by no means follows that
she would be interested in the sides of her character that would
interest us. Moreover, even if she could and would explore herself
fully, it is doubtful if she could bring herself to talk about herself.
I shall show that these three improbabilities spring from the same
source in the nature of woman.

This investigation, therefore, lays itself open to the charge that no
one who is not female can be in a position to make accurate statements
about women. In the meantime the objection must stand, although, later,
I shall have more to say of it. I will say only this much--up to now,
and is this only a consequence of man’s suppression?--we have no account
from a pregnant woman of her sensations and feelings, neither in poetry
nor in memoirs, nor even in a gynæcological treatise. This cannot be on
account of excessive modesty, for, as Schopenhauer rightly pointed out,
there is nothing so far removed from a pregnant woman as shame as to her
condition. Besides, there would still remain to them the possibility of,
after the birth, confessing from memory the psychical life during the
time; if a sense of shame had prevented them from such communication
during the time, it would be gone afterwards, and the varied interests
of such a disclosure ought to have induced some one to break silence.
But this has not been done. Just as we have always been indebted to men
for really trustworthy expositions of the psychical side of women, so
also it is to men that we owe descriptions of the sensations of pregnant
women. What is the meaning of this?

Although in recent times we have had revelations of the psychical life
of half-women and three-quarter women, it is practically only about the
male side of them that they have written. We have really only one clue;
we have to rely upon the female element in men. The principle of
sexually intermediate forms is the authority for what we know about
women through men. I shall define and complete the application of this
principle later on. In its indefinite form, the principle would seem to
imply that the most womanish man would be best able to describe woman,
and that the description might be completed by the real woman. This,
however, is extremely doubtful. I must point out that a man can have a
considerable proportion of femaleness in him without necessarily, to the
same extent, being able to portray intermediate forms. It is the more
remarkable that the male can give a faithful account of the nature of
the female; since, indeed, it must be admitted from the extreme maleness
of successful portrayers of women that we cannot dispute the existence
of this capacity in the abstract male; this power of the male over the
female is a most remarkable problem, and we shall have to consider it
later. For the present we must take it as a fact, and proceed to inquire
in what lies the actual psychological difference between male and
female.

It has been sought to attribute the fundamental difference of the sexes
to the existence of a stronger sexual impulse in man, and to derive
everything else from that. Apart from the question as to whether the
phrase “sexual instinct” denotes a simple and real thing, it is to be
doubted if there is proof of such a difference. It is not more probable
than the ancient theories as to the influence of the “unsatisfied womb”
in the female, or of the “semen retentum” in men, and we have to be on
guard against the current tendency to refer nearly everything to
sublimated sexual instinct. No systematic theory could be founded on a
generalisation so vague. It is most improbable that the greater or
lesser strength of the sexual impulse determines other qualities.

As a matter of fact, the statements that men have stronger sexual
impulses than women, or that women have them stronger than men, are
false. The strength of the sexual impulse in a man does not depend upon
the proportion of masculinity in his composition, and in the same way
the degree of femininity of a woman does not determine her sexual
impulse. These differences in mankind still await classification.

Contrary to the general opinion, there is no difference in the total
sexual impulses of the sexes. However, if we examine the matter in
respect to the two component forces into which Albert Moll analysed the
impulse, we shall find that a difference does exist. These forces may be
termed the “liberating” and the “uniting” impulses. The first appears in
the form of the discomfort caused by the accumulation of ripe sexual
cells; the second is the desire of the ripe individual for sexual
completion. Both impulses are possessed by the male; in the female only
the latter is present. The anatomy and the physiological processes of
the sexes bear out the distinction.

In this connection it may be noted that only the most male youths are
addicted to masturbation, and although it is often disputed, I believe
that similar vices occur only among the maler of women, and are absent
from the female nature.

I must now discuss the “uniting” impulse of woman, for that plays the
chief, if not the sole part in her sexuality. But it must not be
supposed that this is greater in one sex than the other. Any such idea
comes from a confusion between the desire for a thing and the stimulus
towards the active part in securing what is desired. Throughout the
animal and plant kingdoms, the male reproductive cells are the motile,
active agents, which move through space to seek out the passive female
cells, and this physiological difference is sometimes confused with the
actual wish for, or stimulus to, sexual union. And to add to the
confusion, it happens, in the animal kingdom particularly, that the
male, in addition to the directly sexual stimulus, has the instinct to
pursue and bodily capture the female, whilst the latter has only the
passive part to be taken possession of. These differences of habit must
not be mistaken for real differences of desire.

It can be shown, moreover, that woman is sexually much more excitable
(not more sensitive) physiologically than man.

The condition of sexual excitement is the supreme moment of a woman’s
life. The woman is devoted wholly to sexual matters, that is to say, to
the spheres of begetting and of reproduction. Her relations to her
husband and children complete her life, whereas the male is something
more than sexual. In this respect, rather than in the relative strength
of the sexual impulses, there is a real difference between the sexes. It
is important to distinguish between the intensity with which sexual
matters are pursued and the proportion of the total activities of life
that are devoted to them and to their accessory cares. The greater
absorption of the human female by the sphere of sexual activities is the
most significant difference between the sexes.

The female, moreover, is completely occupied and content with sexual
matters, whilst the male is interested in much else, in war and sport,
in social affairs and feasting, in philosophy and science, in business
and politics, in religion and art. I do not mean to imply that this
difference has always existed, as I do not think that important. As in
the case of the Jewish question, it may be said that the Jews have their
present character because it has been forced upon them, and that at one
time they were different. It is now impossible to prove this, and we may
leave it to those who believe in the modification by the environment to
accept it. The historical evidence is equivocal on the point. In the
question of women, we have to take people as they exist to-day. If,
however, we happen to come on attributes that could not possibly have
been grafted on them from without, we may believe that such have always
been with them. Of contemporary women at least one thing is certain.
Apart from an exception to be noted in chap. xii., it is certain that
when the female occupies herself with matters outside the interests of
sex, it is for the man that she loves or by whom she wishes to be loved.
She takes no real interest in the things for themselves. It may happen
that a real female learns Latin; if so, it is for some such purpose as
to help her son who is at school. Desire for a subject and ability for
it, interest in it, and the facility for acquiring it, are usually
proportional. He who has slight muscles has no desire to wield an axe;
those without the faculty for mathematics do not desire to study that
subject. Talent seems to be rare and feeble in the real female (although
possibly it is merely that the dominant sexuality prevents its
development), with the result that woman has no power of forming the
combinations which, although they do not actually make the
individuality, certainly shape it.

Corresponding to true women, there are extremely female men who are to
be found always in the apartments of the women, and who are interested
in nothing but love and sexual matters. Such men, however, are not the
Don Juans.

The female principle is, then, nothing more than sexuality; the male
principle is sexual and something more. This difference is notable in
the different way in which men and women enter the period of puberty. In
the case of the male the onset of puberty is a crisis; he feels that
something new and strange has come into his being, that something has
been added to his powers and feelings independently of his will. The
physiological stimulus to sexual activity appears to come from outside
his being, to be independent of his will, and many men remember the
disturbing event throughout their after lives. The woman, on the other
hand, not only is not disturbed by the onset of puberty, but feels that
her importance has been increased by it. The male, as a youth, has no
longing for the onset of sexual maturity; the female, from the time when
she is still quite a young girl, looks forward to that time as one from
which everything is to be expected. Man’s arrival at maturity is
frequently accompanied by feelings of repulsion and disgust; the young
female watches the development of her body at the approach of puberty
with excitement and impatient delight. It seems as if the onset of
puberty were a side path in the normal development of man, whereas in
the case of woman it is the direct conclusion. There are few boys
approaching puberty to whom the idea that they would marry (in the
general sense, not a particular girl) would not appear ridiculous,
whilst the smallest girl is almost invariably excited and interested in
the question of her future marriage. For such reasons a woman assigns
positive value only to her period of maturity in her own case and in
that of other women; in childhood, as in old age, she has no real
relation to the world. The thought of her childhood is for her, later
on, only the remembrance of her stupidity; she faces the approach of
old age with dislike and abhorrence. The only real memories of her
childhood are connected with sex, and these fade away in the intensely
greater significance of her maturity. The passage of a woman from
virginity is the great dividing point of her life, whilst the
corresponding event in the case of a male has very little relation to
the course of his life.

Woman is only sexual, man is partly sexual, and this difference reveals
itself in various ways. The parts of the male body by stimulation of
which sexuality is excited are limited in area, and are strongly
localised, whilst in the case of the woman, they are diffused over her
whole body, so that stimulation may take place almost from any part.
When in the second chapter of Part I., I explained that sexuality is
distributed over the whole body in both sexes, I did not mean that,
therefore, the sense organs, through which the definite impulses are
stimulated, were equally distributed. There are, certainly, areas of
greater excitability, even in the case of the woman, but there is not,
as in the man, a sharp division between the sexual areas and the body
generally.

The morphological isolation of the sexual area from the rest of the body
in the case of man, may be taken as symbolical of the relation of sex to
his whole nature. Just as there is a contrast between the sexual and the
sexless parts of a man’s body, so there is a time-change in his
sexuality. The female is always sexual, the male is sexual only
intermittently. The sexual instinct is always active in woman (as to the
apparent exceptions to this sexuality of women, I shall have to speak
later on), whilst in man it is at rest from time to time. And thus it
happens that the sexual impulse of the male is eruptive in character and
so appears stronger. The real difference between the sexes is that in
the male the desire is periodical, in the female continuous.

This exclusive and persisting sexuality of the female has important
physical and psychical consequences. As the sexuality of the male is an
adjunct to his life, it is possible for him to keep it in the
physiological background, and out of his consciousness. And so a man
can lay aside his sexuality and not have to reckon with it. A woman has
not her sexuality limited to periods of time, nor to localised organs.
And so it happens that a man can know about his sexuality, whilst a
woman is unconscious of it and can in all good faith deny it, because
she is nothing but sexuality, because she is sexuality itself.

It is impossible for women, because they are only sexual, to recognise
their sexuality, because recognition of anything requires duality. With
man it is not only that he is not merely sexual, but anatomically and
physiologically he can “detach” himself from it. That is why he has the
power to enter into whatever sexual relations he desires; if he likes he
can limit or increase such relations; he can refuse or assent to them.
He can play the part of a Don Juan or a monk. He can assume which he
will. To put it bluntly, man possesses sexual organs; her sexual organs
possess woman.

We may, therefore, deduce from the previous arguments that man has the
power of consciousness of his sexuality and so can act against it,
whilst the woman appears to be without this power. This implies,
moreover, that there is greater differentiation in man, as in him the
sexual and the unsexual parts of his nature are sharply separated. The
possibility or impossibility of being aware of a particular definite
object is, however, hardly a part of the customary meaning of the word
consciousness, which is generally used as implying that if a being is
conscious he can be conscious of any object. This brings me to consider
the nature of the female consciousness, and I must take a long _détour_
to consider it.


CHAPTER III

MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS

Before proceeding to consider the main difference between the psychical
life of the sexes, so far as the latter takes subjective and objective
things as its contents, a few psychological soundings must be taken, and
conceptions formulated. As the views and principles of prevailing
systems of psychology have been formed without consideration of the
subject of this book, it is not surprising that they contain little that
I am able to use. At present there is no psychology but many
psychologists, and it would really be a matter of caprice on my part to
choose any particular school and attempt to apply its principles to my
subject. I shall rather try to lay down a few useful principles on my
own account.

The endeavours to reach a comprehensive and unifying conception of the
whole psychical process by referring it to a single principle have been
particularly evident in the relations between perceptions and sensations
suggested by different psychologists. Herbart, for instance, derived the
sensations from elementary ideas, whilst Horwicz supposed them to come
from perceptions. Most modern psychologists have insisted that such
monistic attempts must be fruitless. None the less there was some truth
in the view.

To discover this truth, however, it is necessary to make a distinction
that has been overlooked by modern workers. We must distinguish between
the perceiving of a perception, feeling of a sensation, thinking a
thought from the later repetitions of the process in which recognition
plays a part. In many cases this distinction is of fundamental
importance.

Every simple, clear, plastic perception and every distinct idea, before
it could be put into words, passes through a stage (which may indeed be
very short) of indistinctness. So also in the case of association; for a
longer or shorter time before the elements about to be grouped have
actually come together, there is a sort of vague, generalised
expectation or presentiment of association. Leibnitz, in particular, has
worked at kindred processes, and I believe them to underlie the attempts
of Herbart and Horwicz.

The common acceptance of pleasure and pain as the fundamental
sensations, even with Wundt’s addition of the sensations of tension and
relaxation, of rest and stimulation, makes the division of psychical
phenomena into sensations and perceptions too narrow for due treatment
of the vague preliminary stages to which I have referred. I shall go
back therefore to the widest classification of psychical phenomena that
I know of, that of Avenarius into “elements” and “characters.” The word
“character” in this connection, of course, has nothing to do with the
subject of characterology.

Avenarius added to the difficulty of applying his theories by his use of
a practically new terminology (which is certainly most striking and
indispensable for some of the new views he expounded). But what stands
most in the way of accepting some of his conclusions is his desire to
derive his psychology from the physiology of the brain, a physiology
which he evolved himself out of his inner consciousness with only a
slight general acquaintance with actual biological facts. The
psychological, or second part of his “Critique of Pure Experience,” was
really the source from which he derived the first or physiological part,
with the result that the latter appears to its readers as an account of
some discovery in Atlantis. Because of these difficulties I shall give
here a short account of the system of Avenarius, as I find it useful for
my thesis.

An “Element” in the sense of Avenarius represents what the usual
psychology terms a perception, or the content of a perception, what
Schopenhauer called a presentation, what in England is called an
“impression” or “idea,” the “thing,” “fact,” or “object” of ordinary
language; and the word is used independently of the presence or absence
of a special sense-organ stimulation--a most important and novel
addition. In the sense of Avenarius, and for our purpose, it is a matter
of indifference to the terminology how far what is called “analysis”
takes place, the whole tree may be taken as the “element,” or each
single leaf, or each hair, or (where most people would stop), the
colours, sizes, weights, temperatures, resistances, and so forth. Still,
the analysis may go yet further, and the colour of the leaf may be taken
as merely the resultant of its quality, intensity, luminosity, and so
forth, these being the elements. Or we may go still further and take
modern ultimate conceptions reaching units incapable of sub-division.

In the sense of Avenarius, then, elements are such ideas as “green,”
“blue,” “cold,” “warm,” “soft,” “hard,” “sweet,” “bitter,” and their
“character” is the particular kind of quality with which they appear,
not merely their pleasantness or unpleasantness, but also such modes of
presentation as “surprising,” “expected,” “novel,” “indifferent,”
“recognised,” “known,” “actual,” “doubtful,” categories which Avenarius
first recognised as being psychological. For instance, what I guess,
believe, or know is an “element”; the fact that I guess it, not believe
it or know it, is the “character” in which it presents itself
psychologically (not logically).

Now there is a stage in mental activity in which this sub-division of
psychical phenomena cannot be made, which is too early for it. All
“elements” at their first appearance are merged with the floating
background, the whole being vaguely tinged by “character.” To follow my
meaning, think of what takes place, when for the first time at a
distance one sees something in the landscape, such as a shrub or a heap
of wood, at the moment when one does not yet know what “it” is.

At this moment “element” and “character” are absolutely
indistinguishable (they are always inseparable as Petzoldt ingeniously
pointed out), so improving the original statement of Avenarius.

In a dense crowd I perceive, for instance, a face which attracts me
across the swaying mass by its expression. I have no idea what the face
is like, and should be quite unable to describe it or give an idea of
it; but it has appealed to me in the most disturbing manner, and I find
myself asking with keen curiosity, “Where have I seen that face before?”

A man may see the head of a woman for a moment, and this may make a very
strong impression on him, and yet he may be unable to say exactly what
he has seen, or, for instance, be able to remember the colour of her
hair. The retina must be exposed to the object sufficiently long, if
only a fraction of a second, for a photographic impression to be made.

If one looks at any object from a considerable distance one has at first
only the vaguest impression of its outlines; and as one comes nearer and
sees the details more clearly, lively sensations, at first lost in the
general mass, are received. Think, for instance, of the first general
impression of, say, the sphenoid bone disarticulated from a skull, or of
many pictures seen a little too closely or a little too far away. I
myself have a remembrance of having had strong impressions from sonatas
of Beethoven before I knew anything of the musical notes. Avenarius and
Petzoldt have overlooked the fact that the coming into consciousness of
the elements is accompanied by a kind of secretion of characterisation.

Some of the simple experiments of physiological psychology illustrate
the point to which I have been referring. If one stays in a dark room
until the eye has adapted itself to the absence of light, and then for a
second subjects oneself to a ray of coloured light, a sensation of
illumination will be received, although it is impossible to recognise
the quality of the illumination; something has been perceived, but what
the something is cannot be apprehended unless the stimulation lasts a
definite time.

In the same way every scientific discovery, every technical invention,
every artistic creation passes through a preliminary phase of
indistinctness. The process is similar to the series of impressions that
would be got as a statue was gradually unwrapped from a series of
swathings. The same kind of sequence occurs, although, perhaps, in a
very brief space of time, when one is trying to recall a piece of music.
Every thought is preceded by a kind of half-thought, a condition in
which vague geometrical figures, shifting masks, a swaying and
indistinct background hover in the mind. The beginning and the end of
the whole process, which I may term “clarification,” are what take place
when a short-sighted person proceeds to look through properly adapted
lenses.

Just as this process occurs in the life of the individual (and he,
indeed, may die long before it is complete), so it occurs in history.
Definite scientific conceptions are preceded by anticipations. The
process of clarification is spread over many generations. There were
ancient and modern vague anticipations of the theory of Darwin and
Lamarck, anticipations which we are now apt to overvalue. Mayer and
Helmholtz had their predecessors, and Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci,
perhaps two of the most many-sided intellects known to us, anticipated
in a vague way many of the conclusions of modern science. The whole
history of thought is a continuous “clarification,” a more and more
accurate description or realisation of details. The enormous number of
stages between light and darkness, the minute gradations of detail that
follow each other in the development of thought can be realised best if
one follows historically some complicated modern piece of knowledge,
such as, for instance, the theory of elliptical functions.

The process of clarification may be reversed, and the act of forgetting
is such a reversal. This may take a considerable time, and is usually
noticed only by accident at some point or other of its course. The
process is similar to the gradual obliteration of well-made roads, for
the maintenance of which no provision has been made. The faint
anticipations of a thought are very like the faint recollections of it,
and the latter gradually become blurred as in the case of a neglected
road over the boundaries of which animals stray, slowly obliterating it.
In this connection a practical rule for memorising, discovered and
applied by a friend of mine, is interesting. It generally happens that
if one wants to learn, say, a piece of music, or a section from the
history of philosophy, one has to go over parts of it again and again.
The problem was, how long should the intervals be between these
successive attempts to commit to memory? The answer was that they should
not be so long as to make it possible to take a fresh interest in the
subject again, to be interested and curious about it. If the interval
has produced that state of mind, then the process of clarification must
begin from the beginning again. The rather popular physiological theory
of Sigismund Exner as to the formation of “paths” in the nervous system
may perhaps be taken as a physical parallel of the process of
clarification. According to the theory, the nerves, or rather the
fibrils, make paths easy for the stimulations to travel along, if these
stimulations last sufficiently long or are repeated sufficiently often.
So also in the case of forgetting; what happens is that these paths or
processes of the nerve-cells atrophy from disuse. Avenarius would have
explained the above processes by his theory of the articulation of the
fibres of the brain, but his physical doctrine was rather too crude and
too simple for application to psycho-physics. None the less his
conception of articulation or jointing is both convenient and
appropriate in its application to the process of clarification, and I
shall employ it in that connection.

The process of clarification must be traced thoroughly in order to
realise its importance, but for the moment, it is important to consider
only the initial stage. The distinction of Avenarius between “element”
and “character,” which later on will become evident in a process of
clarification, is not applicable to the very earliest moments of the
process. It is necessary to coin a name for those minds to which the
duality of element and character becomes appreciable at no stage of the
process. I propose for psychical data at this earliest stage of their
existence the word Henid (from the Greek ἑν, because in them it is
impossible to distinguish perception and sensation as two analytically
separable factors, and because, therefore, there is no trace of duality
in them).

Naturally the “henid” is an abstract conception and may not occur in the
absolute form. How often psychical data in human beings actually stand
at this absolute extreme of undifferentiation is uncertain and
unimportant; but the theory does not need to concern itself with the
possibility of such an extreme. A common example from what has happened
to all of us may serve to illustrate what a henid is. I may have a
definite wish to say something particular, and then something distracts
me, and the “it” I wanted to say or think has gone. Later on, by some
process of association, the “it” is quite suddenly reproduced, and I
know at once that it was what was on my tongue, but, so to speak, in a
more perfect stage of development.

I fear lest some one may expect me to describe exactly what I mean by
“henid.” The wish can come only from a misconception. The very idea of a
henid forbids its description; it is merely a something. Later on
identification will come with the complete articulation of the contents
of the henid; but the henid is not the whole of this detailed content,
but is distinguished from it by a lower grade of consciousness, by an
absence of, so to speak, relief, by a blending of the die and the
impression, by the absence of a central point in the field of vision.

And so one cannot describe particular henids; one can only be conscious
of their existence.

None the less henids are things as vital as elements and characters.
Each henid is an individual and can be distinguished from other henids.
Later on I shall show that probably the mental data of early childhood
(certainly of the first fourteen months) are all henids, although
perhaps not in the absolute sense. Throughout childhood these data do
not reach far from the henid stage; in adults there is always a certain
process of development going on. Probably the perceptions of some plants
and animals are henids. In the case of mankind the development from the
henid to the completely differentiated perception and idea is always
possible, although such an ideal condition may seldom be attained.
Whilst expression in words is impossible in the case of the absolute
henid, as words imply articulated thoughts, there are also in the
highest stages of the intellect possible to man some things still
unclarified and, therefore, unspeakable.

The theory of henids will help in the old quarrel between the spheres of
perception and sensation, and will replace by a developmental conception
the ideas of element and character which Avenarius and Petzoldt deduced
from the process of clarification. It is only when the elements become
distinct that they can be distinguished from the characters. Man is
disposed to humours and sentimentalities only so long as the contours of
his ideas are vague; when he sees things in the light instead of the
dark his process of thinking will become different.

Now what is the relation between the investigation I have been making
and the psychology of the sexes? What is the distinction between the
male and the female (and to reach this has been the object of my
digression) in the process of clarification?

Here is my answer:

The male has the same psychical data as the female, but in a more
articulated form; where she thinks more or less in henids, he thinks in
more or less clear and detailed presentations in which the elements are
distinct from the tones of feeling. With the woman, thinking and feeling
are identical, for man they are in opposition. The woman has many of her
mental experiences as henids, whilst in man these have passed through a
process of clarification. Woman is sentimental, and knows emotion but
not mental excitement.

The greater articulation of the mental data in man is reflected in the
more marked character of his body and face, as compared with the
roundness and vagueness of the woman. In the same connection it is to be
remembered that, notwithstanding the popular belief, the senses of the
male are much more acute than those of the woman. The only exception is
the sense of touch, an exception of great interest to which I shall
refer later. It has been established, moreover, that the sensibility to
pain is much more acute in man, and we have now learned to distinguish
between that and the tactile sensations.

A weaker sensibility is likely to retard the passage of mental data
through the process of clarification, although we cannot quite take it
for granted that it must be so. Perhaps a more trustworthy proof of the
less degree of articulation in the mental data of the woman may be drawn
from consideration of the greater decision in the judgments made by men,
although indeed it may be the case that this distinction rests on a
deeper basis. It is certainly the case that whilst we are still near the
henid stage we know much more certainly what a thing is not than what it
is. What Mach has called instinctive experience depends on henids. While
we are near the henid stage we think round about a subject, correct
ourselves at each new attempt, and say that that was not yet the right
word. Naturally that condition implies uncertainty and indecision in
judgment. Judgment comes towards the end of the process of
clarification; the act of judgment is in itself a departure from the
henid stage.

The most decisive proof for the correctness of the view that attributes
henids to woman and differentiated thoughts to man, and that sees in
this a fundamental sexual distinction, lies in the fact that wherever a
new judgment is to be made, (not merely something already settled to be
put into proverbial form) it is always the case that the female expects
from man the clarification of her data, the interpretation of her
henids. It is almost a tertiary sexual character of the male, and
certainly it acts on the female as such, that she expects from him the
interpretation and illumination of her thoughts. It is from this reason
that so many girls say that they could only marry, or, at least, only
love a man who was cleverer than themselves; that they would be
repelled by a man who said that all they thought was right, and did not
know better than they did. In short, the woman makes it a criterion of
manliness that the man should be superior to herself mentally, that she
should be influenced and dominated by the man; and this in itself is
enough to ridicule all ideas of sexual equality.

The male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously. This is
certainly the necessary conclusion for the extreme cases. The woman
receives her consciousness from the man; the function to bring into
consciousness what was outside it is a sexual function of the typical
man with regard to the typical woman, and is a necessary part of his
ideal completeness.

And now we are brought up against the problem of talent; the whole
modern woman question appears to be resolving itself into a dispute as
to whether men or women are more highly gifted. As the question is
generally propounded there is no attempt to distinguish between the pure
types of sex; the conclusions with regard to these that I have been able
to set forth have an important bearing on the answer to the question.


CHAPTER IV

TALENT AND GENIUS

There has been so much written about the nature of genius that, to avoid
misunderstanding, it will be better to make a few general remarks before
going into the subject.

And the first thing to do is to settle the question of talent. Genius
and talent are nearly always connected in the popular idea, as if the
first were a higher, or the highest, grade of the latter, and as if a
man of very high and varied talents might be a sort of intermediate
between the two. This view is entirely erroneous. Even if there were
different degrees or grades of genius, they would have absolutely
nothing to do with so-called “talent.” A talent, for instance the
mathematical talent, may be possessed by some one in a very high degree
from birth; and he will be able to master the most difficult problems of
that science with ease; but for this he will require no genius, which is
the same as originality, individuality, and a condition of general
productiveness.

On the other hand, there are men of great genius who have shown no
special talent in any marked degree; for instance, men like Novalis or
Jean Paul. Genius is distinctly not the superlative of talent; there is
a world-wide difference between the two; they are of absolutely unlike
nature; they can neither be measured by one another or compared to each
other.

Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family
(_e.g._, the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never
diffused, but is strictly individual.

Many ill-balanced people, and in particular women, regard genius and
talent as identical. Women, indeed, have not the faculty of appreciating
genius, although this is not the common view. Any extravagance that
distinguishes a man from other men appeals equally to their sexual
ambition; they confuse the dramatist with the actor, and make no
distinction between the virtuoso and the artist. For them the talented
man is the man of genius, and Nietzsche is the type of what they
consider genius. What has been called the French type of thought, which
so strongly appeals to them, has nothing to do with the highest
possibilities of the mind. Great men take themselves and the world too
seriously to become what is called merely intellectual. Men who are
merely intellectual are insincere; they are people who have never really
been deeply engrossed by things and who do not feel an overpowering
desire for production. All that they care about is that their work
should glitter and sparkle like a well-cut stone, not that it should
illuminate anything. They are more occupied with what will be said of
what they think than by the thoughts themselves. There are men who are
willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is
admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their
thoughts. I cannot help thinking of one particular living author, a
blaring, outrageous person, who fancies that he is roaring when he is
only snarling. Unfortunately, Nietzsche (however superior he is to the
man I have in mind) seems to have devoted himself chiefly to what he
thought would shock the public. He is at his best when he is most
unmindful of effect. His was the vanity of the mirror, saying to what it
reflects, “See how faithfully I show you your image.” In youth when a
man is not yet certain of himself he may try to secure his own position
by jostling others. Great men, however, are painfully aggressive only
from necessity. They are not like a girl who is most pleased about a new
dress because she knows that it will annoy her friends.

Genius! genius! how much mental disturbance and discomfort, hatred and
envy, jealousy and pettiness, has it not aroused in the majority of
men, and how much counterfeit and tinsel has the desire for it not
occasioned?

I turn gladly from the imitations of genius to the thing itself and its
true embodiment. But where can I begin? All the qualities that go to
make genius are in so intimate connection that to begin with any one of
them seems to lead to premature conclusions.

All discussions on the nature of genius are either biological-clinical,
and serve only to show the absurd presumption of present knowledge of
this kind in its hope to solve a problem so difficult; or they descend
from the heights of a metaphysical system for the sole purpose of
including genius in their purview. If the road that I am about to take
does not lead to every goal at once, it is only because that is the
nature of roads.

Consider how much deeper a great poet can reach into the nature of man
than an average person. Think of the extraordinary number of characters
depicted by Shakespeare or Euripides, or the marvellous assortment of
human beings that fill the pages of Zola. After the Penthesilea,
Heinrich von Kleist created Kätchen von Heilbronn, and Michael Angelo
embodied from his imagination the Delphic Sibyls and the Leda. There
have been few men so little devoted to art as Kant and Schelling, and
yet these have written most profoundly and truly about it. In order to
depict a man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be
like him; in order to portray his psychological activities one must be
able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have his
nature in oneself. One must be like the mind one tries to grasp. It
takes a thief to know a thief, and only an innocent man can understand
another innocent man. The poseur only understands other poseurs, and
sees nothing but pose in the actions of others; whilst the simple-minded
fails to understand the most flagrant pose. To understand a man is
really to be that man.

It would seem to follow that a man can best understand himself--a
conclusion plainly absurd. No one can understand himself, for to do
that he would have to get outside himself; the subject of the knowing
and willing activity would have to become its own object. To grasp the
universe it would be necessary to get a standpoint outside the universe,
and the possibility of such a standpoint is incompatible with the idea
of a universe. He who could understand himself could understand the
world. I do not make the statement merely as an explanation: it contains
an important truth, to the significance of which I shall recur. For the
present I am content to assert that no one can understand his deepest,
most intimate nature. This happens in actual practice; when one wishes
to understand in a general way, it is always from other persons, never
from oneself, that one gets one’s materials. The other person chosen
must be similar in some respect, however different as a whole; and,
making use of this similarity, he can recognise, represent, comprehend.
So far as one understands a man, one is that man.

The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who
understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe
is said to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which
he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of
his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a
more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and a man is the
closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the
more really and strongly he has these others within him. If
comprehension of those about him only flickers in him like a poor
candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to kindle a mighty flame
in his heroes, to give distinction and character to his creations. The
ideal of an artistic genius is to live in all men, to lose himself in
all men, to reveal himself in multitudes; and so also the aim of the
philosopher is to discover all others in himself, to fuse them into a
unit which is his own unit.

This protean character of genius is no more simultaneous than the
bi-sexuality of which I have spoken. Even the greatest genius cannot
understand the nature of all men at the same time, on one and the same
day. The comprehensive and manifold rudiments which a man possesses in
his mind can develop only slowly and by degrees with the gradual
unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost as if there were a
definite periodicity in his development. These periods, when they recur,
however, are not exactly alike; they are not mere repetitions, but are
intensifications of their predecessors, on a higher plane. No two
moments in the life of an individual are exactly alike; there is between
the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of the higher and
lower parts of a spiral ascent. Thus it has frequently happened that
famous men have conceived a piece of work in their early youth, laid it
aside during manhood, and resumed and completed it in old age. Periods
exist in every man, but in different degrees and with varying
“amplitude.” Just as the genius is the man who contains in himself the
greatest number of others in the most active way, so the amplitude of a
man’s periods will be the greater the wider his mental relations may be.
Illustrious men have often been told, by their teachers, in their youth
“that they were always in one extreme or another.” As if they could be
anything else! These transitions in the case of unusual men often assume
the character of a crisis. Goethe once spoke of the “recurrence of
puberty” in an artist. The idea is obviously to be associated with the
matter under discussion.

It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, sterile years
precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the
barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the
feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the
remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy
those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of
ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of
genius more intense than those of other men. Every great man has such
periods, of longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses
self-confidence, in which he thinks of suicide; times in which, indeed,
he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid of
the stimulus to production; times which call forth the blind criticisms
“How such a genius is degenerating!” “How he has played himself out!”
“How he repeats himself!” and so forth.

It is just the same with other characteristics of the man of genius. Not
only the material, but also the spirit, of his work is subject to
periodic change. At one time he is inclined to a philosophical and
scientific view; at another time the artistic influence is strongest; at
one time his intervals are altogether in the direction of history and
the growth of civilisation; later on it is “nature” (compare Nietzsche’s
“Studies in Infinity” with his “Zarathustra”); at another time he is a
mystic, at yet another simplicity itself! (Björnson and Maurice
Maeterlinck are good modern examples.) In fact, the “amplitude” of the
periods of famous men is so great, the different revelations of their
nature so various, so many different individuals appear in them, that
the periodicity of their mental life may be taken almost as diagnostic.
I must make a remark sufficiently obvious from all this, as to the
existence of almost incredibly great changes in the personal appearance
of men of genius from time to time. Comparison of the portraits at
different times of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, or Schopenhauer are enough
to establish this. The number of different aspects that the face of a
man has assumed may be taken almost as a physiognomical measure of his
talent.[9]

  [9] I cannot help using the word “talent” from time to time when I
  really mean genius; but I wish it to be remembered that I am convinced
  of the existence of a fundamental distinction between “talent,” or
  “giftedness,” and “genius.”

People with an unchanging expression are low in the intellectual scale.
Physiognomists, therefore, must not be surprised that men of genius, in
whose faces a new side of their minds is continually being revealed, are
difficult to classify, and that their individualities leave little
permanent mark on their features.

It is possible that my introductory description of genius will be
repudiated indignantly, because it would imply that a Shakespeare has
the vulgarity of his Falstaff, the rascality of his Iago, the
boorishness of his Caliban, and because it identifies great men with all
the low and contemptible things that they have described. As a matter of
fact, men of genius do conform to my description, and as their
biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and the most
repulsive instincts. And yet the objection is invalid, as the fuller
exposition of the thesis will reveal. Only the most superficial survey
of the argument could support it, whilst the exactly opposite conclusion
is a much more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully described
the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because
there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in
the grasp of his own disposition: the author describing the murder is
swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for
murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would
recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he
would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great
men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case
of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual
crime.

The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men has important
consequences connected with the theory of henids that I elaborated in
the last chapter. A man understands what he already has within himself
much more quickly than what is foreign to him (were it otherwise there
would be no intercourse possible: as it is we do not realise how often
we fail to understand one another). To the genius, who understands so
much more than the average man, much more will be apparent.

The schemer will readily recognise his fellow; an impassioned player
easily reads the same power in another person; whilst those with no
special powers will observe nothing. Art discerns itself best, as Wagner
said. In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one
of these can understand other men better than they can understand
themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is
grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation
and comprehension; if we inquire from psychology what is the most
necessary condition for becoming conscious of a thing, for grasping it,
we shall find the answer in “contrast.” If everything were a uniform
grey we should have no idea of colour; absolute unison of sound would
soon produce sleep in all mankind; duality, the power which can
differentiate, is the origin of the alert consciousness. Thus it happens
that no one can understand himself were he to think of nothing else all
his life, but he can understand another to whom he is partly alike, and
from whom he is also partly quite different. Such a distribution of
qualities is the condition most favourable for understanding. In short,
to understand a man means to have equal parts of himself and of his
opposite in one.

That things must be present in pairs of contrasts if we are to be
conscious of one member of the pair is shown by the facts of
colour-vision. Colour-blindness always extends to the complementary
colours. Those who are red blind are also green blind; those who are
blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for
all mental phenomena; it is a fundamental condition of consciousness.
The most high-spirited people understand and experience depression much
more than those who are of level disposition. Any one with so keen a
sense of delicacy and subtilty as Shakespeare must also be capable of
extreme grossness.

The more types and their contrasts a man unites in his own mind the less
will escape him, since observation follows comprehension, and the more
he will see and understand what other men feel, think, and wish. There
has never been a genius who was not a great discerner of men. The great
man sees through the simpler man often at a glance, and would be able to
characterise him completely.

Most men have this, that, or the other faculty or sense
disproportionately developed. One man knows all the birds and tells
their different voices most accurately. Another has a love for plants
and is devoted to botany from his childhood. One man pores lovingly into
the many layered rocks of the earth, and has only the vaguest
appreciation of the skies; to another the attraction of cold, star-sown
space is supreme. One man is repelled by the mountains and seeks the
restless sea; another, like Nietzsche, gets no help from the tossing
waters and hungers for the peace of the hills. Every man, however simple
he may be, has some side of nature with which he is in special sympathy
and for which his faculties are specially alert. And so the ideal
genius, who has all men within him, has also all their preferences and
all their dislikes. There is in him not only the universality of men,
but of all nature. He is the man to whom all things tell their secrets,
to whom most happens, and whom least escapes. He understands most
things, and those most deeply, because he has the greatest number of
things to contrast and compare them with. The genius is he who is
conscious of most, and of that most acutely. And so without doubt his
sensations must be most acute; but this must not be understood as
implying, say, in the artist the keenest power of vision, in the
composer the most acute hearing; the measure of genius is not to be
taken from the acuteness of the sense organ but from that of the
perceiving brain.

The consciousness of the genius is, then, the furthest removed from the
henid stage. It has the greatest, most limpid clearness and
distinctness. In this way genius declares itself to be a kind of higher
masculinity, and thus the female cannot be possessed of genius. The
conclusion of this chapter and the last is simply that the life of the
male is a more highly conscious life than that of the female, and genius
is identical with the highest and widest consciousness. This extremely
comprehensive consciousness of the highest types of mankind is due to
the enormous number of contrasting elements in their natures.

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such
thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or
even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who
knows everything without having learned it.

It stands to reason that this infinite knowledge does not include
theories and systems which have been formulated by science from facts,
neither the history of the Spanish war of succession nor experiments in
dia-magnetism.

The artist does not acquire his knowledge of the colours reflected on
water by cloudy or sunny skies, by a course of optics, any more than it
requires a deep study of characterology to judge other men. But the more
gifted a man is, the more he has studied on his own account, and the
more subjects he has made his own.

The theory of special genius, according to which, for instance, it is
supposed that a musical “genius” should be a fool at other subjects,
confuses genius with talent. A musician, if truly great, is just as well
able to be universal in his knowledge as a philosopher or a poet. Such
an one was Beethoven. On the other hand, a musician may be as limited in
the sphere of his activity as any average man of science. Such an one
was Johann Strauss, who, in spite of his beautiful melodies, cannot be
regarded as a genius if only because of the absence of constructive
faculty in him. To come back to the main point; there are many kinds of
talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind
of talent and master it. There is something in genius common to all
those who possess it; however much difference there may seem to be
between the great philosopher, painter, musician, poet, or religious
teacher. The particular talent through the medium of which the spirit of
a man develops is of less importance than has generally been thought.
The limits of the different arts can easily be passed, and much besides
native inborn gifts have to be taken into account. The history of one
art should be studied along with the history of other arts, and in that
way many obscure events might be explained. It is outside my present
purpose, however, to go into the question of what determines a genius to
become, say, a mystic, or, say, a great delineator.

From genius itself, the common quality of all the different
manifestations of genius, woman is debarred. I will discuss later as to
whether such things are possible as pure scientific or technical genius
as well as artistic and philosophical genius. There is good reason for a
greater exactness in the use of the word. But that may come, and however
clearly we may yet be able to describe it woman will have to be excluded
from it. I am glad that the course of my inquiry has been such as to
make it impossible for me to be charged with having framed such a
definition of genius as necessarily to exclude woman from it.

I may now sum up the conclusions of this chapter. Whilst woman has no
consciousness of genius, except as manifested in one particular person,
who imposes his personality on her, man has a deep capacity for
realising it, a capacity which Carlyle, in his still little understood
book on “Hero-Worship,” has described so fully and permanently. In
“Hero-Worship,” moreover, the idea is definitely insisted on that genius
is linked with manhood, that it represents an ideal masculinity in the
highest form. Woman has no direct consciousness of it; she borrows a
kind of imperfect consciousness from man. Woman, in short, has an
unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most
conscious life.


CHAPTER V

TALENT AND MEMORY

The following observation bears on my henid theory:

I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical work from
which later on I was going to make an extract. Something was in my mind
in henid form. What I thought, how I thought it, what was then knocking
at the door of my consciousness, I could not remember a minute
afterwards, in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a
typical example of the henid.

The more deeply impressed, the more detailed a complex perception may be
the more easily does it reproduce itself. Clearness of the consciousness
is the preliminary condition for remembering, and the memory of the
mental stimulation is proportional to the intensity of the
consciousness. “I shall not forget that”; “I shall remember that all my
life”; “That will never escape my memory again.” Such phrases men use
when things have made a deep impression on them, of moments in which
they have gained wisdom or have become richer by an important
experience. As the power of being reproduced is directly proportionate
to the organisation of a mental impression, it is clear that there can
be no recollection of an absolute henid.

As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his
accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will
he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever
thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely
in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal
remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the sure, most
general, and most easily proved mark of a genius. If a common theory,
especially popular with the philosophers of the coffee-house, be true,
that productive men (because they are always covering new ground) have
no memory, it is often because they are productive only from being on
new ground.

The great extent and acuteness of the memory of men of genius, which I
propose to lay down dogmatically as a necessary inference from my
theory, without attempting to prove it further, is not incompatible with
their rapid loss of the facts impressed on them in school, the tables of
Greek verbs, and so forth. Their memory is of what they have
experienced, not of what they have learned. Of all that was acquired for
examination purposes only so much will be retained as was in harmony
with the natural talent of the pupil. Thus a house-painter may have a
better memory for colours than a great philosopher; the most narrow
philologist may remember Greek aorists that he has learned by heart
better than his teacher, who may none the less be a great poet. The
uselessness of the experimental school of psychology (notwithstanding
their marvellous arsenal of instruments of experimental precision) is
shown by their expectation of getting results as to memory from tests
with letters, unconnected words, long rows of figures. These experiments
have so little bearing on the true memory of man, on the memory by which
he recalls the experiences of his life, that one wonders if such
psychologists have realised that such a thing as the mind exists. The
customary experiments place the most different subjects under the same
conditions, pay no attention to the individuality of these subjects, and
treat them merely as good or bad registering apparatus. There is a
parable in the fact that the two German words “bemerken” (take notice
of) and “merken” (remember) come from the same root. Only what is
harmonious with some inborn quality will be retained. When a man
remembers a thing, it is because he was capable of taking some interest
in the thing; when he forgets, it is because he was uninterested. The
religious man will surely and exactly remember texts, the poet verses
and the mathematician equations.

This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter,
and to another reason for the great memories of genius. The more
significant a man is, the more different personalities he unites in
himself, the more interests that are contained in him, the more wide his
memory must be. All men have practically the same opportunities of
perception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an infinitesimal
part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom
perception and apprehension are identical in their field. Of course no
such being actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has
apprehended nothing that he has perceived. In this way we may take it
that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist; no male is quite without
a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal; no man is absolutely
without the quality, and no man possesses it completely. Apprehension or
absorption, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and
their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose
mentality is unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents
can signify anything because there is within him nothing to compare them
with (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully developed
minds for which everything is unforgettable, because of the firm
impressions made and the sureness with which they are absorbed. The
extreme of genius also does not exist, because even the greatest genius
is not wholly a genius at every moment of his life.

What is at once a deduction from the necessary connection between memory
and genius, and a proof of the actuality of the connection, lies in the
extraordinary memory for minute details shown by the man of genius.
Because of the universality of his mind, everything has only one
interpretation for him, an interpretation often unsuspected at the time;
and so things cling obstinately in his memory and remain there
inextinguishably, although he may have taken not the smallest trouble to
take note of them. And so one may almost take as another mark of the
genius that the phrase “this is no longer true” has no meaning for him.
There is nothing that is no longer true for him, probably just because
he has a clearer idea than other men of the changes that come with time.

The following appears to be one of the best means for the objective
examination of the endowment of a man: If after a long separation from
him we resume the new intercourse with the circumstances of the last,
then we shall find that the highly endowed man has forgotten nothing,
that he vividly and completely takes up the subject from where it was
left off with the fullest recollection of the details. How much ordinary
men forget of their lives any one can prove to his astonishment and
horror. It may happen that we have been for hours importantly engaged
with a man a few weeks before, and we may find that he has forgotten all
about it. It is true that if one recalls all the circumstances to his
mind, he begins to remember, and, finally, with sufficient help, may
remember almost completely. Such experience has made me think that there
may be an empirical proof of the hypothesis that no absolute forgetting
ever occurs; that if the right method with the individual be chosen
recollection may always be induced.

It follows also that from one’s own experience, from what one has
thought or said, heard or read, felt or done, one can give the smallest
possible to another, that the other does not already know. Consideration
of the amount that a man can take in from another would seem to serve as
a sort of objective measure of his genius, a measure that does not have
to wait for an estimation of his actual creative efforts. I am not going
to discuss the extent to which this theory opposes current views on
education, but I recommend parents and teachers to pay attention to it.
The extent to which a man can detect differences and resemblances must
depend on his memories. This faculty will be best developed in those
whose past permeates their present, all the moments of the life of whom
are amalgamated. Such persons will have the greatest opportunities of
detecting resemblances and so finding the material for comparisons. They
will always seize hold of from the past what has the greatest
resemblance to the present experience, and the two experiences will be
combined in such a way that no similarities or differences will be
concealed. And so they are able to maintain the past against the
influence of the present. It is not without reason that from time
immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered to be its
richness in beautiful comparisons and pictures, or that we turn to again
and again, or await our favourite images with impatience when we read
Homer or Shakespeare or Klopstock. To-day when, for the first time for a
century and a half, Germany is without great poets or painters, and when
none the less it is impossible to find any one who is not an “author,”
the power of clear and beautiful comparison seems to have gone. A period
the nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious words,
the philosophy of which has become in more than one sense the philosophy
of the unconscious can contain nothing great. Consciousness is the mark
of greatness, and before it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun
disperses a mist. If only consciousness were to come to this age, how
quickly voices that are now famous would become silent. It is only in
full consciousness, in which the experience of the present assumes
greater intensity by its union with all the experiences of the past,
that imagination, the necessary quality for all philosophical as for all
artistic effort, can find a place. It is untrue, therefore, that women
have more imagination than men. The experiences on account of which men
have assigned higher powers of imagination to women come entirely from
the imaginative sexual life of women. The only inferences that can be
drawn from this do not belong to the present section of my work.

The absence of women from the history of music must be referred to
deeper causes; but it also supports my contention that women are devoid
of imagination. To produce music requires a great deal more imagination
than the malest woman possesses, and much more than is required for
other kinds of artistic or for scientific effort. There is nothing in
nature, nothing in the sphere of the senses, corresponding directly with
sound pictures. Music has no relation to the world of experience; there
is no “music,” no chords or melodies in the natural world; these have to
be evolved from the imagination of the composer. Every other art has
more definite relations to empirical art. Even architecture, which has
been compared with music, has definite relations to matter, although,
like music, it has no anticipations in the senses. Architecture, too, is
an entirely masculine occupation. The very idea of a female architect
excites compassion.

The so-called stupefying effect of music on the creative or practical
musician (especially instrumental music) depends on the fact that even
the sense of smell is a better guide to man in the world of experience
than the contents of a musical work. And it is just this complete
absence of all relation to the world of sight, taste, and smell, that
makes music specially unfitted to express the female nature. It also
explains why this peculiarity of his art demands the highest grade of
imagination from a musician, and why those to whom musical compositions
“come” seem stranger to their fellow men than painters or sculptors. The
so-called “imagination” of women must be very different from that of
men, since there is no woman with even the same position in the history
of music that Angelica Kaufmann had in art.

Where anything obviously depends on strong moulding women have not the
smallest leaning towards its production, neither in philosophy nor in
music, in the plastic arts nor in architecture. Where, however, a weak
and vague sentimentality can be expressed with little effort, as in
painting or verse-making, or in pseudo-mysticism and theosophy, women
have sought and found a suitable field for their efforts. Their lack of
productiveness in the former sphere is in harmony with the vagueness of
the psychical life of women. Music is the nearest possible approach to
the organisation of a sensation. Nothing is more definite,
characteristic, and impressive than a melody, nothing that will more
strongly resist obliteration. One remembers much longer what is sung
than what is spoken, and the arias better than the recitatives.

Let us note specially here that the usual phrases of the defenders of
women do not apply to the case of women. Music is not one of the arts to
which women have had access only so recently that it is too soon to
expect fruits; from the remotest antiquity women have sung and played.
And yet....

It is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing and painting
women have now had opportunities for at least two centuries. Every one
knows how many girls learn to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said
that there has not yet been time for results were results possible. As
there are so few female painters with the smallest importance in the
history of art, it must be that there is something in the nature of
things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting and etching of
women is no more than a sort of elegant, luxurious handiwork. The
sensuous, physical element of colour is more suitable for them than the
intellectual work of formal line-drawing, and hence it is, that whereas
women have acquired some small distinction in painting they have gained
none in drawing. The power of giving form to chaos is with those in whom
the most universal memory has made the widest comprehension possible; it
is a quality of the masculine genius.

I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that
should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as
income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very
probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater
men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and
probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to
most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to
understand a genius.

There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their
lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is
probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain.
They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for
some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in
point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.

It must not be forgotten that quite ordinary men in moments of
excitement, in anger at some underhanded deed, have found words with
which they never would have been credited. The greater part of what is
called expression in art as in language depends (if the reader will
remember what I have said about the process of “clarification”) on the
fact that some individual more richly endowed clarifies, organises, and
exhibits some idea almost instantaneously, an idea which to a less
endowed person was still in the henid form. The course of clarification
is much shortened in the mind of the second person.

If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish,
that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through
which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of
genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to
make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being
untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the
others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.

There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from
giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less
experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a
thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could
only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could
have any meaning.

Because the life of the genius is more intense even in his earliest
years than that of other children, his memory can go further back. In
extreme cases the memory may be complete and vivid back to the third
year of life, whereas in most recollection begins much later. I know
some people whose earliest recollections date only from their eighth
year, and there are instances of an even later beginning of the
conscious life. I do not maintain that the date at which active memory
begins can be taken as a measure of relative genius, that he who
remembers from his second year is so much the more of a genius than he
who can go back only to his fourth or fifth year. But in a general way,
I believe the parallel to hold good.

Even in the cases of the greatest men, some time, greater or shorter,
elapsed between the date of their earliest recollection and the time
from which onwards they remember everything, from the time, in fact, in
which their genius was ripe. But in the case of most men there is
forgetfulness of the greater part of their lives; they are conscious
only that they themselves and none other have lived their lives. Out of
their whole lives there only remain certain moments, and scattered
recollections, which serve as sign-posts. If they are asked about any
particular thing they can only tell, for instance, because in such and
such a month they were so old, or they wore such and such clothes, they
lived at this place, or that their income was so much.

If one has lived with them in former years, it is only after great
trouble that the past can be brought to their mind. In such cases one is
surely justified in saying that such a person is ungifted, or at least
in not considering him conspicuously able.

The request for an autobiography would put most men into a most painful
position; they could scarcely tell if they were asked what they had done
the day before. Memory with most people is quite spasmodic and purely
associative. In the case of the man of genius every impression that he
has received endures; he is always under the influence of impressions;
and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer from fixed ideas. The
psychical condition of men’s minds may be compared with a set of bells
close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings
only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment.
In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets
in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The
latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and
absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the
basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.

For similar reasons gratitude is apparently the rarest human virtue.
People are often very conscious of how much they have borrowed, but they
neither can nor will try to remember the necessity in which they stood,
nor the freedom which that help brought them. Even if want of memory
were really the cause of ingratitude, it would not be sufficient for a
man to possess a marvellous memory to have a like spirit of gratitude. A
special condition is also necessary, but its description cannot be
undertaken here.

From the connection between giftedness and memory which is so often
mistaken and denied because it is not sought where it is to be found,
from the power of self recollection, a further fact is to be deduced.
The poet who feels urged to write without premeditation, without
reflection, without having willingly pressed the pedal; the musician to
whom the desire to compose has come, so that he must create whether he
will or no, even if he feels more inclined to sleep or to rest; these,
in such moments, will simply reproduce thoughts they have carried in
their heads all their lives. A composer who can remember none of his
songs or subjects by heart, or a poet who cannot recollect any of his
poems--without having carefully learned them--such men are in no sense
really great.

Before we apply these remarks to the consideration of the mental
differences of the sexes, we must make yet one more distinction between
different kinds of memory. The individual moments in the life of a
gifted man are not remembered as disconnected points, not as different
particles of time, each one separated and defined from the following
one, as the numerals one, two, and so on.

The result of self-observation shows that sleep, the limitations of
consciousness, the gaps in memory, even special experiences, appear to
be in some mysterious way one great whole; incidents do not follow each
other like the tickings of a watch, but they pass along in a single
unbroken stream. With ordinary men the moments which are united in a
close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few,
and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the
genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets
flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius
vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not
been gathered up and stored.

This peculiar continuity by which a man first realises that he exists,
that he is, and that he is in the world, is all comprehensive in the
genius, limited to a few important moments in the mediocre, _and
altogether lacking in woman_. When a woman looks back over her life and
lives again her experiences, there is presented no continuous, unbroken
stream, but only a few scattered points. And what kind of points? They
are just those which accord with woman’s natural instincts. Of what
these interests exclusively consist the second chapter gave a
preliminary idea; and those who remember the ideas in question will not
be astonished at the following facts: The female is concerned altogether
with one class of recollections--those connected with the sexual impulse
and reproduction. She thinks of her lovers and proposals, of her
marriage day, of every child as if it were a doll; of the flowers which
she received at every ball, the number, size, and price of the bouquets;
of every serenade; of every verse which (as she fondly imagines) was
written for her; of every phrase by which a lover has impressed her; but
above all--with an exactness which is as contemptible as it is
disquieting to herself--of every compliment without exception that has
ever been paid her.

That is _all_ that the _real_ woman recalls of her life. But it is just
those things which human beings never forget, and those they cannot
remember that give the clue to knowledge of their life and character. It
belongs to a later period of the book to go more thoroughly into the
reason why the female has precisely the remembrances she has. Some
important conclusion may be expected from reflection on the incredible
memory with which women recall all the adulation and flattery, all the
proofs of gallantry, which have happened to them since childhood.

Whatever may be urged against the present complete limitation of the
female memory to the sphere of sexuality and conjugal life, it is to me
quite evident. Various arguments about girls’ schools, and so forth, I
am prepared for. These difficulties will have to be cleared away later.
But I must just say again that all memory, which is to be used as a
means of psychological definition of the individual, can include only
the memory of what has been learnt when learning means actual
experience.

The explanation of the discontinuity in the psychical life of women
(reference to which is introduced here, only because it is a necessary
psychological factor in the problem of memory, and without reference to
its spiritualistic or idealistic significance) can be reached only when
the nature of continuity is studied with reference to the deepest
problems of philosophy and psychology.

As a proof of the fact I will at present quote nothing more than the
statement of Lotze, which has so often caused astonishment, that women
much more readily submit themselves to new relationships and more easily
accommodate themselves to them than men, in whom the parvenu can be seen
much longer, whereas one might not be able to tell the peasant from the
peeress, the woman brought up in poor surroundings from the patrician’s
daughter. Later on I shall deal more exhaustively with this subject.

At any rate, it will now be seen why (if neither vanity, desire for
gossip, nor imitation drives them to it) only the better men write down
recollections of their lives, and how I perceive in this a strong
evidence of the connection between memory and giftedness. It is not as
if every man of genius wished to write an autobiography: the incitement
to autobiography comes from special, very deep-seated psychological
conditions. But on the other hand, the writing of a full autobiography,
if it is the outcome of a genuine desire, is always the sign of a
superior man. For real faithful memory is the source of reverence. The
really great would resist any temptation to give up his past in exchange
for material advantage or mental health; the greatest treasures of the
world, even happiness itself, he would not take in exchange for his
memories.

The desire for a draught of the waters of Lethe is the trait of mediocre
or inferior natures. And however much a really great man, as Goethe
says, may condemn and abhor his past failings, and although he sees
others clinging fast to theirs, he will never smile at those past
actions and failings of his own, or make merry over his early mode of
life and thought.

The class of persons, now so much in evidence, who claim to have
“conquered” their pasts, have the smallest possible claim to the word
“conquer.” They are those who idly relate that they formerly believed
this or the other, but have now “overcome” their beliefs, whereas they
are as little in earnest about the present as they were about the past.
They see only the mechanism, not the soul of things, and at no stage
what they believe themselves to have conquered was deep in their
natures.

In contrast with these it may be noticed with what painful care great
men render even the, apparently, most minute details in their own
biographies: for them the past and present are equal; with others
neither of the two are real.

The famous man realises how everything, even the smallest, most
secondary, matters played an important part in his life, how they have
helped his development, and to this fact is due his extraordinary
reverence for his own memoirs. And such an autobiography is not written
all at once, as it were, with one event treated like another, and
without meditation; nor does the idea of it suddenly occur to a man; the
material for such a work by a great man, so to speak, is always at hand.

His new experiences acquire a deeper significance because of the past,
which is always present to him, and hence the great man and only the
great man, feels that he himself is in very truth a “man of destiny.”
And so it comes that great men are always more “superstitious” than
average men. To sum up, I may say:

A man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem
important to him.

In the course of further investigation this dictum will be seen to have
a deep significance even apart from its bearing on the universality,
comprehension, and comparison exhibited by the genius.

The position of woman in these matters is not difficult to explain. A
real woman never becomes conscious of a destiny, of her own destiny; she
is not heroic; she fights most for her possessions, and there is nothing
tragic in the struggle as her own fate is decided with the fate of her
possessions.

Inasmuch as woman is without continuity, she can have no true reverence;
as a fact, reverence is a purely male virtue. A man is first reverent
about himself, and self-respect is the first stage in reverence for all
things. But it costs a woman very little to break off with her past; if
the word irony could be fittingly used here, one might say that a man
does not easily regard his past with irony and superiority as women
appear to do--and not only after marriage.

Later on I shall show how women are exactly the opposite of that which
reverence means. I would rather be silent about the reverence of widows.

The superstition of women is psychologically absolutely different from
the superstitions of famous men.

The reverent relation to one’s own past, which depends on a real
continuity of memory, and which is possible only by comprehension, can
be shown in relation to a still wider and deeper subject.

Whether a man has a real relationship to his own past or not, involves
the question as to whether he has a desire for immortality, or if the
idea of death is indifferent to him.

The desire for immortality is to-day, as a rule, treated shamefully, and
in a very different spirit.

Not only is the problem treated as merely ontological, but the
psychological side of it is only trifled with. It has been held that it
is connected, like the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, with the
feeling that we have all experienced, when, in doing something certainly
for the first time, we seem to remember having gone through the same
experience before. Another generally adopted view is to derive the idea
of immortality from the belief in spirits, as has been done by Tylor,
Spencer, Avenarius, and others, although in any other age than this age
of experimental psychology it would have been dismissed _a priori_. I am
sure that it must seem impossible to the majority of thinking men to
regard a belief so important to mankind, about which there has been so
much strife, as merely the last stage in a syllogism of which the first
premiss is the midnight dream of a dead man. How can phenomena of that
kind explain the belief in the continuity of their lives after death
held so firmly by Goethe or Bach, or the desire for immortality which
speaks to us in Beethoven’s last sonatas? The desire for the persistence
of the conscious self must spring from sources mightier than these
feeble rationalistic guesses.

The deeper source of the belief depends on the relation of a man to his
own past. Our consciousness and vision of the past is the strongest
ground for our desire to be conscious in the future. The man who values
his past, who holds his mental life in greater respect than his
corporeal life, is not willing to give up his consciousness at death.
And so this organic primary desire for immortality is strongest in men
of genius, in the men whose pasts are richest. This connection between
the desire for immortality and memory receives strong support from what
is related by those who have been rescued from sudden death. Even if
they had not thought it out before they relive their past in a few
moments, at once and with frantic rapidity. The feeling of what is
impending brings in violent contrast the intensity of the present
consciousness and the idea that it may cease for ever. In reality we
know very little of the mental state of the dying. It takes more than
an ordinary person to interpret it, and for reasons connected with what
I have been saying men of genius usually avoid death-beds. But it is
quite wrong to ascribe the sudden appearance of religion in so many
people who are fatally ill, to a desire to make sure of their future
state. It is extremely superficial to assume that the doctrine of hell
can for the first time assume such an importance to the dying as to make
them afraid to pass away “with a lie on their lips.”[10]

  [10] I venture to remind readers how often at the approach of death
  those who have been occupied with purely scientific matters have
  turned to religious problems, _e.g._, Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Weber.

The important point is this: Why do men who have lived throughout a
lying life feel towards the end a sudden desire for truth? And why are
others so horrified, although they do not believe in punishment in the
next world, when they hear of a man dying with a lie on his lips or with
an unrepented action? And why have both the hardness of heart until the
end and the death-bed repentance appealed so forcibly to the imagination
of poets? The discussion as to the “euthanasia” of atheists, which was
so popular in the eighteenth century, is more than a mere historical
curiosity as F. A. Lange considered it.

I adduce these considerations not merely to suggest a possibility which
is hardly more than a guess. It seems to be unthinkable that it is not
the case that many more people than actual geniuses have some trace of
genius. The quantitative difference in natural endowment will be most
marked at the moment when the endowment becomes active. And for most men
this moment is the point of death. If we were not accustomed to regard
men of genius as a separate class shut off from the others like the
payers of income-tax, we should find less difficulty in grafting these
new ideas on the old. And just as the earliest recollections of
childhood which a man has are not the result of some external event
breaking through the continuity of the past course of his life, but are
the result of his internal development, there comes to every one a day
on which his consciousness is so intensified that remembrance remains,
and from that time onwards, according to his endowment, more or fewer
remembrances are formed (a factor which by itself upsets the whole of
modern psychology), so in different men there are many different
stimulants of the consciousness of which the last is the hour of death,
and from the point of view of their degree of genius men might almost be
classified by the number of things that excite their consciousness. I
take this opportunity of again urging the falseness of a doctrine of
modern psychology (which treats men simply as better or worse pieces of
registering apparatus and takes no notice of the internal, ontogenetic
development of the mind); I mean the idea that in youth we retain the
greatest number of impressions. We must not confuse really experienced
impressions with the mere material on which to exercise memorising. Such
stuff a child learns more easily simply because it is not weighted with
mental impressions. A psychology which is opposed to experience in
matters so fundamental must be rejected. What I am attempting at present
is no more than to give the faintest indication of that ontogenetic
psychology or theoretical biography which sooner or later will replace
what now passes for the science of mind. Every programme represents some
definite conviction; before we wish to reach a goal we have some
definite conception of what the goal is to be. The name “theoretical
biography” will define the new subject from philosophy and physiology,
and the biological method of treatment introduced by Darwin, Spencer,
and others will be widened until it becomes a science capable of giving
a rational orderly account of the whole course of the mental life from
the cradle to the grave. It is to be called biography, not biology,
because it is to deal with the investigation of the permanent laws that
rule the mental development of an individual, whereas biology itself
concerns itself with individuals themselves. The new knowledge will
seek general points of view and the establishment of types. Psychology
must try to become theoretical biography. Existing psychology would find
its place in the branches of the new science, and in this way only would
Wundt’s desire to establish the foundations of a science of the mind be
fulfilled. It would be absurd to despair of this simply because of the
uselessness of the existing science of the mind which has not yet even
grasped its own object. In this way a justification for experimental
psychology might yet be found, in spite of the important results of the
investigations by Windelband and Rickert on the relation between natural
and psychical science, or the old dichotomy between the physical and
mental sciences.

The relation between the continuity of memory and the desire for
immortality is borne out by the fact that woman is devoid of the desire
for immortality. It is to be noted that those persons are quite wrong
who have attributed the desire for immortality to the fear of death.
Women are as much afraid of death as are men, but they have not the
longing for immortality.

My attempted explanation of the psychological desire for immortality is
as yet more an indication of the connection between the desire and
memory than a deduction from a higher natural law. It will always be
found that the connection actually exists; the more a man lives in his
past (not, as a superficial reader might guess, in his future) the more
intense will be his longing for immortality. The lack of the desire for
immortality in women is to be associated with the lack in them of
reverence for their own personality. It seems, however, that the absence
of both reverence and desire for immortality in woman is due to a more
general principle, and in the same fashion in the case of man the
co-existence of a higher form of memory and the desire for immortality
may be traced to some deeper root. So far, I have attempted only to show
the coincidence of the two, how the deep respect for their own past and
the deep desire for their own future are to be found in the same
individuals. It will now be my task to find the common origin of these
two factors of the mind.

Let us take as a starting-point what we were able to lay down as to the
universality of the memory of great men. To such everything is equally
real: what took place long ago and the most recent experience. Thus it
happens that a single experience does not end with the moment of time in
which it happened, does not disappear as this moment of time disappears,
but through the memory is wrested from the grasp of time. Memory makes
experience timeless; the essence of it is that it should transcend time.
A man can only remember the past because memory is free from the control
of time, because events which in nature are functions of time, in the
spirit have conquered time.

But here a difficulty crops up. How can memory be a negation of time if,
on the other hand, it is certain that if we had no memory we should be
unconscious of time? It is certainly true that we shall always be
conscious of the passing of time by our memory of the past. If the two
are in so intimate a relation how can the one be the negation of the
other?

The difficulty is easy to resolve. It is just because a living
creature--not necessarily a human being--by being endowed with memory is
not wholly absorbed by the experiences of the moment that it can, so to
speak, oppose itself to time, take cognisance of it, and make it the
subject of observation. Were the being wholly abandoned to the
experience of the moment and not saved from it by memory then it would
change with time and be a floating bubble in the stream of events; it
could never be conscious of time, for consciousness implies duality. The
mind must have transcended time to grasp it, it must have stood outside
it in order to be able to reflect upon it. This does not apply merely to
special moments of time, as, for instance, to the case that we cannot be
conscious of sorrow until the sorrow is over, but it is a part of the
conception of time. If we could not free ourselves from time, we could
have no knowledge of time.

In order to understand the condition of timelessness let us reflect on
what memory rescues from time. What transcends time is only what is of
interest to the individual, what has meaning for him; in fact, all that
he assigns value to. We remember only the things that have some value
for us even if we are unconscious of the value. It is the value that
creates the timelessness. We forget everything that has no value for us
even if we are unconscious of that absence of value.

What has value, then, is timeless; or, to put it the other way, a thing
has the more value the less it is a function of time. In all the world
value is in proportion to independence of time; only things that are
timeless have a positive value. Although this is not what I take to be
the deepest and fullest meaning of value, it is, at least, the first
special law of the theory of values.

A hasty survey of common facts will suffice to prove this relation
between value and duration. We are always inclined to pay little
attention to the views of those whom we have known only for a short
time, and, as a rule, we think little of the hasty judgments of those
who easily change their ideas. On the other hand, uncompromising
fixedness gains respect, even if it assume the form of vindictiveness or
obstinacy. The _ære perennius_ of the Roman poets and the Egyptian
pyramids lasting for forty centuries are favourite images. The
reputation a man leaves behind him would soon be depreciated were it
suspected that it would soon disappear instead of being handed down the
centuries. A man dislikes to be told that he is always changing; but let
it be put that he is simply showing new sides of his character and he
will be proud of the permanence through the changes. He who is tired of
life, for whom life has ceased to be of interest, is interesting to no
one. The fear of the extinction of a name or of a family is well known.

So also statute laws and customs lose in value if their validity is
expressly limited in time; and if two people are making a bargain, they
will be the more ready to distrust one another if the bargain is to be
only of short duration. In fact, the value that we attach to things
depends to a large extent on our estimate of their durability.

This law of values is the chief reason why men are interested in their
death and their future. The desire for value shows itself in the efforts
to free things from time, and this pressure is exerted even in the case
of things which sooner or later must change, as, for instance, riches
and position and everything that we call the goods of this world. Here
lies the psychological motive for the making of wills and the bestowal
of property. The motive is not care for relatives, because a man without
relatives very often is more anxious to settle his goods, not feeling,
perhaps, like the head of a family, that in any event his existence will
have some kind of permanence, that traces of him will be left after his
own death.

The great politician or ruler, and especially the despot, whose rule
ends with his death, seeks to increase his own value by making it
independent of time. He may attempt it through a code of laws or a
biography like that of Julius Cæsar, by some great philosophical
undertaking, by the founding of museums or collections, or (and this
perhaps is the favourite way) by alterations of the calendar. And he
seeks to extend his power to the utmost during his life-time, to
preserve it and make it stable by enduring contracts and diplomatic
marriages, and most of all by attacking and removing everything that
could endanger the permanence of his kingdom. And so the politician
becomes a conqueror.

Psychological and philosophical investigations of the theory of values
have neglected the time element. Perhaps this is because they have been
very much under the influence of political economy. I believe, however,
that the application of my principle to political economy would be of
considerable value. Very slight reflection will lead one to see that in
commercial affairs the time element is a most important factor in
estimating value. The common definition of value, that it is in
proportion to the power of the thing valued to relieve our wants, is
quite incomplete without the element of time. Such things as air and
water have no value only in so far as they are not localised and
individualised; but as soon as they have been localised and
individualised, and so received form, they have received a quality that
may not last, and with the idea of duration comes the idea of value.
Form and timelessness, or individuation and duration, are the two
factors which compose value.

Thus it can be shown that the fundamental law of the theory of value
applies both to individual psychology and to social psychology. And now
I can return to what is, after all, the special task of this chapter.

The first general conclusion to be made is that the desire for
timelessness, a craving for value, pervades all spheres of human
activity. And this desire for real value, which is deeply bound up with
the desire for power, is completely absent in the woman. It is only in
comparatively rare cases that old women trouble to make exact directions
about the disposition of their property, a fact in obvious relation with
the absence in them of the desire for immortality.

Over the dispositions of a man there is the weight of something solemn
and impressive--something which makes him respected by other men.

The desire for immortality itself is merely a specific case of the
general law that only timeless things have a positive value. On this is
founded its connection with memory. The permanence with which
experiences stay with a man is proportional to the significance which
they had for him. Putting it in a paradoxical form, I may say: Value is
created by the past. Only that which has a positive value remains
protected by memory from the jaws of time; and so it may be with the
individual psychical life as a whole. If it is to have a positive value,
it must not be a function of time, but must subdue time by eternal
duration after physical death. This draws us incomparably nearer the
innermost motive of the desire for immortality. The complete loss of
significance which a rich, individual, fully-lived life would suffer if
it were all to end with death, and the consequent senselessness of
everything, as Goethe said, in other words, to Eckermann (February 14,
1829) lead to the demand for immortality. The strongest craving for
immortality is possessed by the genius, and this is explained by all the
other facts which have been discussed as to his nature.

Memory only fully vanquishes time when it appears in a universal form,
as in universal men.

The genius is thus the only timeless man--at least, this and nothing
else is his ideal of himself; he is, as is proved by his passionate and
urgent desire for immortality, just the man with the strongest demand
for timelessness, with the greatest desire for value.[11]

  [11] It is often a cause for astonishment that men with quite
  ordinary, even vulgar, natures experience no fear of death. But it is
  quite explicable: it is not the fear of death which creates the desire
  for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes fear of
  death.

And now we are face to face with an almost astonishing coincidence. The
timelessness of the genius will not only be manifest in relation to the
single moments of his life, but also in his relation to what is known as
“his generation,” or, in a narrower sense, “his time.” As a matter of
fact, he has no relations at all with it. The age does not create the
genius it requires. The genius is not the product of his age, is not to
be explained by it, and we do him no honour if we attempt to account for
him by it.

Carlyle justly noted how many epochs had called for great men, how badly
they had needed them, and how they still did not obtain them.

The coming of genius remains a mystery, and men reverently abandon their
efforts to explain it. And as the causes of its appearance do not lie in
any one age, so also the consequences are not limited by time. The
achievements of genius live for ever, and time cannot change them. By
his works a man of genius is granted immortality on the earth, and thus
in a threefold manner he has transcended time. His universal
comprehension and memory forbid the annihilation of his experiences with
the passing of the moment in which each occurred; his birth is
independent of his age, and his work never dies.

Here is the best place to consider a question which, strangely enough,
appears to have received no attention. The question is, if there be
anything akin to genius in the world of animals and plants? Although it
must be admitted that exceptional forms occur amongst animals and
plants, these cannot be regarded as coming under our definition of
genius. Talent may exist amongst them as amongst men below the standard
of genius. But the special gift, what Moreau, Lombroso, and others have
called the “divine spark,” we must deny to animals. This limitation is
not jealousy nor the anxious guarding of a privilege, but is founded on
good grounds.

Is there anything unexplained by the assumption that the first
appearance of genius was in man! In the first place, it is because of
this that the human race has an objective mind; in other words, that man
is the only organism with a history.

The history of the human race (naturally I mean the history of its mind
and not merely of its wars) is readily intelligible on the theory of the
appearance of genius, and of the imitation by the more monkey-like
individuals of the conduct of those with genius. The chief stages, no
doubt, were house-building, agriculture, and, above all, speech. Every
single word has been the invention of a single man, as, indeed, we still
see, if we leave out of consideration the merely technical terms. How
else could language have arisen? The earliest words were
“onomatopoetic”; a sound similar to the exciting cause was evolved
almost without the will of the speaker, in direct response to the
sensuous stimulation. All the other words were originally metaphors, or
comparisons, a kind of primitive poetry, for all prose has come from
poetry. Many, perhaps the majority of the greatest geniuses, have
remained unknown. Think of the proverbs, now almost commonplaces, such
as “one good turn deserves another.” These were said for the first time
by some great man. How many quotations from the classics, or sayings of
Christ, have passed into the common language, so that we have to think
twice before we can remember who were the authors of them. Language is
as little the work of the multitude as our ballads. Every form of speech
owes much that is not acknowledged to individuals of another language.
Because of the universality of genius, the words and phrases that he
invents are useful not only to those who use the language in which he
wrote them. A nation orients itself by its own geniuses, and derives
from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding star serves also
as a light to other nations. As speech has been created by a few great
men, the most extraordinary wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which
reveals itself to a few ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked
by the stupid professional philologists.

The genius is not a critic of language, but its creator, as he is the
creator of all the mental achievements which are the material of culture
and which make up the objective mind, the spirit of the peoples. The
“timeless” men are those who make history, for history can be made only
by those who are not floating with the stream. It is only those who are
unconditioned by time who have real value, and whose productions have an
enduring force. And the events that become forces of culture become so
only because they have an enduring value.

If we make a criterion of genius the exhibition of this threefold
“timelessness” we shall have a measure by which it is easy to test all
claimants. Lombroso and Türck have expanded the popular view which
ascribes genius to all whose intellectual or practical achievements are
much above the average. Kant and Schelling have insisted on the more
exclusive doctrine that genius can be predicated only of the great
creative artists. The truth probably lies between the two. I am inclined
to think that only great artists and great philosophers (amongst the
latter, I include, above all, the great religious teachers) have proved
a claim to genius. Neither the “man of action” nor “the man of science”
has any claim.

Men of action, famous politicians and generals, may possess a few traits
resembling genius (particularly a specially good knowledge of men and an
enormous capacity for remembering people). The psychology of such traits
will be dealt with later; they are confused with genius only by those
whom the externals of greatness dazzle. The man of genius almost
typically renounces such external greatness because of the real
greatness within him. The really great man has the strongest sense of
values; the distinguished general is absorbed by the desire for power.
The former seeks to link power with real value; the latter desires that
power itself should be valued. Great generals and great politicians,
like the bird Phœnix, are born out of fiery chaos and like it disappear
again in chaos. The great emperor or the great demagogue is the only man
who lives entirely in the present; he does not dream of a more
beautiful, better future; his mind does not dwell on his own past which
has already passed, and so in the two ways most possible to man, he does
not transcend time, but lives only in the moment. The great genius does
not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that
surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman
takes its direction and its termination. And so the great emperor is no
more than a phenomenon of nature, whereas the genius is outside nature
and is an incorporation of the mind. The works of men of action crumble
at the death of their authors, if indeed they have not already decayed,
or they survive only a brief time leaving no traces behind them except
what the chronicles record as having been done and later undone. The
emperor creates no works that survive time, passing into eternity; such
creations come from genius. It is the genius in reality and not the
other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is
outside and unconditioned by history. The great man has a history, the
emperor is only a part of history. The great man transcends time; time
creates and time destroys the emperor.

The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher (I think of
such names as Newton and Gauss, Linnæus and Darwin, Copernicus and
Galileo), deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.
Men of science are not universal; they deal only with a branch or
branches of knowledge. This is not due, as is sometimes said, merely to
the extreme modern specialisation that makes it impossible to master
everything. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there are
still amongst the learned men individuals with a knowledge as many-sided
as that of Aristotle or Leibnitz; the names of von Humboldt and William
Wundt at once come to my mind. The absence of genius comes from
something much more deeply seated in the men of science, and in science
itself, from a cause which I shall explain in the eighth chapter.
Probably some one may be disposed to argue that if even the most
distinguished men of science have not a knowledge so universal as that
of the philosopher, there are some who stand on the outermost fringes of
philosophy, and to whom it is yet difficult to deny the word genius. I
think of such men as Fichte, Schleiermacher, Carlyle, and Nietzsche.
Which of the merely scientific has felt in himself an unconditioned
comprehension of all men and of all things, or even the capacity to
verify any single thing in his mind and by his mind? On the contrary,
has not the whole history of the science of the last thousand years been
directed against this? This is the reason why men of science are
necessarily one-sided. No man of science, unless he is also a
philosopher, however eminent his achievements, has that continuous
unforgetting life that the genius exhibits, and this is because of his
want of universality.

Finally, it is to be observed that the investigations of the scientific
are always in definite relation to the knowledge of their day. The
scientific man takes possession of a definite store of experimental or
observed knowledge, increases or alters it more or less, and then hands
it on. And much will be taken away from his achievements, much will
silently disappear; his treatises may make a brave show in the
libraries, but they cease to be actively alive. On the other hand, we
can ascribe to the work of the great philosopher, as to that of the
great artist, an imperishable, unchangeable presentation of the world,
not disappearing with time, and which, because it was the expression of
a great mind, will always find a school of men to adhere to it. There
still exist disciples of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Berkeley
and Bruno, but there are now none who denote themselves as followers of
Galileo or Helmholtz, of Ptolemy or Copernicus. It is a misuse of terms,
due to erroneous ideas, to speak of the “classics” of science or of
pedagogy in the sense that we speak of the classics of philosophy and
art.

The great philosopher bears the name of genius deservedly and with
honour. And if it will always be the greatest pain to the philosopher
that he is not an artist, so the artist envies the philosopher his
tenacious and controlled strength of systematic thought, and it is not
surprising that the artist has taken pleasure in depicting Prometheus
and Faust, Prospera and Cyprian, Paul the Apostle and Il Penseroso. The
philosopher and the artist are alternate sides of one another.

We must not be too lavish in attributing genius to those who are
philosophers or we shall not escape the reproach of being merely
partisans of philosophy against science. Such a partisanship is foreign
to my purpose, and, I hope, to this book. It would only be absurd to
discuss the claims to genius of such men as Anaxagoras, Geulincx,
Baader, or Emerson. I deny genius either to such unoriginally profound
writers as Angelus Silesius, Philo and Jacobi, or to original yet
superficial persons such as Comte, Feuerbach, Hume, Herbart, Locke and
Karneades. The history of art is equally full of preposterous
valuations, whilst, on the other hand, the history of science is
extremely free from false estimations. The history of science busies
itself very little with the biographies of its protagonists; its object
is a system of objective, collective knowledge in which the individual
is swept away. The service of science demands the greatest sacrifice,
for in it the individual human being renounces all claim to eternity as
such.


CHAPTER VI

MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS

The title that I have given to this chapter at once opens the way to
misinterpretation. It might appear as if the author supported the view
that logical and ethical values were the objects exclusively of
empirical psychology, psychical phenomena, like perception and
sensation, and that logic and ethics, therefore, were subsections of
psychology and based upon psychology.

I declare at once that I call this view, the so-called psychologismus,
at once false and injurious. It is false because it can lead to nothing;
and injurious because, while it hardly touches logic and ethics, it
overthrows psychology itself. The exclusion of logic and ethics from the
foundations of psychology, and the insertion of them in an appendix, is
one of the results of the overgrowth of the doctrine of empirical
perception, of that strange heap of dead, fleshless bones which is known
as empirical psychology, and from which all real experience has been
excluded. I have nothing to do with the empirical school, and in this
matter lean towards the transcendentalism of Kant.

As the object of my work, however, is to discover the differences
between different members of humanity, and not to discuss categories
that would hold good for the angels in heaven, I shall not follow Kant
closely, but remain more directly in psychological paths.

The justification of the title of this chapter must be reached along
other lines. The tedious, because entirely new, demonstration of the
earlier part of my work has shown that the human memory stands in
intimate relation with things hitherto supposed unconnected with
it--such things as time, value, genius, immortality. I have attempted to
show that memory stands in intimate connection with all these. There
must be some strong reason for the complete absence of earlier allusions
to this side of the subject. I believe the reason to be no more than the
inadequacy and slovenliness which hitherto have spoiled theories of
memory.

I must here call attention to a theory first propounded by Charles
Bonnet in the middle of the eighteenth century and towards the end of
the nineteenth century, specially insisted upon by Ewald Hering and E.
Mach. This theory regarded the human memory as being only a special case
of a property common to all organised matter, the property that makes
the path of new stimuli rather easier if these resemble stimuli that
have acted at some former time. The theory really makes the human memory
an adaptation in the sense of Lamarck, the result on the living organism
of repeated stimulation. It is true that there is a point in common
between the human memory and the increase of sensitiveness caused by the
repeated application of a stimulus; that identical element consists in
the permanence of the effect of the first stimulation. There is,
however, a fundamental difference between the growth of a muscle that is
much used or the adaptation of the eater of arsenic or morphia to
increased doses, and the recollection of past experiences by human
beings. In the one case the trace of the old is just to be felt in the
new stimulation; in the other case, by means of the consciousness, the
old situations are actually reproduced with all their individuation. The
identification of the two is so superficial that it is a waste of time
to dwell longer on it.

The doctrine of association as the theory of memory is linked with the
foregoing physiological theory as a matter of history, through Hartley,
and, as a matter of fact, because the idea of habit is shared by the
two. The association theory attributes memory to the mechanical play of
the linking of presentations according to four laws. It overlooks the
fact that memory (the continuous memory of man) is a function of the
will. I can remember a thing if I really _will_. In the case of
hypnosis, when the recollection of all that has been forgotten is
induced, an outside will replaces the will of the subject. It is will
that sets in action the chains of association, and we have to deal here
with something deeper than a mechanical principle.

In the association psychology, which first splits up the psychic life,
and then vainly imagines that it can weld the re-assorted pieces
together again, there is another confusion, the confusion between memory
and recollection, which has persisted in spite of the well-founded
objections of Avenarius and von Höffding. The recognition of a
circumstance does not necessarily involve the special reproduction of
the former impression, even although there seems to be a tendency for
the new impression, at least, partly to recall the old one. But there is
another kind of recognition, perhaps as common, in which the new
impression does not appear to be directly linked with an association,
but in which it comes, so to speak, “coloured” (James would say
“tinged”) with that character that would be called by von Höffding the
“familiarity quality.” To him who returns to his native place the roads
and streets seem familiar, even although he has forgotten the names, has
to ask his way, and can think of no special occasion on which he went
along them. A melody may seem “familiar” and yet I may be unable to say
where I heard it. The “character” (in the sense of Avenarius) of
familiarity, of intimacy, hovers over the sense-impression itself, and
analysis can detect no associations, none of the fusing of the old and
new, which, according to the assertion of a presumptuous
pseudo-psychology, produces the feeling; these cases are quite easy to
distinguish from cases in which there is a real although vague
association with an older experience in henid form.

In individual psychology this distinction is of great importance. In the
highest types of mankind the consciousness of the continuous past is
present in so active a form that the moment such a one sees an
acquaintance in the street he is at once able to reproduce the last
meeting as a complete experience, whereas in the case of the less gifted
person, the feeling of familiarity that makes recognition possible,
occurs when he is able to recall the past connection in all its details.

If we now, in conclusion, ask whether or no other animals than man
possess a similar faculty for remembering and reviving their earlier
lives in their entirety it is most probable that the answer must be in
the negative. Animals could not, as they do, remain for hours at a time,
motionless and peaceful on one spot, if they were capable of thinking of
the future or of remembering the past. Animals have the feeling of
familiarity and the sense of expectation (as we find from the
recognition of his master by a dog after twenty years’ absence); but
they possess no memory and no hope. They are capable of recognition
through the sense of familiarity, but they have no memory.

As memory has been shown to be a special character unconnected with the
lower spheres of psychical life, and the exclusive property of human
beings, it is not surprising that it is closely related to such higher
things as the idea of value and of time, and the craving for
immortality, which is absent in animals, and possible to men only in so
far as they possess the quality of genius. If memory be an essentially
human thing, part of the deepest being of humanity, finding expression
in mankind’s most peculiar qualities, then it will not be surprising if
memory be also related to the phenomena of logic and ethics. I have now
to explore this relationship.

I may set out from the old proverb that liars have bad memories. It is
certain that the pathological liar has practically no memory. About male
liars I shall have more to say; they are not common, however. But if we
remember what was said as to the absence of memory amongst women we
shall not be surprised at the existence of the numerous proverbs and
common sayings about the untruthfulness of women. It is evident that a
being whose memory is very slight, and who can recall only in the most
imperfect fashion what it has said or done, or suffered, must lie
easily if it has the gift of speech. The impulse to untruthfulness will
be hard to resist if there is a practical object to be gained, and if
the influence that comes from a full conscious reality of the past be
not present. The impulse to lie is stronger in woman, because, unlike
that of man, her memory is not continuous, whilst her life is discrete,
unconnected, discontinuous, swayed by the sensations and perceptions of
the moment instead of dominating them. Unlike man, her experiences float
past without being referred, so to speak, to a definite, permanent
centre; she does not feel herself, past and present, to be one and the
same throughout all her life. It happens almost to every man that
sometimes he “does not understand himself”; indeed, with very many men,
it happens (leaving out of the question the facts of psychical
periodicity) that if they think over their pasts in their minds they
find it very difficult to refer all the events to a single conscious
personality; they do not grasp how it could have been that they, being
what they feel themselves at the time to be, could ever have done or
felt or thought this, that, or the other. And yet in spite of the
difficulty, they know that they had gone through these experiences. The
feeling of identity in all circumstances of life is quite wanting in the
true woman, because her memory, even if exceptionally good, is devoid of
continuity. The consciousness of identity of the male, even although he
may fail to understand his own past, manifests itself in the very desire
to understand that past. Women, if they look back on their earlier
lives, never understand themselves, and do not even wish to understand
themselves, and this reveals itself in the scanty interest they give to
the attempts of man to understand them. The woman does not interest
herself about herself, and hence there have been no female
psychologists, no psychology of women written by a woman, and she is
incapable of grasping the anxious desire of the man to understand the
beginning, middle, and end of his individual life in their relation to
each other, and to interpret the whole as a continual, logical,
necessary sequence.

At this point there is a natural transition to logic. A creature like
woman, the absolute woman, who is not conscious of her own identity at
different stages of her life, has no evidence of the identity of the
subject-matter of thought at different times. If in her mind the two
stages of a change cannot be present simultaneously by means of memory,
it is impossible for her to make the comparison and note the change. A
being whose memory is never sufficiently good as to make it
psychologically possible to perceive identity through the lapse of time,
so as to enable her, for instance, to pursue a quantity through a long
mathematical reckoning; such a creature in the extreme case would be
unable to control her memory for even the moment of time required to say
that A will be still A in the next moment, to pronounce judgment on the
identity A = A, or on the opposite proposition that A is not equal to A,
for that proposition also requires a continuous memory of A to make the
comparison possible.

I have been making no mere joke, no facetious sophism or paradoxical
proposition. I assert that the judgment of identity depends on
conceptions, never on mere perceptions and complexes of perceptions, and
the conceptions, as logical conceptions, are independent of time,
retaining their constancy, whether I, as a psychological entity, think
them constant or not. But man never has a conception in the purely
logical form, for he is a psychological being, affected by the condition
of sensations; he is able only to form a general idea (a typical,
connotative, representative conception) out of his individual
experiences by a reciprocal effacing of the differences and
strengthening of the similarities, thus, however, very closely
approximating to an abstract conception, and in a most wonderful fashion
using it as such. He must also be able to preserve this idea which he
thinks clear, although in reality it is confused, and it is memory alone
that brings about the possibility of that. Were he deprived of memory he
would lose the possibility of thinking logically, for this possibility
is incarnated, so to speak, only in a psychological medium.

Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. The
propositions of logic are not conditioned by the existence of memory,
but only the power to use them. The proposition A = A must have a
psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At₁ = At₂.
Of course this is not the case in pure logic, but man has no special
faculty of pure logic, and must act as a psychological being.

I have already shown that the continuous memory is the vanquisher of
time, and, indeed, is necessary even for the idea of time to be formed.
And so the continuous memory is the psychological expression of the
logical proposition of identity. The absolute woman, in whom memory is
absent, cannot take the proposition of identity, or its contradictory,
or the exclusion of the alternative, as axiomatic.

Besides these three conditions of logical thought, the fourth condition,
the containing of the conclusion in the major premiss, is possible only
through memory. That proposition is the groundwork of the syllogism. The
premisses psychologically precede the conclusion, and must be retained
by the thinking person whilst the minor premiss applies the law of
identity or of non-identity. The grounds for the conclusion must lie in
the past. And for this reason continuity which dominates the mental
processes of man is bound up with causality. Every psychological
application of the relation of a conclusion to its premisses implies the
continuity of memory to guarantee the identity of the propositions. As
woman has no continuous memory she can have no _principium rationis
sufficientis_.

And so it appears that woman is without logic.

George Simmel has held this familiar statement to be erroneous, inasmuch
as women have been known to draw conclusions with the strongest
consistency. That a woman in a concrete case can unrelentingly pursue a
given course at the stimulation of some object is no more a proof that
she understands the syllogism, than is her habit of perpetually
recurring to disproved arguments a proof that the law of identity is an
axiom for her. The point at issue is whether or no they recognise the
logical axioms as the criteria of the validity of their thoughts, as
the directors of their process of thinking, whether they make or do not
make these the rule of conduct and the principle of judgment. A woman
cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity
she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental
processes. Hence the ease with which women assume opinions. If a woman
gives vent to an opinion, or statement, and a man is so foolish as to
take it seriously and to ask her for the proof of it, she regards the
request as unkind and offensive, and as impugning her character. A man
feels ashamed of himself, feels himself guilty if he has neglected to
verify a thought, whether or no that thought has been uttered by him; he
feels the obligation to keep to the logical standard which he has set up
for himself. Woman resents any attempt to require from her that her
thoughts should be logical. She may be regarded as “logically insane.”

The most common defect which one could discover in the conversation of a
woman, if one really wished to apply to it the standard of logic (a feat
that man habitually shuns, so showing his contempt for a woman’s logic)
is the _quaternio terminorum_, that form of equivocation which is the
result of an incapacity to retain definite presentations; in other words
the result of a failure to grasp the law of identity. Woman is unaware
of this; she does not realise the law nor make it a criterion of
thought. Man feels himself bound to logic; the woman is without this
feeling. It is only this feeling of guilt that guarantees man’s efforts
to think logically. Probably the most profound saying of Descartes, and
yet one that has been widely misunderstood, is that all errors are
crimes.

The source of all error in life is failure of memory. Thus logic and
ethics, both of which deal with the furtherance of truth and join in its
highest service, are dependent on memory. The conception dawns on us
that Plato was not so far wrong when he connected discernment with
memory. Memory, it is true, is not a logical and ethical act, but it is
a logical and ethical phenomenon. A man who has had a vivid and deep
perception regards it as a fault, if some half-hour afterwards he is
thinking of something different, even if external influences have
intervened. A man thinks himself unconscientious and blameworthy if he
notices that he has not thought of a particular portion of his life for
a long time. Memory, moreover, is linked with morality, because it is
only through memory that repentance is possible. All forgetfulness is in
itself immoral. And so reverence is a moral exercise; it is a duty to
forget nothing, and for this reason we should reverence the dead.
Equally from logical and ethical motives, man tries to carry logic into
his past, in order that past and present may become one.

It is with something of a shock that we realise here that we approach
the deep connection between logic and ethics, long ago suggested by
Socrates and Plato, discovered anew by Kant and Fichte, but lost sight
of by living workers.

A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not A has
no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any
consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth. Such a
creature if endowed with speech will lie without knowing it, without the
possibility of knowing it; _Veritas norma sui et falsa est_. There is
nothing more upsetting to a man than to find, when he has discovered a
woman in a lie, and has asked her, “Why did you lie about it?” that she
simply does not understand the question, but simply looks at him and
laughingly tries to soothe him, or bursts into tears.

The subject does not end with the part played by memory. Lying is common
enough amongst men. And lies can be told in spite of a full remembrance
of the subject which for some purpose some one wishes to be informed
about. Indeed, it might almost be said that the only persons who can lie
are those who misrepresent facts in spite of a superior knowledge and
consciousness of them.

Truth must first be regarded as the real value of logic and ethics
before it is correct to speak of deviations from truth for special
motives as lies from the moral point of view. Those who have not this
high conception should be adjudged as guilty rather of vagueness and
exaggeration than of lying; they are not immoral but non-moral. And in
this sense the woman is non-moral.

The root of such an absolute misconception of truth must lie deep. The
continuous memory against which alone a man can be false, is not the
real source of the effort for truth, the desire for truth, the basal
ethical-logical phenomenon, but only stands in intimate relation with
it.

That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which
removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all
time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces
the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only
be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates
from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling
of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their
actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to
the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to
account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long
past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any
court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the
individual himself quite independently of all social codes (so
condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the
social life of man). Society recognises the idea of illegality, but not
of sin; it presses for punishment without wishing to produce repentance;
lying is punished by the law only in its ceremonious form of perjury,
and error has never been placed under its ban. Social ethics with its
conception of duty to our neighbour and to society, and practical
exclusion from consideration of the other fifteen hundred million human
beings, cannot extend the realm of morality, when it begins by limiting
it in this arbitrary fashion.

What is this “centre of apperception” that is superior to time and
change?

It can be nothing less than what raises man above himself (as a part of
the world of sense) which joins him to an order of things that only the
reason can grasp, and that puts the whole world of sense at his feet. It
is nothing else than personality.

The most sublime book in the world, the “Criticism of Practical Reason,”
has referred morality to an intelligent ego, distinct from all empirical
consciousness. I must now turn to that side of my subject.


CHAPTER VII

LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO

David Hume is well known to have abolished the conception of the ego by
seeing in it only a bundle of different perceptions in continual ebb and
flow. However completely Hume thought himself to have compromised the
ego, at least he explained his view relatively moderately. He proposed
to say nothing about a few metaphysicians who appeared to rejoice in
another kind of ego; for himself he was quite certain that he had none,
and he dared to suppose that the majority of mankind, leaving the few
peculiar metaphysicians out of the question, were, like himself, mere
bundles. So the polite man expressed himself. In the next chapter I
shall show how his irony recoils on himself. That his view became so
famous depends partly on the over-estimation in which Hume is held and
which is largely due to Kant. Hume was a most distinguished empirical
psychologist, but he cannot be regarded as a genius, the popular view
notwithstanding. It is not very much to be the first of English
philosophers, but Hume has not even a claim to that position. I do not
think that Kant would have given so much praise to Hume if he had been
fully acquainted with all Hume’s work and not merely with the “Enquiry,”
as he certainly rejected the position of Spinoza, according to which men
were not “substances,” but merely accidents.

Lichtenberg, who took the field against the ego later than Hume, was
still bolder. He is the philosopher of impersonality, and calmly
corrects the conversational “I think” into an actual “it thinks”; he
regards the ego as a creation of the grammarian. In this Hume had
anticipated him, inasmuch as he also had declared, at the end of his
analysis, all disputes as to the identity of the person to be merely a
battle of words.

E. Mach has recently represented the universe as a coherent mass, and
the egos as points in which the coherent mass has greater consistency.
The only realities are the perceptions, which are connected in one
individual strongly, but which are weaker in another individual who is
thus differentiated from the first.

The contents of the perceptions are the realities, and they persist
externally to the worthless personal recollections. The ego is not a
real but only a practical entity and cannot be isolated, and, therefore,
the idea of individual immortality must be rejected. None the less the
idea of an ego is not wholly to be rejected; here and there, as, for
instance, in Darwin’s struggle for existence, it appears to have some
validity.

It is extraordinary how an investigator who has accomplished so much,
not only as a historian of his special branch and as a critic of ideas,
but who is also fully equipped with knowledge of biology, should have
paid no heed to the fact that every organic being is indivisible from
the first, and is not composed of anything like atoms, monads, &c. The
first distinctive mark of the living as opposed to inorganic matter is
that the former is always differentiated into dissimilar, mutually
dependent parts, and is not homogeneous like a crystal. And so it should
have been borne in mind that it was at least possible that
individuation, the fact that organic beings are not united, like Siamese
twins, would prove to have importance in psychical matters, and the ego,
therefore, was more than Mach’s idea of it as a mere waiting-hall of
perceptions.

It may be that there exists a psychical correlation even amongst
animals. Everything that an animal feels and perceives has a different
“note” or “colour” in every individual. This individual quality is not
only characteristic of the class, genus, species, race, and family, but
also is different in every individual of the same family, &c. The
idioplasm is the physiological equivalent of this specific individual
quality of the sensations and perceptions, and there are reasons
analogous with those in favour of the supposition of an idioplasm for
the supposition of an individual character amongst animals. The
sportsman who has to do with dogs, the trainer with horses, and the
keeper with animals will readily admit the existence of this
individuality as a constant element. It is clear that we have to do here
with something more than a mere rendezvous of perceptions.

But even if this psychical analogue of the idioplasm were proved to
exist in the case of animals, it could not be ranked with the
intelligible character, the existence of which in any living creature
except man cannot be maintained. The intelligible character of men,
their individuation, has the same relation to empirical character that
memory has to the simple power of recognition. And finally we come to
identity, by which the structure, form, law, and cosmos persist even
through the change of contents. The considerations from which is drawn
the proof of the existence in man of such a noumenal, trans-empirical
subject must now be stated briefly. They come from logic and ethics.

Logic deals with the true significance of the principle of identity
(also with that of contradiction; the exact relation of these two, and
the various modes of stating it are controversial matters outside the
present subject). The proposition A = A is axiomatic and self-evident.
It is the primitive measure of truth for all other propositions; however
much we may think over it we must return to this fundamental
proposition. It is the principle of the distinction between truth and
error; and he who regards it as meaningless tautology, as was the case
with Hegel and many of the later empiricists (this being not the only
surprising point of contact between two schools apparently so different)
is right in a fashion, but has misunderstood the nature of the
proposition. A = A, the principle of all truth, cannot itself be a
special truth. He who finds the proposition of identity or that of
non-identity meaningless does so by his own fault. He must have expected
to find in these propositions special ideas, a source of positive
knowledge. But they are not in themselves knowledge, separate acts of
thought, but the common standard for all acts of thought. And so they
cannot be compared with other acts of thought. The rule of the process
of thought must be outside thought. The proposition of identity does not
add to our knowledge; it does not increase but rather founds a kingdom.
The proposition of identity is either meaningless or means everything.
Upon what do the propositions of identity and of non-identity depend?
The common view is that they are judgments. Sigwart, for instance, who
has recently discussed the matter, puts it as follows: The two judgments
A is B and A is not B cannot be true at the same time because the
judgment “An unlearned man is learned” would involve a contradiction
because the predicate “learned” is affirmed of a subject of which the
judgment has been made implicitly that he is unlearned, so that in
reality two judgments are made, X is learned and X is unlearned. The
“psychologismus” of this method of argument is plain. It has recourse to
a temporary judgment preceding the formation of the conception
“unlearned man.” The proposition, however, A is not A claims validity
quite apart from the past, present, or future existence of other
judgments. It depends on the conception “unlearned man.” It makes the
conception more certain by excluding contradictory instances.

This, then, gives us the true function of the principles of identity and
non-identity. They are materials for conceptions.

This function concerns only logical conceptions, but not what have been
called psychological conceptions. The conception is always represented
psychologically by a generalisation; and this presentation in a certain
fashion is included in the conception. The generalisation represents the
conception psychologically, but is not identical with it. It can, so to
speak, be richer (as when I think of a triangle) or it can be poorer
(the conception of a lion contains more than my generalisation of
lions). The logical conception is the plumb-line which the attention
tries to follow; it is the goal and pole-star of the psychological
generalisation.

Pure logical thought cannot occur in the case of men; it would be an
attribute of deity. A human being must always think partly
psychologically because he possesses not only reason but also senses,
and his thought cannot free itself from temporal experiences but must
remain bound by them. Logic, however, is the supreme standard by which
the individual can test his own psychological ideas and those of others.
When two men are discussing anything it is the conception and not the
varying individual presentations of it that they aim at. The conception,
then, is the standard of value for the individual presentations. The
mode in which the psychological generalisation comes into existence is
quite independent of the conception and has no significance in respect
to it. The logical character which invests the conception with dignity
and power is not derived from experience, for experience can give only
vague and wavering generalisations. Absolute constancy and absolute
coherence which cannot come from experience are the essence of the
conception of that power concealed in the depths of the human mind whose
handiwork we try hard but in vain to see in nature. Conceptions are the
only true realities, and the conception is not in nature; it is the rule
of the essence not of the actual existence.

When I enunciate the proposition A = A, the meaning of the proposition
is not that a special individual A of experience or of thought is like
itself. The judgment of identity does not depend on the existence of an
A. It means only that if an A exists, or even if it does not exist, then
A = A. Something is posited, the existence of A = A whether or no A
itself exists. It cannot be the result of experience, as Mill supposed,
for it is independent of the existence of A. But an existence has been
posited; it is not the existence of the object; it must be the existence
of the subject. The reality of the existence is not in the first A or
the second A, but in the simultaneous identity of the two. And so the
proposition A = A is no other than the proposition “I am.”

From the psychological point of view, the real meaning of the
proposition of identity is not so difficult to interpret. It is clear
that to be able to say A = A, to establish the permanence of the
conception through the changes of experience, there must be something
unchangeable, and this can be only the subject. Were I part of the
stream of change I could not verify that the A had remained unchanged,
had remained itself. Were I part of the change, I could not recognise
the change. Fichte was right when he stated that the existence of the
ego was to be found concealed in pure logic, inasmuch as the ego is the
condition of intelligible existence.

The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These posit an
existence towards which all cognition serves. Logic is a law which must
be obeyed, and man realises himself only in so far as he is logical. He
finds himself in cognition.

All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must not err. He _must_
find the truth, and so he can find it. The duty of cognition involves
the possibility of cognition, the freedom of thought, and the hope of
ascertaining truth. In the fact that logic is the condition of the mind
lies the proof that thought is free and can reach its goal.

I can treat ethics briefly and in another fashion, inasmuch as what I
have to say is founded on Kant’s moral philosophy. The deepest, the
intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take
refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.
This is manifest in consciousness of sin and in repentance. No one has
attempted to explain these facts otherwise; and no one allows himself to
be persuaded that he must commit this or that act. In the shall there
lies the possibility of the can. The causal determining factors, the
lower motives that act upon him, he is fully aware of, but he remains
conscious of an intelligible ego free to act in a different way from
other egos.

Truth, purity, faithfulness, uprightness, with reference to oneself;
these give the only conceivable ethics. Duty is only duty to oneself,
duty of the empirical ego to the intelligible ego. These appear in the
form of two imperatives that will always put to shame every kind of
psychologismus--the logical law and the moral law. The internal
direction, the categorical imperatives of logic and morality which
dominate all the codes of social utilitarianism are factors that no
empiricism can explain. All empiricism and scepticism, positivism and
relativism, instinctively feel that their principal difficulties lie in
logic and ethics. And so perpetually renewed and fruitless efforts are
made to explain this inward discipline empirically and psychologically.

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty
to oneself. They celebrate their union by the highest service of truth,
which is overshadowed in the one case by error, in the other by untruth.
All ethics are possible only by the laws of logic, and logic is no more
than the ethical side of law. Not only virtue, but also insight, not
only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind.
Through the union of these alone comes perfection.

Ethics, however, the laws of which are postulates, cannot be made the
basis of a logical proof of existence. Ethics are not logical in the
same sense that logic is ethical. Logic proves the absolute actual
existence of the ego; ethics control the form which the actuality
assumes. Ethics dominate logic and make logic part of their contents.

In thinking of the famous passage in the “Critique of Practical Reason,”
where Kant introduces man as a part of the intelligible cosmos, it may
be asked how Kant assured himself that the moral law was inherent in
personality. The answer Kant gave was simply that no other and no nobler
origin could be found for it. He goes no further than to say that the
categorical imperative is the law of the noumenon, belonging to it and
inherent in it from the beginning. That, however, is the nature of
ethics. Ethics make it possible for the intelligible ego to act free
from the shackles of empiricism, and so through ethics, the existence of
whose possibilities logic assures us, is able to become actual in all
its purity.

There remains a most important point in which the Kantian system is
often misunderstood. It reveals itself plainly in every case of
wrong-doing.

Duty is only towards oneself; Kant must have realised this in his
earlier days when first he felt an impulse to lie. Except for a few
indications in Nietzsche, and in Stirner, and a few others, Ibsen alone
seems to have grasped the principle of the Kantian ethics (notably in
“Brand” and “Peer Gynt”). The following two quotations also give the
Kantian view in a general way:

First Hebbel’s epigram, “Lies and Truth.”

“Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth? The former costs you
yourself, the latter at most your happiness.”

Next, the well-known words of Sleika from the “Westöstlichen Diwan”:

  All sorts go to make a world,
  The crowd and the rogue and the hero;
  But the highest fortune of earth’s children
  Is always in their own personality.

  It matters little how a man lives
  If only he is true to himself;
  It matters nothing what a man may lose
  If he remains what he really is.

It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and
they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to
justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at
least the mental side of it), to some one else, whether it be the
personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human
being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the
social law.

Kant was permeated with his conviction, as is conspicuous in the
minutest details of his chosen life-work, that man was responsible only
to himself, to such an extent that he regarded this side of his theory
as self-evident and least likely to be disputed. This silence of Kant
has brought about a misunderstanding of his ethics--the only ethics
tenable from the psychologically introspective standpoint, the only
system according to which the insistent strong inner voice of the one is
to be heard through the noise of the many.

I gather from a passage in his “Anthropology” that even in the case of
Kant some incident in his actual earthly life preceded the “formation of
his character.” The birth of the Kantian ethics, the noblest event in
the history of the world, was the moment when for the first time the
dazzling awful conception came to him, “I am responsible only to myself;
I must follow none other; I must not forget myself even in my work; I am
alone; I am free; I am lord of myself.”

“Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often
and the deeper I dwell on them--the starry vault above me and the moral
law within me. I must not look on them both as veiled in mystery or
think that their majesty places them beyond me. I see them before me,
and they are part of the consciousness of my existence. The first arises
from my position in the outer world of the senses, and links me with the
immeasurable space in which worlds and worlds and systems and systems,
although in immeasurable time, have their ebbs and flows, their
beginnings and ends. The second arises from my invisible self, my
personality, and places me in a world that has true infinity, but which
is evident only to the reason and with which I recognise myself as being
bound, not accidentally as in the other case but in a universal and
necessary union. On the one hand, the consciousness of an endless series
of worlds destroys my sense of importance, making me only one of the
animal creatures which must return its substance again to the planet
(that, too, being no more than a point in space) from whence it came,
after having been in some unknown way endowed with life for a brief
space. The second point of view enhances my importance, makes me an
intelligence, infinite and unconditioned through my personality, the
moral law in which separates me from the animals and from the world of
sense, removes me from the limits of time and space, and links me with
infinity.”

The secret of the critique of practical reason is that man is alone in
the world, in tremendous eternal isolation.

He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far
removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his
necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone.

Thus he becomes one and all; he has the law in him, and so he himself is
the law, and no mere changing caprice. The desire is in him to be only
the law, to be the law that is himself, without afterthought or
forethought. This is the awful conclusion, he has no longer the sense
that there can be duty for him. Nothing is superior to him, to the
isolated absolute unity. But there are no alternatives for him; he must
respond to his own categorical imperatives, absolutely, impartially.
“Freedom,” he cries (for instance, Wagner, or Schopenhauer), “rest,
peace from the enemy; peace, not this endless striving”; and he is
terrified. Even in this wish for freedom there is cowardice; in the
ignominious lament there is desertion as if he were too small for the
fight. What is the use of it all, he cries to the universe; and is at
once ashamed, for he is demanding happiness, and that his own burden
should rest on other shoulders. Kant’s lonely man does not dance or
laugh; he neither brawls nor makes merry; he feels no need to make a
noise, because the universe is so silent around him. To acquiesce in his
loneliness is the splendid supremacy of the Kantian.


CHAPTER VIII

THE “I” PROBLEM AND GENIUS

  “In the beginning the world was nothing but the Âtman, in the form of
  a man. It looked around and saw nothing different to itself. Then it
  cried out once, ‘It is I.’ That is how the word ‘I’ came to be. That
  is why even at the present day, if any one is called, he answers, ‘It
  is I,’ and then recalls his other name, the one he
  bears.”--(Brihadâranyata-Upanishad.)

Many disputations about principles in psychology arise from individual
characterological differences in the disputants. Thus, in the mode that
I have already suggested, characterology might play an important part.
When one person thinks to have discovered this, the other that, by
introspection, characterology would have to show why the results in the
one case should differ from those in the other, or, at least, to point
out in what other respects the persons in question were unlike. I see no
other possible way of clearing up the disputed points of psychology.
Psychology is a science of experiences, and, therefore, it must
proceed from the individual to the general, and not, as in the
supra-individualistic laws of logic and ethics, proceed from the
universal to the individual case. There is no such thing as an empirical
general psychology; and it would be a mistake to approach such without
having fully reckoned with differential psychology.

It is a great pity that psychology has been placed between philosophy
and the analysis of perceptions. From whichever side psychologists
approached the subject, they have always been assured of the general
validity of their results. Perhaps even so fundamental a question as to
whether or no perception itself implies an actual and spontaneous act of
consciousness cannot be solved without a consideration of
characterological differences.

The purpose of this work is to apply characterology to the solution of a
few of these doubtful matters, with special reference to the
distinctions between the sexes. The different conceptions of the
I-problem, however, depend not so much on differences of sex as on
differences in giftedness. The dispute between Hume and Kant receives
its characterological explanation much in the same way as if I were to
distinguish two men in so far as the one held in the highest esteem the
works of Makart and Gounod, the other those of Rembrandt and Beethoven.
I would simply distinguish the two by their giftedness. So also the
judgments about the “I” must be very different in the cases of
differently gifted men. There have been no truly great men who were not
persuaded of the existence of the “I”; a man who denies it cannot be a
great man.

In the course of the following pages this proposition will be taken as
absolutely binding, and will be used really as a means of valuing
genius.

There has been no famous man who, at least some time in the course of
his life, and generally earlier in proportion to his greatness, has not
had a moment in which he was absolutely convinced of the possession of
an ego in the highest sense.

Let us compare the following utterances of three very great geniuses.

Jean Paul relates in his autobiographical sketch, “Truths from my own
Life”:

“I can never forget a circumstance which, so far, has been related by no
one--the birth of my own self-consciousness, the time and place of which
I can tell. One morning I was standing, as a very young child, at the
front door, and looking towards the wood-shed I suddenly saw, all at
once my inner likeness. ‘I’ am ‘I’ flashed like lightning from the skies
across me, and since then has remained. I saw myself then for the first
time and for ever. This cannot be explained as a confusion of memory,
for no alien narrative could have blended itself with this sacred event,
preserved permanently in my memory by its vividness and novelty.”

Novalis, in his “Miscellaneous Fragments,” refers to an identical
experience:

“This factor every one must experience for himself. It is a factor of
the higher order, and reveals itself only to higher men; but men should
strive to induce it in themselves. Philosophy is the exercise of this
factor, it is a true self-revelation, the stimulation of the real ego by
the ideal ego. It is the foundation of all other revelations; the
resolution to philosophise is a challenge to the actual ego, to become
conscious of itself, to grow and to become a soul.”

Schelling discusses the same phenomenon in his “Philosophical Letters
upon Dogmatism and Criticism,” a little known early work, in which occur
the following beautiful words:

“In all of us there dwells a secret marvellous power of freeing
ourselves from the changes of time, of withdrawing to our secret selves
away from external things, and of so discovering to ourselves the
eternal in us in the form of unchangeability. This presentation of
ourselves to ourselves is the most truly personal experience upon which
depends everything that we know of the supra-sensual world. This
presentation shows us for the first time what real existence is, whilst
all else only appears to be. It differs from every presentation of the
sense in its perfect freedom, whilst all other presentations are bound,
being overweighted by the burden of the object. Still there exists for
those who have not this perfect freedom of the inner sense some approach
to it, experiences approaching it from which they may gain some faint
idea of it.... This intellectual presentation occurs when we cease to be
our own object, when, withdrawing into ourselves, the perceiving self
merges in the self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and
duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time, or rather
eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no longer an object for
us, but is lost in us.”

The positivist will perhaps only laugh at the self-deceived deceiver,
the philosopher who asserts that he has had such experiences. Well, it
is not easy to prevent it. It is also unnecessary. But I am by no means
of the opinion that this “factor of a higher order” plays the same part
in all men of genius of a mystical identity of subject and object as
Schelling describes it.

Whether there are undivided experiences in which the dualism of actual
life is overcome, as is indicated by Plotin and the Indian Mahatmas, or
whether this is only the highest intensification of experience, but in
principle similar to all others--does not signify here, the coincidence
of subject and object, of time and eternity, the representing of God
through living men, will neither be demonstrated as possible nor denied
as impossible. The experiencing of one’s own “I” is not to be begun by
theoretical knowledge, and no one has ever, so far, tried to put it in
the position of a systematic philosophy. I shall, therefore, not call
this factor of a higher order, which manifests itself in some men in one
way and in other men in another way, an essential manifestation of the
true ego, but only a phase of it.

Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may become conscious of
it first through the love of a woman, for the great man loves more
intensely than the ordinary man; or it may be from the contrast given by
a sense of guilt or the knowledge of having failed; these, too, the
great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded people. It may lead
him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all things in
God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful
dualism of nature and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the
need, the craving, for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder.
But always it leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of
the world for himself and by himself, without the help of the thought of
others.

This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis elaborated
at his writing-table in his library from all the books that have been
written; it is something that has been experienced, and as a whole it is
clear and intelligible, although details may still be obscure and
contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this
intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in
that of the philosopher. And, however different they may be, if they are
really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they have this in common,
something that comes only from the excitation of the ego, the faith that
every great man possesses, the conviction of his possession of an “I” or
soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe and
comprehends it.

From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in
spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of
mortality, will live in and by his soul.

And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative
powers, that the great man has so intense a self-consciousness. Nothing
can be more unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of
their inability to recognise what is within them. There is no great man
who does not well know how far he differs from others (except during
these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded).
Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created
something; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he
over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than
Kant. Nietzsche declared that “Thus spake Zarathustra” was the greatest
book in the world.

There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that great men are
modest. They are never arrogant. Arrogance and self-realisation are
contradictories, and should never be confused although this is often
done. A man has just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation,
and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially
lowering his estimation of others. Of course the foregoing holds true
only of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance; the
great man must occasionally comport himself with what seems rudeness to
contemptible persons.

All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external
proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that
the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to
the position of the theologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather
than a superstition and is no mere handmaid of religious systems.
Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy
or theology; atheists like Shelley use the expression and know very well
what they mean by it.

Others have suggested that the “soul” is only a beautiful empty word,
which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for
themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to
express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the
existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist
no doubt will consider that all this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is
the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse of the word,
but if great artists speak of their soul they know what they are about.
Artists, like philosophers, know well when they approach the greatest
possible reality, but Hume had no sense of this.

The scientific man ranks, as I have already said, and as I shall
presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. The two latter
may earn the title of genius which must always be denied to the
scientific man. Without any good reason having been assigned for it, it
has usually been the case that the voice of genius on any particular
problem is listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in
this preference? Can the genius explain things as to which the man of
science, as such, can say nothing? Can he peer into depths where the man
of science is blind?

The conception genius concludes universality. If there were an absolute
genius (a convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could
not have a vivid, intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have
already shown, would have universal comprehension, and through its
perfect memory would be independent of time. To comprehend anything one
must have within one something similar. A man notices, understands, and
comprehends only those things with which he has some kinship. The genius
is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious, most
continuous, and most individual ego. The ego is the central point, the
unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness.

The ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal
comprehension, the centre of infinite space; the great man contains the
whole universe within himself; genius is the living microcosm. He is not
an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination of an infinite number of
elements; the argument in chap. iv. as to his relation to other men and
things must not be taken in that sense; he is everything. In him and
through him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real
experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from
parts in the fashion of science. For the genius the ego is the all,
lives as the all; the genius sees nature and all existences as whole;
the relations of things flash on him intuitively; he has not to build
bridges of stones between them. And so the genius cannot be an empirical
psychologist slowly collecting details and linking them by associations;
he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a compound of atoms
and molecules.

It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius
always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything
within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that
for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. And so the man
of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his
genius. That is why his views are more valuable than those of all
others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe,
whilst others never reach a full consciousness of this inner self, and
so, for him, all things have significance, all things are symbolical.
For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases
through the walls of the capillaries; the blue of the sky is more than
the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light; snakes are not
merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single
man to have achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been
made, if everything that has been done by the following: Archimedes and
Lagrange, Johannes Müller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace,
Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucydides and Niebuhr, Friedrich August
Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science, could have
been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would still
not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have
pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they
obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea
and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm,
dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but
he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not
produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome
of a process of oxidation.

And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and
strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems
to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego
have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience
together piece by piece according to rule. The greatest poly-historian,
on the contrary, does nothing but add branch to branch and yet creates
no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist
is lower than the great artist, the great philosopher. The infinity of
the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity
in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all
totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself. Although these
remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of
genius, although the occurrence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic
conceptions, religious fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the
conditions, not the actual process of a really great achievement has
been made clearer, yet this is nevertheless to be the final definition
of genius:

A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with
the whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really
divine spark in mankind.

The great idea of the soul of man as the microcosm, the most important
discovery of the philosophy of the Renaissance--although traces of the
idea are to be found in Plato and Aristotle--appears to be quite
disregarded by modern thinkers since the death of Leibnitz. It has
hitherto been held as only holding good for genius, as the prerogative
of those masters of men.

But the incongruity is only apparent. All mankind have some of the
quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to
which one man draws close whilst another is further away, which is
attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end of life.

The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he
who has begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they then can
see with their own eyes proves that they were only standing before the
door.

Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect
relationship to everything: his idea of the “whole” is only a glimpse,
he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not
without the possibility of following this identification in another, and
so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can
bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make
each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in
all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world.
It is not so with plants or animals. They are limited, they do not know
the whole but only one element; they do not populate the whole earth,
and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has
allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to
the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the
“starry vault” and “the moral law.” For the latter originates in the
soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything
because it is universal itself: the starry heavens and the moral law are
fundamentally one and the same. The universalism of the categorical
imperative is the universalism of the universe.

The infinity of the universe is only the “thought-picture” of the
infinity of the moral volition.

This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles that mighty
magician.

  Γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ’ ὕδωρ,
  Αἰθέρι δ’ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον,
  Στοργῇ δὲ στοργήν, νεῖχος δέ τε νείχεϊ λυγρῷ.

And Plotinus;

                Οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἴδεν
  ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος,

which Goethe imitated in the famous verse:

  “Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
  Die Sonne könnt’ es nie erblicken;
  Läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eig’ne Kraft,
  Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”

Man is the only creature, he is _the_ creature in Nature, that has in
himself a relation to every thing.

He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete
consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things,
the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is
called a genius. He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom
an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own
accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.

The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the
lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this
capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. The man of genius lives in
a state of complete understanding, an understanding of the whole; the
whole world is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can
become creative. The one lives in conscious active relation with the
whole, the other in an unconscious relation; the man of genius is the
actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. The genius is the
complete man; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully
developed.

Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other
parts; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws,
but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as
the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is
unconditioned. The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he
does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional
subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought
forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be
swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the
future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose consciousness
of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror
for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols
and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that is within
him and all that is outside him. He is the freest and the wisest and the
most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from
what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him.

How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to
other men? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which
morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And
certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious
qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusations of base
ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults?

It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philosopher may be,
the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very
way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in
contact in every-day life; these cannot follow his higher flights and
so try to bind the eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way
many great men have been branded as immoral.

Goethe, fortunately for himself, preserved a silence about himself so
complete that modern people who think that they understand him
completely as the light-living Olympian, only know a few specks of him
taken from his marvellous delineation of Faust; we may be certain, none
the less, that he judged himself severely, and suffered in full measure
for the guilt he found in himself. And when an envious Nörgler, who
never grasped Schopenhauer’s doctrine of detachment and the meaning of
his Nirwana, throws the reproach at the latter that he got the last
value out of his property, such a mean yelping requires no answer.

The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on
sure ground; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so
obscuring the judgment of his own ego; he will not passively accept the
interpretation of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his
own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the thought
will always be painful to him. A conscious lie that he has told will
harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the
memory in Dionysian fashion. But men of genius will suffer most when
they become aware afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to
spread a lie in their talk or conduct with others. Other men, who do not
possess this organic thirst for truth, are always deeply involved in
lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great men
against the “lies of life.”

The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by
time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of
his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride
is towards himself; there is the desire in him to impress his own self
by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride
peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is
independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a
higher tribunal. Soft and ascetic natures (Pascal is an example)
sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it
off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others,
but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.

Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself
prejudices the sense of duty towards one’s neighbours? Do not the two
stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself
must break it with others? By no means. As there is only one truth, so
there can be only one desire for truth--what Carlyle called
sincerity--that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to
the world; it is never one of two, a view of the world differing from a
view of oneself, a self-study without a world-study; there is only one
duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if
he is moral towards himself he is moral towards others.

There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as
the conception of moral duty towards one’s neighbours and how it is to
be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the
theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of
human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings
and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general
system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines
the morality of a man by his “goodness,” the degree to which his
compassionate disposition is developed. From the philosophical point of
view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source
of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support
from Schopenhauer’s sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer’s “Essay on the
Foundations of Morality” shows in its motto “It is easy to preach
morality, difficult to find a basis for it,” the fundamental error of
the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science
of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a
search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently to
listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish what he ought
to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is
to be a doctrine of the requirements which man has invented for himself
and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in
furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all
moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.

All attempts to explain ethics by psychology overlook the fact that
every psychic event in man is appraised by man himself, and the
appraiser of the psychic event cannot be a psychic event. This standard
can only be an idea, or a value which is never fully realised, and which
cannot be altered by any experience because it remains constant, even if
all experience is in opposition to it. Moral conduct can be only conduct
controlled by an idea. And so we can choose only from systems of
morality which set up some idea or maxim for the regulation of conduct,
and there are only two to choose from, the ethical socialism or social
ethics, founded by Bentham and Mill, but imported to the Continent and
diligently propagated in Germany and Norway, and ethical individualism
such as is taught by Christianity and German idealism.

The second failure of all the systems of ethics founded on sympathy is
that they attempt to find a foundation for morality, to explain
morality, whilst the very conception of morality is that it should be
the ultimate standard of human conduct, and so must be inexplicable and
non-derivative, must be its own purpose, and cannot be brought into
relation of cause and effect with anything outside itself. This
attempted derivation of morality is simply another aspect of the purely
descriptive, and therefore necessarily, relative, ethics, and is
untenable from the fact that however diligently the search be made, it
is impossible to find in the sphere of causes and effects a high aim
that would be applicable to every moral action. The inspiring motive of
an action cannot come from any nexus of cause and effect; it is much
more in the nature of things for cause and effect to be linked with an
inspiring moral aim. Outside the domain of first causes there lies a
domain of moral aims, and this latter domain is the inheritance of
mankind. The complete science of existence is a linking together of
first causes until the first cause of all is reached, and a complete
science of “oughts” leads to a union of all in one great aim, the
culminating moral imperative.

He who rates sympathy as a positive moral factor has treated as moral
something that is a feeling, not an act. Sympathy may be an ethical
phenomenon, the expression of something ethical, but it is no more an
ethical act than are the senses of shame and pride; we must clearly
distinguish between an ethical act and an ethical phenomenon. Nothing
must be considered an ethical act that is not a confirmation of the
ethical idea by action; ethical phenomena are unpremeditated,
involuntary signs of a permanent tendency of the disposition towards the
moral idea. It is in the struggle between motives that the idea presses
in and seeks to make the decision; the empirical mixture of ethical and
unethical feelings, sympathy and malice, self-confidence and
presumption, gives no help towards a conclusion. Sympathy is, perhaps,
the surest sign of a disposition, but it is not the moral purpose
inspiring an action. Morality must imply conscious knowledge of the
moral purpose and of value as opposed to worthlessness. Socrates was
right in this, and Kant is the only modern philosopher who has followed
him. Sympathy is a non-logical sensation, and has no claim to respect.

The question now before us is to consider how far a man can act morally
with regard to his fellow men.

It is certainly not by unsolicited help which obtrudes itself on the
solitude of another and pierces the limits that he has set for himself;
not by compassion but rather by respect. This respect we owe only to
man, as Kant showed; for man is the only creature in the universe who is
a purpose to himself.

But how can I show a man my contempt, and how prove to him my respect?
The first by ignoring him, the second by being friendly with him.

How can I use him as a means to an end, and how can I honour him by
regarding him himself as an end? In the first case, by looking upon him
as a link in the chain of circumstances with which I have to deal; in
the second, by endeavouring to understand him. It is only by interesting
oneself in a man, without exactly telling him so, by thinking of him, by
grasping his work, by sympathising with his fate, and by seeking to
understand him, that one can respect one’s neighbour. Only he who,
through his own afflictions, has become unselfish, who forgets small
wranglings with his fellow man, who can repress his impatience, and who
endeavours to understand him, is really disinterested with regard to his
neighbour; and he behaves morally because he triumphs over the strongest
enemy to his understanding of his neighbour--selfishness.

How does the famous man stand in this respect? He who understands the
most men, because he is most universal in disposition, and who lives in
the closest relation to the universe at large, who most earnestly
desires to understand its purpose, will be most likely to act well
towards his neighbour.

As a matter of fact, no one thinks so much or so intently as he about
other people (even although he has only seen them for a moment), and no
one tries so hard to understand them if he does not feel that he already
has them within him in all their significance. Inasmuch as he has a
continuous past, a complete ego of his own, he can create the past which
he did not know for others. He follows the strongest bent of his inner
being if he thinks about them, for he seeks only to come to the truth
about them by understanding them. He sees that human beings are all
members of an intelligible world, in which there is no narrow egoism or
altruism. This is the only explanation of how it is that great men stand
in vital, understanding relationship, not only with those round about
them, but with all the personalities of history who have preceded them;
this is the only reason why great artists have grasped historical
personalities so much better and more intensively than scientific
historians. There has been no great man who has not stood in a personal
relationship to Napoleon, Plato, or Mahomet. It is in this way that he
shows his respect and true reverence for those who have lived before
him. When many of those who have been intimate with artists feel
aggrieved when later on they recognise themselves in their works; when
writers are reproached for treating everything as copy, it is easy
enough to understand the feeling. But the artist or author who does not
heed the littlenesses of mankind has committed no crime, he has simply
employed his creative act of understanding with regard to them, by a
single-minded representation and reproduction of the world around him,
and there can be no higher relation between men than this. The following
words of Pascal, which have already been mentioned, are specially
applicable here: “A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il y a
plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de
différence entre les hommes.” It follows from the foregoing that the
greater a man is the greater efforts he will make to understand things
that are most strange to him, whilst the ordinary man readily thinks
that he understands a thing, although it may be something he does not at
all understand, so that he fails to perceive the unfamiliar spirit which
is appealing to him from some object of art or from a philosophy, and at
most attains a superficial relation to the subject, but does not rise to
the inspiration of its creator. The great man who attains to the highest
rungs of consciousness does not easily identify himself and his opinion
with anything he reads, whilst those with a lesser clarity of mind
adopt, and imagine that they absorb, things that in reality are very
different. The man of genius is he whose ego has acquired consciousness.
He is enabled by it to distinguish the fact that others are different,
to perceive the “ego” of other men, even when it is not pronounced
enough for them to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who
feels that every other man is also an ego, a monad, an individual
centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and
a distinct past, he alone is in a position to avoid making use of his
neighbours as means to an end, he, according to the ethics of Kant, will
trace, anticipate, and therefore respect the personality in his
companion (as part of the intelligible universe), and will not merely be
scandalised by him. The psychological condition of all practical
altruism, therefore, is theoretical individualism.

Here lies the bridge between moral conduct towards oneself and moral
conduct towards one’s neighbour, the apparent want of which in the
Kantian philosophy Schopenhauer unjustly regarded as a fault, and
asserted to arise necessarily out of Kant’s first principles.

It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons
take absolutely no interest in their fellow men; they live as if they
were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on
them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour,
and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of his
being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not a man and had no
personality of his own. “I” and “thou” are complementary terms. A man
soonest gains consciousness of himself when he is with other men. This
is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is
alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self-confidence is
damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the
whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime
because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in
practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism; if there is
no “thou,” there is certainly no “I,” and that would mean there is
nothing.

There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that
which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And
this is it: he who feels his own personality, feels it also in others.
For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The
highest individualism is the highest universalism. Ernest Mach is in
great error when he denies the subject, and thinks it is only after the
renunciation of the individual “I” that an ethical relation, which
excludes neglect of the strange “I” and over-estimation of the
individual “I,” may be expected. It has already been seen where the want
of one’s own I leads in relation to one’s neighbour. The I is the
fundamental ground of all social morality. I should never be able to
place myself, as an actual psychological being, in an ethical relation
to a mere bundle of elements. It is possible to imagine such a
relationship; but it is entirely opposed to practical conduct; because
it eliminates the psychological condition necessary for making the moral
idea an actual reality.

We are preparing for a real ethical relation to our fellow men when we
make them conscious that each of them possesses a higher self, a soul,
and that they must realise the souls in others.

This relation is, however, manifested in the most curious manner in the
man of genius. No one suffers so much as he with the people, and,
therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense,
it is certainly only “by suffering” that a man knows. If compassion is
not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge,
it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of
knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius understands men. And
the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all; but
he suffers most through his understanding.

Although I tried to show in an earlier chapter that genius is the factor
which primarily elevates man above the animals, and in connection with
that fact that it is man alone who has a history (this being explained
by the presence in all men of some degree of the quality of genius), I
must return to that earlier side of my argument. Genius involves the
living actuality of the intelligible subject. History manifests itself
only as a social thing, as the “objective spirit,” the individuals as
such playing no part in it, being, in fact, non-historical. Here we see
the threads of our argument converging. If it be the case, and I do not
think that I am wrong, that the timeless, human personality is the
necessary condition of every real ethical relation to our fellow men,
and if individuality is the necessary preliminary to the collective
spirit, then it is clear why the “metaphysical animal” and the
“political animal,” the possessor of genius and the maker of history,
are one and the same, are humanity. And the old controversy is settled;
which comes first, the individual or the community? Both must be equal
and simultaneous.

I think that I have proved at every point that genius is simply the
higher morality. The great man is not only the truest to himself, the
most unforgetful, the one to whom errors and lies are most hateful and
intolerable; he is also the most social, at the same time the most
self-contained, and the most open man. The genius is altogether a higher
form, not merely intellectually, but also morally. In his own person,
the genius reveals the idea of mankind. He represents what man is; he is
the subject whose object is the whole universe which he makes endure for
all time.

Let there be no mistake. Consciousness and consciousness alone is in
itself moral; all unconsciousness is immoral, and all immorality is
unconscious. The “immoral genius,” the “great wicked man,” is,
therefore, a mythical animal, invented by great men in certain moments
of their lives as a possibility, in order (very much against the will of
the Creator) to serve as a bogey for nervous and timid natures, with
which they frighten themselves and other children. No criminal who
prided himself in his deed would speak like Hagen in the
“Götterdämmerung” over Siegfried’s dead body: “Ha, ha, I have slain him;
I, Hagen, gave him his death blow.”

Napoleon and Bacon, who are given as counter-instances, were
intellectually much over-rated or wrongly represented. And Nietzsche is
the least reliable in these matters, when he begins to discuss the
Borgia type. The conception of the diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of
Ahriman, of the “radical evil in human nature,” is exceedingly powerful,
yet it concerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it. It is
a fiction, created in the hours in which great men have struggled
against the evil in themselves.

Universal comprehension, full consciousness, and perfect timelessness
are an ideal condition, ideal even for gifted men; genius is an innate
imperative, which never becomes a fully accomplished fact in human
beings. Hence it is that a man of genius will be the last man to feel
himself in the position to say of himself: “I am a genius.” Genius is,
in its essence, nothing but the full completion of the idea of a man,
and, therefore, every man ought to have some quality of it, and it
should be regarded as a possible principle for every one.

Genius is the highest morality, and, therefore, it is every one’s duty.
Genius is to be attained by a supreme act of the will, in which the
whole universe is affirmed in the individual. Genius is something which
“men of genius” take upon themselves; it is the greatest exertion and
the greatest pride, the greatest misery and the greatest ecstasy to a
man. A man may become a genius if he wishes to.

But at once it will certainly be said: “Very many men would like very
much to be ‘original geniuses,’” and their wish has no effect. But if
these men who “would like very much” had a livelier sense of what is
signified by their wish, if they were aware that genius is identical
with universal responsibility--and until that is grasped it will only be
a wish and not a determination--it is highly probable that a very large
number of these men would cease to wish to become geniuses.

The reason why madness overtakes so many men of genius--fools believe it
comes from the influence of Venus, or the spinal degeneration of
neurasthenics--is that for many the burden becomes too heavy, the task
of bearing the whole world on the shoulders, like Atlas, intolerable for
the smaller, but never for the really mighty minds. But the higher a man
mounts, the greater may be his fall; all genius is a conquering of
chaos, mystery, and darkness, and if it degenerates and goes to pieces,
the ruin is greater in proportion to the success. The genius which runs
to madness is no longer genius; it has chosen happiness instead of
morality. All madness is the outcome of the insupportability of
suffering attached to all consciousness. Sophocles derived his idea that
a man might wish to become mad for this reason, and lets Aias, whose
mind finally gives way, give utterance to these words:

  εν τω φρονειν γαρ μηδεν ἡδιστος βιος.

I shall conclude this chapter with the solemn words, similar to the best
moments of Kant’s style, of Johann Pico von Mirandola, to whom I may
bring some measure of recognition. In his address “on the dignity of
man” the Supreme Being addresses the following words to man:

“Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum peculiare tibi
dedimus, O Adam: ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera tute optaveris,
ea pro voto, pro tua sententia, habeas et possideas. Definita caeteris
natura intra praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur; tu nullis angustiis
coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illam
praefinies. Medium te mundi posui, ut circumspiceres inde commodius
quicquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem, neque terrenum, neque mortalem,
neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque
plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris in
inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora quae sunt
divina, ex tui animi sententia regenerari.

O summam Dei Patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis
felicitatem: cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta
simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt e bulga matris, quod possessura
sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt
futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. _Nascenti homini omniferaria semina et
omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater_; quae quisque excoluerit, illa
adolescent et fructus suos ferent in illo: si vegetalia, planta fiet,
si sensualia, obbrutescet, si rationalia, caeleste evadet animal, si
intellectualia, angelus erit et Dei filius. _Et si nulla creaturarum
sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suac se receperit, unus cum Deo
spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia
constitutus omnibus antestabit”._


CHAPTER IX

MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY

It is now time to return to the actual subject of this investigation in
order to see how far its explanation has been helped by the lengthy
digressions, which must often have seemed wide of the mark.

The consequences of the fundamental principles that have been developed
are of such radical importance to the psychology of the sexes that, even
if the former deductions have been assented to, the present conclusions
may find no acceptance. This is not the place to analyse such a
possibility; but in order to protect the theory I am now going to set
up, from all objections, I shall fully substantiate it in the fullest
possible manner by convincing arguments.

Shortly speaking the matter stands as follows: I have shown that logical
and ethical phenomena come together in the conception of truth as the
ultimate good, and posit the existence of an intelligible ego or a soul,
as a form of being of the highest super-empirical reality. In such a
being as the absolute female there are no logical and ethical phenomena,
and, therefore, the ground for the assumption of a soul is absent. The
absolute female knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and
the words law and duty, duty towards herself, are words which are least
familiar to her. The inference that she is wanting in supersensual
personality is fully justified. The absolute female has no ego.

In a certain sense this is an end of the investigation, a final
conclusion to which all analysis of the female leads. And although this
conclusion, put thus concisely, seems harsh and intolerant, paradoxical
and too abrupt in its novelty, it must be remembered that the author is
not the first who has taken such a view; he is more in the position of
one who has discovered the philosophical grounds for an opinion of long
standing.

The Chinese from time immemorial have denied that women possess a
personal soul. If a Chinaman is asked how many children he has, he
counts only the boys, and will say none if he has only daughters.
Mahomet excluded women from Paradise for the same reason, and on this
view depends the degraded position of women in Oriental countries.

Amongst the philosophers, the opinions of Aristotle must first be
considered. He held that in procreation the male principle was the
formative active agent, the “logos,” whilst the female was the passive
material. When we remember that Aristotle uses the word “soul” for the
active, formative, causative principle, it is plain that his idea was
akin to mine, although, as he actually expressed it, it related only to
the reproductive process; it is clear, moreover, that he, like all the
Greek philosophers except Euripides, paid no heed to woman, and did not
consider her qualities from any other point of view than that of her
share in reproduction.

Amongst the fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origen certainly had a
very low opinion of woman, and St. Augustine, except for his relations
with his mother, seems to have shared their view. At the Renaissance the
Aristotelian conceptions gained many new adherents, amongst whom Jean
Wier (1518-1588) may be cited specially. At that period there was a
general, more sensible and intuitive understanding on the subject, which
is now treated as merely curious, contemporary science having bowed the
knee to other than Aristotelian gods.

In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the characters of Anitra, Rita, and
Irene) and August Strindberg have given utterance to this view. But the
popularity of the idea of the soullessness of woman has been most
attained by the wonderful fairy tales of Fouqué, who obtained the
material for them from Paracelsus, after deep study, and which have been
set to music by E. T. A. Hoffman, Girschner, and Albert Lorzing.

Undine, the soulless Undine, is the platonic idea of woman. In spite of
all bi-sexuality she most really resembles the actuality. The well-known
phrase, “Women have no character,” really means the same thing.
Personality and individuality (intelligible), ego and soul, will and
(intelligible) character, all these are different expressions of the
same actuality, an actuality the male of mankind attains, the female
lacks.

But since the soul of man is the microcosm, and great men are those who
live entirely in and through their souls, the whole universe thus having
its being in them, the female must be described as absolutely without
the quality of genius. The male has everything within him, and, as Pico
of Mirandola put it, only specialises in this or that part of himself.
It is possible for him to attain to the loftiest heights, or to sink to
the lowest depths; he can become like animals, or plants, or even like
women, and so there exist woman-like female men.

The woman, on the other hand, can never become a man. In this consists
the most important limitation to the assertions in the first part of
this work. Whilst I know of many men who are practically completely
psychically female, not merely half so, and have seen a considerable
number of women with masculine traits, I have never yet seen a single
woman who was not fundamentally female, even when this femaleness has
been concealed by various accessories from the person herself, not to
speak of others. One must _be_ (_cf._ chap. i. part I.) either man or
woman, however many peculiarities of both sexes one may have, and this
“_being_,” the problem of this work from the start, is determined by
one’s relation to ethics and logic; but whilst there are people who are
anatomically men and psychically women, there is no such thing as a
person who is physically female and psychically male, notwithstanding
the extreme maleness of their outward appearance and the unwomanliness
of their expression.

We may now give, with certainty, a conclusive answer to the question as
to the giftedness of the sexes: there are women with undoubted traits of
genius, but there is no female genius, and there never has been one (not
even amongst those masculine women of history which were dealt with in
the first part), _and there never can be one_. Those who are in favour
of laxity in these matters, and are anxious to extend and enlarge the
idea of genius in order to make it possible to include women, would
simply by such action destroy the conception of genius. If it is in any
way possible to frame a definition of genius that would thoroughly cover
the ground, I believe that my definition succeeds. And how, then, could
a soulless being possess genius? The possession of genius is identical
with profundity; and if any one were to try to combine woman and
profundity as subject and predicate, he would be contradicted on all
sides. A female genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply
intensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious maleness.

The man of genius possesses, like everything else, the complete female
in himself; but woman herself is only a part of the Universe, and the
part can never be the whole; femaleness can never include genius. This
lack of genius on the part of woman is inevitable because woman is not a
monad, and cannot reflect the Universe.[12]

  [12] It would be a simple matter to introduce at this point a list of
  the works of the most famous women, and show by a few examples how
  little they deserve the title of genius. But it would be a wearisome
  task, and any one who would make use of such a list can easily procure
  it for himself, so that I shall not do so.

The proof of the soullessness of woman is closely connected with much of
what was contained in the earlier chapters. The third chapter explained
that woman has her experiences in the form of henids, whilst those of
men are in an organised form, so that the consciousness of the female is
lower in grade than that of the male. Consciousness, however, is
psychologically a fundamental part of the theory of knowledge. From the
point of view of the theory of knowledge, consciousness and the
possession of a continuous ego, of a transcendental subjective soul, are
identical conceptions. Every ego exists only so far as it is
self-conscious, conscious of the contents of its own thoughts; all real
existence is conscious existence. I can now make an important addition
to the theory of henids. The organised contents of the thoughts of the
male are not merely those of the female articulated and formed, they are
not what was potential in the female becoming actual; from the very
first there is a qualitative difference. The psychical contents of the
male, even whilst they are still in the henid stage that they always try
to emerge from, are already partly conceptual, and it is probable that
even perceptions in the male have a direct tendency towards conceptions.
In the female, on the other hand, there is no trace of conception either
in recognition or in thinking.

The logical axioms are the foundation of all formation of mental
conceptions, and women are devoid of these; the principle of identity is
not for them an inevitable standard, nor do they fence off all other
possibilities from their conception by using the principle of
contradictories. This want of definiteness in the ideas of women is the
source of that “sensitiveness” which gives the widest scope to vague
associations and allows the most radically different things to be
grouped together. And even women with the best and least limited
memories never free themselves from this kind of association by
feelings. For instance, if they “feel reminded” by a word of some
definite colour, or by a human being of some definite thing to
eat--forms of association common with women--they rest content with the
subjective association, and do not try to find out the source of the
comparison, and if there is any relation in it to actual fact. The
complacency and self-satisfaction of women corresponds with what has
been called their intellectual unscrupulousness, and will be referred to
again in connection with their want of the power to form concepts. This
subjection to waves of feeling, this want of respect for conceptions,
this self-appreciation without any attempt to avoid shallowness,
characterise as essentially female the changeable styles of many modern
painters and novelists. Male thought is fundamentally different from
female thought in its craving for definite form, and all art that
consists of moods is essentially a formless art.

The psychical contents of man’s thoughts, therefore, are more than the
explicit realisation of what women think in henids. Woman’s thought is a
sliding and gliding through subjects, a superficial tasting of things
that a man, who studies the depths, would scarcely notice; it is an
extravagant and dainty method of skimming which has no grasp of
accuracy. A woman’s thought is superficial, and touch is the most highly
developed of the female senses, the most notable characteristic of the
woman which she can bring to a high state by her unaided efforts. Touch
necessitates a limiting of the interest to superficialities, it is a
vague effect of the whole and does not depend on definite details. When
a woman “understands” a man (of the possibility or impossibility of any
real understanding I shall speak later) she is simply, so to speak
tasting (however wanting in taste the comparison may be) what he has
thought about her. Since, on her own part, there is no sharp
differentiation, it is plain that she will often think that she herself
has been understood when there is no more present than a vague
similarity of perceptions. The incongruity between the man and woman
depends, in a special measure, on the fact that the contents of the
thoughts of the man are not merely those of the woman in a higher state
of differentiation, but that the two have totally distinct sequences of
thought applied to the same object, conceptual thought in the one and
indistinct sensing in the other; and when what is called “understanding”
in the two cases is compared, the comparison is not between a fully
organised integrated thought and a lower stage of the same process; but
in the understanding of man and woman there is on the one side a
conceptual thought, on the other side an unconceptual “feeling,” a
henid.

The unconceptual nature of the thinking of a woman is simply the result
of her less perfect consciousness, of her want of an ego. It is the
conception that unites the mere complex of perceptions into an object,
and this it does independently of the presence of an actual perception.
The existence of the complex of perceptions is dependent on the will;
the will can shut the eyes and stop the ears so that the person no
longer sees nor hears, but may get drunk or go to sleep and forget. It
is the conception which brings freedom from the eternally subjective,
eternally psychological relativity of the actual perceptions, and which
creates the things in themselves. By its power of forming conceptions
the intellect can spontaneously separate itself from the object;
conversely, it is only when there is a comprehending function that
subject and object can be separated and so distinguished; in all other
cases there is only a mass of like and unlike images present mingling
together without law and order. The conception creates definite
realities from the floating images, the object from the perception, the
object which stands like an enemy opposite the subject that the subject
may measure its strength upon it. The conception is thus the creator of
reality; it is the “transcendental object” of Kant’s “Critique of
Reason,” but it always involves a transcendental “subject.”

It is impossible to say of a mere complex of perceptions that it is like
itself; in the moment that I have made the judgment of identity, the
complex of perceptions has become a concept. And so the conception gives
their value to all processes of verification and all syllogisms; the
conception makes the contents of thought free by binding them. It gives
freedom both to the subject and object; for the two freedoms involve
each other. All freedom is in reality self-binding, both in logic and in
ethics. Man is free only when he himself is the law. And so the function
of making concepts is the power by which man gives himself dignity; he
honours himself by giving freedom to the objective world, by making it
part of the objective body of knowledge to which recourse may be had
when two men differ. The woman cannot in this way set herself over
against realities, she and they swing together capriciously; she cannot
give freedom to her objects as she herself is not free.

The mode in which perceptions acquire independence in conceptions is the
means of getting free from subjectivity. The conception is that about
which I think, write, and speak. And in this way there comes the belief
that I can make judgments concerning it. Hume, Huxley, and other
“immanent” psychologists, tried to identify the conception with a mere
generalisation, so making no distinction between logical and
psychological thought. In doing this they ignored the power of making
judgments. In every judgment there is an act of verification or of
contradiction, an approval or rejection, and the standard for these
judgments, the idea of truth, must be something external to that on what
it is acting. If there are nothing but perceptions, then all perceptions
must have an equal validity, and there can be no standard by which to
form a real world. Empiricism in this fashion really destroys the
reality of experience, and what is called positivism is no more than
nihilism. The idea of a standard of truth, the idea of truth, cannot lie
in experience. In every judgment this idea of the existence of truth is
implicit. The claim to real knowledge depends on this capacity to judge,
involves the conception of the possibility of truth in the judgment.

This claim to be able to reach knowledge is no more than to say that the
subject can judge of the object, can say that the object is true. The
objects on which we make judgments are conceptions; the conception is
what we know. The conception places a subject and an object against one
another, and the judgment then creates a relation between the two. The
attainment of truth simply means that the subject can judge rightly of
the object, and so the function of making judgments is what places the
ego in relation to the all, is what makes a real unity of the ego and
the all possible. And thus we reach an answer to the old problem as to
whether conception or judgment has precedence; the answer is that the
two are necessary to one another. The faculty of making conceptions
cleaves subject and object and unites them again.

A being like the female, without the power of making concepts, is unable
to make judgments. In her “mind” subjective and objective are not
separated; there is no possibility of making judgments, and no
possibility of reaching, or of desiring, truth. No woman is really
interested in science; she may deceive herself and many good men, but
bad psychologists, by thinking so. It may be taken as certain, that
whenever a woman has done something of any little importance in the
scientific world (Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, &c.) it is always
because of some man in the background whom they desire to please in this
way; and it is more often justifiable to say “cherchez l’homme” where
women are concerned than “cherchez la femme” in the case of men.

But there have never been any great discoveries in the world of science
made by women, because the facility for truth only proceeds from a
desire for truth, and the former is always in proportion to the latter.
Woman’s sense of reality is much less than man’s, in spite of much
repetition of the contrary opinion. With women the pursuit of knowledge
is always subordinated to something else, and if this alien impulse is
sufficiently strong they can see sharply and unerringly, but woman will
never be able to see the value of truth in itself and in relation to her
own self. Where there is some check to what she wishes (perhaps
unconsciously) a woman becomes quite uncritical and loses all touch with
reality. This is why women so often believe themselves to have been the
victims of sexual overtures; this is the reason of extreme frequency of
hallucinations of the sense of touch in women, of the intensive reality
of which it is almost impossible for a man to form an idea. This also is
why the imagination of women is composed of lies and errors, whilst the
imagination of the philosopher is the highest form of truth.

The idea of truth is the foundation of everything that deserves the name
of judgment. Knowledge is simply the making of judgments, and thought
itself is simply another name for judgment. Deduction is the necessary
process in making judgments, and involves the propositions of identity
and of contradictories, and, as I have shown, these propositions are not
axiomatic for women.

A psychological proof that the power of making judgments is a masculine
trait lies in the fact that the woman recognises it as such, and that it
acts on her as a tertiary sexual character of the male. A woman always
expects definite convictions in a man, and appropriates them; she has no
understanding of indecision in a man. She always expects a man to talk,
and a man’s speech is to her a sign of his manliness. It is true that
woman has the gift of speech, but she has not the art of talking; she
converses (flirts) or chatters, but she does not talk. She is most
dangerous, however, when she is dumb, for men are only too inclined to
take her quiescence for silence.

The absolute female, then, is devoid not only of the logical rules, but
of the functions of making concepts and judgments which depend on them.
As the very nature of the conceptual faculty consists in posing subject
against object, and as the subject takes its deepest and fullest meaning
from its power of forming judgments on its objects, it is clear that
women cannot be recognised as possessing even the subject.

I must add to the exposition of the non-logical nature of the female
some statements as to her non-moral nature. The profound falseness of
woman, the result of the want in her of a permanent relation to the idea
of truth or to the idea of value, would prove a subject of discussion so
exhaustive that I must go to work another way. There are such endless
imitations of ethics, such confusing copies of morality, that women are
often said to be on a moral plane higher than that of man. I have
already pointed out the need to distinguish between the non-moral and
the immoral, and I now repeat that with regard to women we can talk only
of the non-moral, of the complete absence of a moral sense. It is a
well-known fact of criminal statistics and of daily life that there are
very few female criminals. The apologists of the morality of women
always point to this fact.

But in deciding the question as to the morality of women we have to
consider not if a particular person has objectively sinned against the
idea, but if the person has or has not a subjective centre of being that
can enter into a relation with the idea, a relation the value of which
is lowered when a sin is committed. No doubt the male criminal inherits
his criminal instincts, but none the less he is conscious--in spite of
theories of “moral insanity”--that by his action he has lowered the
value of his claim on life. All criminals are cowardly in this matter,
and there is none of them that thinks he has raised his value and his
self-consciousness by his crime, or that would try to justify it to
himself.

The male criminal has from birth a relation to the idea of value just
like any other man, but the criminal impulse, when it succeeds in
dominating him, destroys this almost completely. Woman, on the contrary,
often believes herself to have acted justly when, as a matter of fact,
she has just done the greatest possible act of meanness; whilst the true
criminal remains mute before reproach, a woman can at once give
indignant expression to her astonishment and anger that any one should
question her perfect right to act in this or that way. Women are
convinced of their own integrity without ever having sat in judgment on
it. The criminal does not, it is true, reflect on himself, but he never
urges his own integrity; he is much more inclined to get rid of the
thought of his integrity,[13] because it might remind him of his guilt:
and in this is the proof that he had a relation to the idea (of truth),
and only objects to be reminded of his unfaithfulness to his better
self. No male criminal has ever believed that his punishment was unjust.
A woman, on the contrary, is convinced of the animosity of her accuser,
and if she does not wish to be convinced of it, no one can persuade her
that she has done wrong.

  [13] A male criminal even feels guilty when he has not actually done
  wrong. He can always accept the reproaches of others as to deception,
  thieving, and so on, even if he has never committed such acts, because
  he knows he is capable of them. So also he always feels himself
  “caught” when any other offender is arrested.

If any one talks to her it usually happens that she bursts into tears,
begs for pardon, and “confesses her fault,” and may really believe that
she feels her guilt; but only when she desires to do so, and the
outbreak of tears has given her a certain sort of satisfaction. The male
criminal is callous; he does not spin round in a trice, as a woman would
do in a similar instance if her accuser knew how to handle her
skilfully.

The personal torture which arises from guilt, which cries aloud in its
anguish at having brought such a stain upon herself, no woman knows, and
an apparent exception (the penitent, who becomes a self-mortifying
devotee,) will certainly prove that a woman only feels a vicarious
guilt.

I am not arguing that woman is evil and anti-moral; I state that she
cannot be really evil; _she is merely non-moral_.

Womanly compassion and female modesty are the two other phenomena which
are generally urged by the defenders of female virtue. It is especially
from womanly kindness, womanly sympathy, that the beautiful descriptions
of the soul of woman have gained most support, and the final argument of
all belief in the superior morality of woman is the conception of her as
the hospital nurse, the tender sister. I am sorry to have to mention
this point, and should not have done so, but I have been forced to do so
by a verbal objection made to me, which can be easily foreseen.

It is very shortsighted of any one to consider the nurse as a proof of
the sympathy of women, because it really implies the opposite. For a man
could never stand the sight of the sufferings of the sick; he would
suffer so intensely that he would be completely upset and incapable of
lengthy attendance on them. Any one who has watched nursing sisters is
astounded at their equanimity and “sweetness” even in the presence of
most terrible death throes; and it is well that it is so, for man, who
cannot stand suffering and death, would make a very bad nurse. A man
would want to assuage the pain and ward off death; in a word, he would
want to _help_; where there is nothing to be done he is better away; it
is only then that nursing is justified and that woman offers herself for
it. But it would be quite wrong to regard this capacity of women in an
ethical aspect.

Here it may be said that for woman the problem of solitude and society
does not exist. She is well adapted for social relations (as, for
instance, those of a companion or sick-nurse), simply because for her
there is no transition from solitude to society. In the case of a man,
the choice between solitude and society is serious when it has to be
made. The woman gives up no solitude when she nurses the sick, as she
would have to do were she to deserve moral credit for her action; a
woman is never in a condition of solitude, and knows neither the love of
it nor the fear of it. The woman is always living in a condition of
fusion with all the human beings she knows, even when she is alone; she
is not a “monad,” for all monads are sharply marked off from other
existences. Women have no definite individual limits; they are not
unlimited in the sense that geniuses have no limits, being one with the
whole world; they are unlimited only in the sense that they are not
marked off from the common stock of mankind.

This sense of continuity with the rest of mankind is a sexual character
of the female, and displays itself in the desire to touch, to be in
contact with, the object of her pity; the mode in which her tenderness
expresses itself is a kind of animal sense of contact. It shows the
absence of the sharp line that separates one real personality from
another. The woman does not respect the sorrow of her neighbour by
silence; she tries to raise him from his grief by speech, feeling that
she must be in physical, rather than spiritual contact with him.

This diffused life, one of the most fundamental qualities of the female
nature, is the cause of the impressibility of all women, their
unreserved and shameless readiness to shed tears on the most ordinary
occasion. It is not without reason that we associate wailing with women,
and think little of a man who sheds tears in public. A woman weeps with
those that weep and laughs with those that laugh--unless she herself is
the cause of the laughter--so that the greater part of female sympathy
is ready-made.

It is only women who demand pity from other people, who weep before them
and claim their sympathy. This is one of the strongest pieces of
evidence for the psychical shamelessness of women. A woman provokes the
compassion of strangers in order to weep with them and be able to pity
herself more than she already does. It is not too much to say that even
when a woman weeps alone she is weeping with those that she knows would
pity her and so intensifying her self-pity by the thought of the pity of
others. Self-pity is eminently a female characteristic; a woman will
associate herself with others, make herself the object of pity for these
others, and then at once, deeply stirred, begin to weep with them about
herself, the poor thing. Perhaps nothing so stirs the feeling of shame
in a man as to detect in himself the impulse towards this self-pity,
this state of mind in which the subject becomes the object.

As Schopenhauer put it, female sympathy is a matter of sobbing and
wailing on the slightest provocation, without the smallest attempt to
control the emotion; on the other hand, all true sorrow, like true
sympathy, just because it is real sorrow, must be reserved; no sorrow
can really be so reserved as sympathy and love, for these make us most
fully conscious of the limits of each personality. Love and its
bashfulness will be considered later on; in the meantime let us be
assured that in sympathy, in genuine masculine sympathy, there is always
a strong feeling of reserve, a sense almost of guilt, because one’s
friend is worse off than oneself, because I am not he, but a being
separated from his being by extraneous circumstances. A man’s sympathy
is the principle of individuality blushing for itself; and hence man’s
sympathy is reserved whilst that of woman is aggressive.

The existence of modesty in women has been discussed already to a
certain extent; I shall have more to say about it in relation with
hysteria. But it is difficult to see how it can be maintained that this
is a female virtue, if one reflect on the readiness with which women
accept the habit of wearing low-necked dresses wherever custom
prescribes it. A person is either modest or immodest, and modesty is not
a quality which can be assumed or discarded from hour to hour.

Strong evidence of the want of modesty in woman is to be derived from
the fact that women dress and undress in the presence of one another
with the greatest freedom, whilst men try to avoid similar
circumstances. Moreover, when women are alone together, they are very
ready to discuss their physical qualities, especially with regard to
their attractiveness for men; whilst men, practically without exception,
avoid all notice of one another’s sexual characters.

I shall return to this subject again. In the meantime I wish to refer to
the argument of the second chapter in this connection. One must be fully
conscious of a thing before one can have a feeling of shame about it,
and so differentiation is as necessary for the sense of shame as for
consciousness. The female, who is only sexual, can appear to be asexual
because she is sexuality itself, and so her sexuality does not stand out
separately from the rest of her being, either in space or in time, as in
the case of the male. Woman can give an impression of being modest
because there is nothing in her to contrast with her sexuality. And so
the woman is always naked or never naked--we may express it either
way--never naked, because the true feeling of nakedness is impossible to
her; always naked, because there is not in her the material for the
sense of relativity by which she could become aware of her nakedness and
so make possible the desire to cover it.

What I have been discussing depends on the actual meaning of the word
“ego” to a woman. If a woman were asked what she meant by her “ego” she
would certainly think of her body. Her superficies, that is the woman’s
ego. The ego of the female is quite correctly described by Mach in his
“Anti-metaphysical Remarks.”

The ego of a woman is the cause of the vanity which is specific of
women. The analogue of this in the male is an emanation of the set of
his will towards his conception of the good, and its objective
expression is a sensitiveness, a desire that no one shall call in
question the possibility of attaining this supreme good. It is his
personality that gives to man his value and his freedom from the
conditions of time. This supreme good, which is beyond price, because,
in the words of Kant, there can be found no equivalent for it, is the
dignity of man. Women, in spite of what Schiller has said, have no
dignity, and the word “lady” was invented to supply this defect, and her
pride will find its expression in what she regards as the supreme good,
that is to say, in the preservation, improvement, and display of her
personal beauty. The pride of the female is something quite peculiar to
herself, something foreign even to the most handsome man, an obsession
by her own body; a pleasure which displays itself, even in the least
handsome girl, by admiring herself in the mirror, by stroking herself
and playing with her own hair, but which comes to its full measure only
in the effect that her body has on man. A woman has no true solitude,
because she is always conscious of herself only in relation to others.
The other side of the vanity of women is the desire to feel that her
body is admired, or, rather, sexually coveted, by a man.

This desire is so strong that there are many women to whom it is
sufficient merely to know that they are coveted.

The vanity of women is, then, always in relation to others; a woman
lives only in the thoughts of others about her. The sensibility of women
is directed to this. A woman never forgets that some one thought her
ugly; a woman never considers herself ugly; the successes of others at
the most only make her think of herself as perhaps less attractive. But
no woman ever believes herself to be anything but beautiful and
desirable when she looks at herself in the glass; she never accepts her
own ugliness as a painful reality as a man would, and never ceases to
try to persuade others of the contrary.

What is the source of this form of vanity, peculiar to the female? It
comes from the absence of an intelligible ego, the only begetter of a
constant and positive sense of value; it is, in fact, that she is devoid
of a sense of personal value. As she sets no store by herself or on
herself, she endeavours to attain to a value in the eyes of others by
exciting their desire and admiration. The only thing which has any
absolute and ultimate value in the world is the soul. “Ye are better
than many sparrows” were Christ’s words to mankind. A woman does not
value herself by the constancy and freedom of her personality; but this
is the only possible method for every creature possessing an ego. But if
a real woman, and this is certainly the case, can only value herself at
the rate of the man who has fixed his choice on her; if it is only
through her husband or lover that she can attain to a value not only in
social and material things, but also in her innermost nature, it follows
that she possesses no personal value, she is devoid of man’s sense of
the value of his own personality for itself. And so women always get
their sense of value from something outside themselves, from their money
or estates, the number and richness of their garments, the position of
their box at the opera, their children, and, above all, their husbands
or lovers. When a woman is quarrelling with another woman, her final
weapon, and the weapon she finds most effective and discomfiting, is to
proclaim her superior social position, her wealth or title, and, above
all, her youthfulness and the devotion of her husband or lover; whereas
a man in similar case would lay himself open to contempt if he relied on
anything except his own personal individuality.

The absence of the soul in woman may also be inferred from the
following: Whilst a woman is stimulated to try to impress a man from the
mere fact that he has paid no attention to her (Goethe gave this as a
practical receipt), the whole life of a woman, in fact, being an
expression of this side of her nature, a man, if a woman treats him
rudely or indifferently, feels repelled by her. Nothing makes a man so
happy as the love of a girl; even if he did not at first return her
love, there is a great probability of love being aroused in him. The
love of a man for whom she does not care is only a gratification of the
vanity of a woman, or an awakening and rousing of slumbering desires. A
woman extends her claims equally to all men on earth.

The shamelessness and heartlessness of women are shown in the way in
which they talk of being loved. A man feels ashamed of being loved,
because he is always in the position of being the active, free agent,
and because he knows that he can never give himself entirely to love,
and there is nothing about which he is so silent, even when there is no
special reason for him to fear that he might compromise the lady by
talking. A woman boasts about her love affairs, and parades them before
other women in order to make them envious of her. Woman does not look
upon a man’s inclination for her so much as a tribute to her actual
worth, or a deep insight into her nature, as the bestowing a value on
her which she otherwise would not have, as the gift to her of an
existence and essence with which she justifies herself before others.

The remark in an earlier chapter about the unfailing memory of woman for
all the compliments she has ever received since childhood is explained
by the foregoing facts. It is from compliments, first of all, that woman
gets a sense of her “value,” and that is why women expect men to be
“polite.” Politeness is the easiest form of pleasing a woman, and
however little it costs a man it is dear to a woman, who never forgets
an attention, and lives upon the most insipid flattery, even in her old
age. One only remembers what possesses a value in one’s eyes; it may
safely be said that it is for compliments women have the most developed
memory. The woman can attain a sense of value by these external aids,
because she does not possess within her an inner standard of value
which diminishes everything outside her. The phenomena of courtesy and
chivalry are simply additional proofs that women have no souls, and that
when a man is being “polite” to a woman he is simply ascribing to her
the minimum sense of personal value, a form of deference to which
importance is attached precisely in the measure that it is
misunderstood.

The non-moral nature of woman reveals itself in the mode in which she
can so easily forget an immoral action she has committed. It is almost
characteristic of a woman that she cannot believe that she has done
wrong, and so is able to deceive both herself and her husband. Men, on
the other hand, remember nothing so well as the guilty episodes of their
lives. Here memory reveals itself as eminently a moral phenomenon.
Forgiving and forgetting, not forgiving and understanding, go together.
When one remembers a lie, one reproaches oneself afresh about it. A
woman forgets, because she does not blame herself for an act of
meanness, because she does not understand it, having no relation to the
moral idea. It is not surprising that she is ready to lie. Women have
been regarded as virtuous, simply because the problem of morality has
not presented itself to them; they have been held to be even more moral
than man; this is simply because they do not understand immorality. The
innocence of a child is not meritorious; if a patriarch could be
innocent he might be praised for it.

Introspection is an attribute confined to males, if we leave out of
account the hysterical self-reproaches of certain women--and
consciousness of guilt and repentance are equally male. The penances
that women lay on themselves, remarkable imitations of the sense of
guilt, will be discussed when I come to deal with what passes for
introspection in the female sex. The “subject” of introspection is the
moral agent; it has a relation to psychical phenomena only in so far as
it sits in judgment on them.

It is quite in the nature of positivism that Comte denies the
possibility of introspection, and throws ridicule on it. For certainly
it is absurd that a psychical event and a judgment of it could coincide
if the interpretations of the positivists be accepted. It is only on the
assumption that there exists an ego unconditioned by time and
intrinsically capable of moral judgments, endowed with memory and with
the power of making comparisons, that we can justify the belief in the
possibility of introspection.

If woman had a sense of her personal value and the will to defend it
against all external attacks she could not be jealous. Apparently all
women are jealous, and jealousy depends on the failure to recognise the
rights of others. Even the jealousy of a mother when she sees another
woman’s daughters married before her own depends simply on her want of
the sense of justice.

Without justice there can be no society, so that jealousy is an
absolutely unsocial quality. The formation of societies in reality
presupposes the existence of true individuality. Woman has no faculty
for the affairs of State or politics, as she has no social inclinations;
and women’s societies, from which men are excluded, are certain to break
up after a short time. The family itself is not really a social
structure; it is essentially unsocial, and men who give up their clubs
and societies after marriage soon rejoin them. I had written this before
the appearance of Heinrich Schurtz’ valuable ethnological work, in which
he shows that associations of men, and not the family, form the
beginnings of society.

Pascal made the wonderful remark that human beings seek society only
because they cannot bear solitude and wish to forget themselves. It is
the fact expressed in these words which puts in harmony my earlier
statement that women had not the faculty of solitude and my present
statement that she is essentially unsociable.

If a woman possessed an “ego” she would have the sense of property both
in her own case and that of others. The thieving instinct, however, is
much more developed in men than in women. So-called “kleptomaniacs”
(those who steal without necessity) are almost exclusively women. Women
understand power and riches but not personal property. When the thefts
of female kleptomaniacs are discovered, the women defend themselves by
saying that it appeared to them as if everything belonged to them. It is
chiefly women who use circulating libraries, especially those who could
quite well afford to buy quantities of books; but, as matter of fact,
they are not more strongly attracted by what they have bought than by
what they have borrowed. In all these matters the relation between
individuality and society comes into view; just as a man must have
personality himself to appreciate the personalities of others, so also
he must acquire a sense of personal right in his own property to respect
the rights of others.

One’s name and a strong devotion to it are even more dependent on
personality than is the sense of property. The facts that confront us
with reference to this are so salient that it is extraordinary to find
so little notice taken of them. Women are not bound to their names with
any strong bond. When they marry they give up their own name and assume
that of their husband without any sense of loss. They allow their
husbands and lovers to call them by new names, delighting in them; and
even when a woman marries a man that she does not love, she has never
been known to suffer any psychical shock at the change of name. The name
is a symbol of individuality; it is only amongst the lowest races on the
face of the earth, such as the bushmen of South Africa, that there are
no personal names, because amongst such as these the desire for
distinguishing individuals from the general stock is not felt. The
fundamental namelessness of the woman is simply a sign of her
undifferentiated personality.

An important observation may be mentioned here and may be confirmed by
every one. Whenever a man enters a place where a woman is, and she
observes him, or hears his step, or even only guesses he is near, she
becomes another person. Her expression and her pose change with
incredible swiftness; she “arranges her fringe” and her bodice, and
rises, or pretends to be engrossed in her work. She is full of a
half-shameless, half-nervous expectation. In many cases one is only in
doubt as to whether she is blushing for her shameless laugh, or laughing
over her shameless blushing.

The soul, personality, character--as Schopenhauer with marvellous sight
recognised--are identical with free-will. And as the female has no ego,
she has no free-will. Only a creature with no will of its own, no
character in the highest sense, could be so easily influenced by the
mere proximity to a man as woman is, who remains in functional
dependence on him instead of in free relationship to him. Woman is the
best medium, the male her best hypnotiser. For this reason alone it is
inconceivable why women can be considered good as doctors; for many
doctors admit that their principal work up to the present--and it will
always be the same--lies in the suggestive influence on their patients.

The female is uniformly more easily hypnotised than the male throughout
the animal world, and it may be seen from the following how closely
hypnotic phenomena are related to the most ordinary events. I have
already described, in discussing female sympathy, how easy it is for
laughter or tears to be induced in females. How impressed she is by
everything in the newspapers! What a martyr she is to the silliest
superstitions! How eagerly she tries every remedy recommended by her
friends!

Whoever is lacking in character is lacking in convictions. The female,
therefore, is credulous, uncritical, and quite unable to understand
Protestantism. Christians are Catholics or Protestants before they are
baptized, but, none the less, it would be unfair to describe Catholicism
as feminine simply because it suits women better. The distinction
between the Catholic and Protestant dispositions is a side of
characterology that would require separate treatment.

It has been exhaustively proved that the female is soulless and
possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom,
character nor will. This conclusion is of the highest significance in
psychology. It implies that the psychology of the male and of the female
must be treated separately. A purely empirical representation of the
psychic life of the female is possible; in the case of the male, all the
psychic life must be considered with reference to the ego, as Kant
foresaw.

The view of Hume (and Mach), which only admits that there are
“impressions” and “thoughts” (ABC and α β γ ...), and which has almost
driven the psyche out of present day psychology, declares that the whole
world is to be considered exclusively as a picture in a reflector, a
sort of kaleidoscope; it merely reduces everything to a dance of the
“elements,” without thought or order; it denies the possibility of
obtaining a secure standpoint for thought; it not only destroys the idea
of truth, and accordingly of reality, the only claims on which
philosophy rests, but it also is to blame for the wretched plight of
modern psychology.

This modern psychology proudly styles itself the “psychology without the
soul,” in imitation of its much over-rated founder, Friedrich Albert
Lange. I think I have proved in this work that without the
acknowledgment of a soul there would be no way of dealing with psychic
phenomena; just as much in the case of the male who has a soul as in the
case of the female who is soulless.

Modern psychology is eminently womanish, and that is why this
comparative investigation of the sexes is so specially instructive, and
it is not without reason that I have delayed pointing out this radical
difference; it is only now that it can be seen what the acceptation of
the ego implies, and how the confusing of masculine and feminine
spiritual life (in the broadest and deepest sense) has been at the root
of all the difficulties and errors into which those who have sought to
establish a universal psychology have fallen.

I must now raise the question--is a psychology of the male possible as a
science? The answer must be that it is not possible. I must be
understood to reject all the investigations of the experimenters, and
those who are still sick with the experimental fever may ask in wonder
if all these have no value? Experimental psychology has not given a
single explanation as to the deeper laws of masculine life; it can be
regarded only as a series of sporadic empirical efforts, and its method
is wrong inasmuch as it seeks to reach the kernel of things by surface
examination, and as it cannot possibly give an explanation of the
deep-seated source of all psychical phenomena. When it has attempted to
discover the real nature of psychical phenomena by measurements of the
physical phenomena that accompany them, it has succeeded in showing that
even in the most favourable cases there is an inconstancy and variation.
The fundamental possibility of reaching the mathematical idea of
knowledge is that the data should be constant. As the mind itself is the
creator of time and space, it is impossible to expect that geometry and
arithmetic should explain the mind, that the creature should explain the
creator.

There can be no scientific psychology of man, for the aim of psychology
is to derive what is not derivative, to prove to every man what his real
nature and essence are, to deduce these. But the possibility of deducing
them would imply that they were not free. As soon as it has been
admitted that the conduct, action, nature, of an individual man can be
determined scientifically, it will be proved that man has no free-will.
Kant and Schopenhauer understood this fully, and, on the other hand,
Hume and Herbart, the founders of modern psychology, did not believe in
free-will. It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation
of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated
efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception
and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an
empirical factor. The will, like the power of judgment, is associated
inevitably with the existence of an ego, or soul. It is not a matter of
experience, it transcends experience, and until psychology recognises
this extraneous factor, it will remain no more than a methodical annex
of physiology and biology. If the soul is only a complex of experiences
it cannot be the factor that makes experiences possible. Modern
psychology in reality denies the existence of the soul, but the soul
rejects modern psychology.

This work has decided in favour of the soul against the absurd and
pitiable psychology without a soul. In fact, it may be doubted if, on
the assumption that the soul exists and has free thought and free-will,
there can be a science of causal laws and self-imposed rules of willing
and thinking. I have no intention of trying to inaugurate a new era of
rational psychology. I wish to follow Kant in positing the existence of
a soul as the unifying and central conception, without which any
explanation or description of psychic life, however faithful in its
details, however sympathetically undertaken, must be wholly
unsatisfying. It is extraordinary how inquirers who have made no attempt
to analyse such phenomena as shame and the sense of guilt, faith and
hope, fear and repentance, love and hate, yearning and solitude, vanity
and sensitiveness, ambition and the desire for immortality, have yet the
courage simply to deny the ego because it does not flaunt itself like
the colour of an orange or the taste of a peach. How can Mach and Hume
account for such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist? Or
again, consider this: no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection
in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend his life in
a room surrounded with mirrors. Can this fear, the fear of the
doppelganger,[14] be explained on Darwinian principles? The word
doppelganger has only to be mentioned to raise a deep dread in the mind
of any man. Empirical psychology cannot explain this; it reaches the
depths. It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of little
children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less secure stage of
society. I have taken this example only to remind the empirical
psychologists that there are many things inexplicable on their
hypotheses.

  [14] It is notable that women are devoid of this fear; female
  doppelgangers are not heard of.

Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a Wagnerite, a
Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth? He objects to be thought a mere
echo. Even Ernst Mach is angry in anticipation at the thought that some
friend will describe him as a Positivist, Idealist, or any other
non-individual term. This feeling must not be confused with the results
of the fact that a man may describe himself as a Wagnerite, and so
forth. The latter is simply a deep approval of Wagnerism, because the
approver is himself a Wagnerite. The man is conscious that his agreement
is in reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a man
will say much about himself that he would not permit another to say of
him. As Cyrano de Bergerac put it:

  “Je me les sers moi-même, avec assez de verve,
  Mais je ne permets pas qu’un autre me les serve.”

It cannot be right to consider such men as Pascal and Newton, on the one
hand, as men of the highest genius, on the other, as limited by a mass
of prejudices which we of the present generation have long overcome. Is
the present generation with its electrical railways and empirical
psychology so much higher than these earlier times? Is culture, if
culture has any real value, to be compared with science, which is always
social and never individual, and to be measured by the number of public
libraries and laboratories? Is culture outside human beings and not
always in human beings?

It is in striking harmony with the ascription to men alone of an
ineffable, inexplicable personality, that in all the authenticated cases
of double or multiple personality the subjects have been women. The
absolute female is capable of sub-division; the male, even to the most
complete characterology and the most acute experiment, is always an
indivisible unit. The male has a central nucleus of his being which has
no parts, and cannot be divided; the female is composite, and so can be
dissociated and cleft.

And so it is most amusing to hear writers talking of the soul of the
woman, of her heart and its mysteries, of the psyche of the modern
woman. It seems almost as if even an accoucheur would have to prove his
capacity by the strength of his belief in the soul of women. Most women,
at least, delight to hear discussions on their souls, although they
know, so far as they can be said to _know_ anything, that the whole
thing is a swindle. The woman as the Sphinx! Never was a more
ridiculous, a more audacious fraud perpetrated. Man is infinitely more
mysterious, incomparably more complicated.

It is only necessary to look at the faces of women one passes in the
streets. There is scarcely one whose expression could not at once be
summed up. The register of woman’s feelings and disposition is so
terribly poor, whereas men’s countenances can scarcely be read after
long and earnest scrutiny.

Finally, I come to the question as to whether there exists a complete
parallelism or a condition of reciprocal interaction between mind and
body. In the case of the female, psycho-physical parallelism exists in
the form of a complete co-ordination between the mental and the
physical; in women the capacity for mental exertion ceases with senile
involution, just as it developed in connection with and in subservience
to the sexual instincts. The intelligence of man never grows as old as
that of the woman, and it is only in isolated cases that degeneration of
the mind is linked with degeneration of the body. Least of all does
mental degeneration accompany the bodily weakness of old age in those
who have genius, the highest development of mental masculinity.

It is only to be expected that the philosophers who most strongly argued
in favour of parallelism, such as Spinoza and Fechner, were also
determinists. In the case of the male, the free intelligible agent who
by his own will can distinguish between good and evil, the existence of
parallelism between mind and body must be rejected.

The question, then, as to the proper view of the psychology of the sexes
may be taken as settled. There has to be faced, however, an
extraordinarily difficult problem that, so far as I know, has not even
been stated yet, but the answer to which, none the less, strongly
supports my view of the soullessness of women.

In the earlier pages of my volume I contrasted the clarity of male
thinking processes with their vagueness in woman, and later on showed
that the power of orderly speech, in which logical judgments are
expressed, acts on women as a male sexual character. Whatever is
sexually attractive to the female must be characteristic of the male.
Firmness in a man’s character makes a sexual impression on a woman,
whilst she is repelled by the pliant man. People often speak of the
moral influence exerted on men by women, when no more is meant than that
women are striving to attain their sexual complements. Women demand
manliness from men, and feel deeply disappointed and full of contempt if
men fail them in this respect. However untruthful or great a flirt a
woman may be, she is bitterly indignant if she discover traces of
coquetry or untruthfulness in a man. She may be as cowardly as she
likes, but the man must be brave. It has been almost completely
overlooked that this is only a sexual egotism seeking to secure the most
satisfactory sexual complement. From the side of empirical observation,
no stronger proof of the soullessness of woman could be drawn than that
she demands a soul in man, that she who is not good in herself demands
goodness from him. The soul is a masculine character, pleasing to women
in the same way and for the same purpose as a masculine body or a
well-trimmed moustache. I may be accused of stating the case coarsely,
but it is none the less true. It is the man’s will that in the last
resort influences a woman most powerfully, and she has a strong faculty
for perceiving whether a man’s “I will” means mere bombast or actual
decision. In the latter case the effect on her is prodigious.

How is it that woman, who is soulless herself, can discern the soul in
man? How can she judge about his morality who is herself non-moral? How
can she grasp his character when she has no character herself? How
appreciate his will when she is herself without will?

These difficult problems lie before us, and their solutions must be
placed on strong foundations, for there will be many attempts to destroy
them.


CHAPTER X

MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION

The chief objection that will be urged against my views is that they
cannot possibly be valid for all women. For some, or even for the
majority, they will be accepted as true, but for the rest----

It was not my original intention to deal with the different kinds of
women. Women may be regarded from many different points of view, and, of
course, care must be taken not to press too hardly what is true for one
extreme type. If the word character be accepted in its common, empirical
signification, then there are differences in women’s characters. All the
properties of the male character find remarkable analogies in the female
sex (an interesting case will be dealt with later on in this chapter);
but in the male the character is always deeply rooted in the sphere of
the intelligible, from which there has come about the lamentable
confusion between the doctrine of the soul and characterology. The
characterological differences amongst women are not rooted so deeply
that they can develop into individuality; and probably there is no
female quality that in the course of the life of a woman cannot be
modified, repressed, or annihilated by the will of a man.

How far such differences in character may exist in cases that have the
same degree of masculinity or of femininity I have not yet been at the
pains to inquire. I have refrained deliberately from this task, because
in my desire to prepare the way for a true orientation of all the
difficult problems connected with my subject I have been anxious not to
raise side issues or to burden the argument with collateral details.

The detailed characterology of women must wait for a detailed treatment,
but even this work has not totally neglected the differences that exist
amongst women; I shall hope to be acquitted of false generalisations if
it be remembered that what I have been saying relates to the female
element, and is true in the same proportion that women possess that
element. However, as it is quite certain that a particular type of woman
will be brought forward in opposition to my conclusions, it is necessary
to consider carefully that type and its contrasting type.

To all the bad and defamatory things that I have said about women, the
conception of woman as a mother will certainly be opposed. But those who
adduce this argument will admit the justice of a simultaneous
consideration of the type that is at the opposite pole from motherhood,
as only in this way is it possible to define clearly in what motherhood
consists and to delimit it from other types.

The type standing at the pole opposite to motherhood is the prostitute.
The contrast is not any more inevitable than the contrast between man
and woman, and certain limits and restrictions will have to be made. But
allowing for these, women will now be treated as falling into two types,
sometimes having in them more of the one type, sometimes more of the
other.

This dichotomy may be misunderstood if I do not distinguish it from a
contrast that is popularly made. It is often said that a woman should be
both mother and mistress. I do not see the sense or the utility of the
distinction involved in the phrase. Is no more meant by “mistress” than
the condition which of necessity must precede motherhood? If that is so,
then no lasting characterological property is involved. For the word
“mistress” tells us nothing about a woman except that she is in a
certain relation to a man. It has nothing to do with her real being; it
is something imposed on her from without. The conception of being loved
tells us nothing about the nature of the person who is loved. The
condition of being loved, whether as mother or mistress, is a merely
accidental, external designation of the individual, whereas the quality
of motherhood is something born in a woman, something deep-seated in her
nature. It is this something that we must investigate.

That motherhood and prostitution are at extreme poles appears probable
simply from the fact that motherly women bear far more children, whilst
the frivolous have few children, and prostitutes are practically
sterile. It must be remembered, of course, that it is not only
prostitutes who belong to the prostitute type; very many so-called
respectable girls and married women belong to it. Accurate analysis of
the type will show that it reaches far beyond the mere women of the
streets. The street-walker differs from the respectable coquette and the
celebrated hetaira only through her incapacity for differentiation, her
complete want of memory, and her habit of living from moment to moment.
If there were but one man and one woman on the earth, the prostitute
type would reveal itself in the relations of the woman to the man.

This fact of limited fertility ought by itself to relieve me from the
necessity of comparing my view of prostitution with the popular view
that would derive what is really deep-seated in the nature of women from
mere social conditions, from the poverty of women and the economic
stress of a society arranged by males, from the difficulty of women
succeeding in a respectable career, or from the existence of a large
bachelor class with the consequent demand for a system of prostitution.
To these suggestions it may well be replied that prostitution is by no
means confined to the poorer classes; that women without any economic
necessity have frequently given way to its appeal; that there are many
situations in shops, offices, post-offices, the telegraph and telephone
services, wherever mere mechanical ability is required, where women are
preferred because, from their lower degree of differentiation, their
demands are smaller; and business men having discovered this in
anticipation of science, readily employ them at a lower rate of wages.
Young prostitutes have often quite as hard an economic battle to fight,
as they must wear expensive clothes, and as they are always charged
excessively high rates for food and lodging. Prostitution is not a
result of social conditions, but of some cause deep in the nature of
women; prostitutes who have been “reclaimed” frequently, even if
provided for, return to their old way of life. It is a curious
circumstance that prostitutes appear to be relatively immune to certain
diseases which readily affect other types of women. I may note finally,
that prostitution is not a modern growth; it has been known from the
earliest times, and even was a part of some ancient religions, as, for
instance, among the Phœnicians.

Prostitution cannot be considered as a state into which men have seduced
women. The man may occasionally be to blame, as, for instance, when a
servant is discharged and finds herself deserted. But where there is no
inclination for a certain course, the course will not be adopted.
Prostitution is foreign to the male element, although the lives of men
are often more laborious and unpleasant than those of women, and male
prostitutes (such as are found amongst waiters, barbers, and so on) are
always advanced sexually intermediate forms. The disposition for and
inclination to prostitution is as organic in a woman as is the capacity
for motherhood.

Of course, I do not mean to suggest that, when any woman becomes a
prostitute, it is because of an irresistible, inborn craving. Probably
most women have both possibilities in them, the mother and the
prostitute. What is to happen in cases of doubt depends on the man who
is able to make the woman a mother, not merely by the physical act but
by a single look at her. Schopenhauer said that a man’s existence dates
from the moment when his father and mother fell in love. That is not
true. The birth of a human being, ideally considered, dates from the
moment when the mother first saw or heard the voice of the father of her
child. Biological and medical science, under the influence of Johannes
Müller, Th. Bischoff, and Darwin have been completely opposed, for the
last sixty years, to the theory of “impression.” I may later attempt to
develop such a theory. For the present I shall remark only that it is
not fatal to the theory of impression that it does not agree with the
view which regards the union of an ovum and spermatazoon as the only
beginning of a new individual; and science will have to deal with it
instead of regarding it as being opposed to all experience and so
rejecting it. In an _a priori_ science such as mathematics, I may take
it for granted that even on the planet Jupiter 2 and 2 could not make 5,
but biology deals only with propositions of relative universality.
Although I support the theory of the existence of such a power of
impression, it must not be supposed that I think that all malformations
and abnormalities, or even any large number of them, are due to it. I go
no further than to say that it is possible for the progeny to be
influenced by a man, although physical relations between him and the
mother have not taken place. And just as Schopenhauer and Goethe were
correct in their theory of colour, although they were in opposition to
all the physicists of the past, present, and future, so Ibsen (in “The
Lady from the Sea”) and Goethe (in “Elective Affinities”) may be right
against all the scientific men who deal with the problems of inheritance
on a purely physical basis.

If a man has an influence on a woman so great that her children of whom
he is not the father resemble him, he must be the absolute sexual
complement of the woman in question. If such cases are very rare, it is
only because there is not much chance of the absolute sexual complements
meeting, and this is no argument against the truth of the views of
Goethe and Ibsen to which I have just referred.

It is a rare chance if a woman meets a man so completely her sexual
complement that his mere presence makes him the father of her children.
And so it is conceivable in the case of many mothers and prostitutes
that their fates have been reversed by accident. On the other hand,
there must be many cases in which the woman remains true to the maternal
type without meeting the necessary man, and also cases where a woman,
even although she meets the man, may be driven none the less into the
prostitute type by her natural instincts.

We have not to face the general occurrence of women as one or other of
two distinct inborn types, the maternal type and the prostitute. The
reality is found between the two. There are certainly no women
absolutely devoid of the prostitute instinct to covet being sexually
excited by any stranger. And there are equally certainly no women
absolutely devoid of all maternal instincts, although I confess that I
have found more cases approaching the absolute prostitute than the
absolute mother.

The essence of motherhood consists, as the most superficial
investigation will reveal, in that the getting of the child is the chief
object of life, whereas in the prostitute sexual relations in themselves
are the end. The investigation of the subject must be pursued by
considering the relation of each type to the child and to sexual
congress.

Consider the relation to the child first. The absolute prostitute thinks
only of the man; the absolute mother thinks only of the child. The best
test case is the relation to the daughter. It is only when there is no
jealousy about her youth or greater beauty, no grudging about the
admiration she wins, but an identification of herself with her daughter
so complete that she is as pleased about her child’s admirers as if they
were her own, that a woman has a claim to the title of perfect mother.

The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only about the child,
would become a mother by any man. It will be found that women who were
devoted to dolls when they were children, and were kind and attentive to
children in their own childhood, are least particular about their
husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match who takes
any notice of them and who satisfies their parents and relatives. When
such a maiden has become a mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to
pay any attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on the
other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children; later on,
she may pretend to care for them as a means of attracting men through
the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please
all men; and since there is no such thing as an ideally perfect type of
mother, there are traces of this desire to please in every woman, as
every man of the world will admit.

Here we can trace at least a formal resemblance between the two types.
Both are careless as to the individuality of their sexual complement.
The one accepts any possible man who can make her a mother, and once
that has been achieved asks nothing more; on this ground only is she to
be described as monogamous. The other is ready to yield herself to any
man who stimulates her erotic desires; that is her only object. From
this description of the two extreme types we may hope to gain some
knowledge of the nature of actual women.

I have to admit that the popular opinion as to the monogamous nature of
women as opposed to the essential polygamy of the male, an opinion I
long held, is erroneous. The contrary is the case. One must not be
misled by the fact that a woman will wait very long for a particular
man, and where possible will choose him who can bestow most value on
her, the most noble, the most famous, the ideal prince. Woman is
distinguished by this desire for value from the animals, who have no
regard for value either for themselves and through themselves, as in the
case of a man, or for another and through another, as in the case of a
woman. But this could be brought forward only by fools as in any way to
the credit of woman, since, indeed, it shows most strongly that she is
devoid of a feeling of personal value. The desire for this demands to be
satisfied, but does not find satisfaction in the moral idea of monogamy.
The man is able to pour forth value, to confer it on the woman; he can
give it, he wishes to give it, but he cannot receive it. The woman seeks
to create as much personal value as possible for herself, and so adheres
to the man who can give her most of it; faithfulness of the man,
however, rests on other grounds. He regards it as the completion of
ideal love, as a fulfilment, even although it is questionable if that
could be attained. His faithfulness springs from the purely masculine
conception of truth, the continuity demanded by the intelligible ego.
One often hears it said that women are more faithful than men; but man’s
faithfulness is a coercion which he exercises on himself, of his own
free will, and with full consciousness. He may not adhere to this
self-imposed contract, but his falling away from it will seem as a wrong
to himself. When he breaks his faith he has suppressed the promptings of
his real nature. For the woman unfaithfulness is an exciting game, in
which the thought of morality plays no part, but which is controlled
only by the desire for safety and reputation. There is no wife who has
not been untrue to her husband in thought, and yet no woman reproaches
herself with this. For a woman pledges her faith lightly and without any
full consciousness of what she does, and breaks it just as lightly and
thoughtlessly as she pledged it. The motive for honouring a pledge can
be found only in man; for a woman does not understand the binding force
of a given word. The examples of female faithfulness that can be adduced
against this are of little value. They are either the slow result of the
habit of sexual acquiescence, or a condition of actual slavery,
dog-like, attentive, full of instinctive tenacious attachment,
comparable with that necessity for actual contact which marks female
sympathy.

The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises
from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by
time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same
person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and
finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of the Catholic
Church. I am not going to discuss the question of marriage or free-love.
Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the
highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the
world with marriage.

None the less marriage could have been invented only by man. No
proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order
into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man’s desire
for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the
history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but
the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.

The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their
child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute
element is strong will perceive her son’s manhood and always stand in a
sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother,
there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For
this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not
to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known
physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her
children and of a wife to her husband.

Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a
woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of
her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her
own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and
unjust in the event of a quarrel.

The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl
is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards
that man who will afterwards become the father of her child; in fact, in
a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the
mother-type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving
wife; the mothers form the enduring root-stock of our race from which
the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his
own impermanence. It is this idea which enables the man to see in the
mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which
gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring
security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence
of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence. In such minutes there
may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious
silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he
is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his
beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, understands him, and
takes care of him (Siegfried and Brünnhilde, Act III.). But this does
not last long. (Siegfried tears himself from Brünnhilde). For a man only
comes to his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises
himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a
man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him.
The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books
that have been written, the chapter on “Death and its Relation to the
Indestructibility of our Nature,” in Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will
and Idea,” is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species
is set down as the only real permanence.

It is the permanence of the race that gives the mother her courage and
fearlessness in contrast with the cowardliness and fear of the
prostitute. It is not the courage of individuality, the moral courage
arising from an inner sense of freedom and personal value, but rather
the desire that the race should be maintained which, acting through the
mother, protects the husband and child. As courage and cowardice belong
respectively to the mother and the prostitute, so is it with that other
pair of contrasting ideas, hope and fear. The absolute mother stands in
a persisting relation to hope; as she lives on through the race, she
does not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting fear of
it.

The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man; she knows
herself to be his anchor; as she is in a secure place, linked in the
chain of the generations, she may be likened to a harbour from which
each new individual sails forth to wander on the high seas. From the
moment of conception onwards the mother is psychically and physically
ready to feed and protect her child. And this protective superiority
extends itself to her lover; she understands all that is simple and
naïve and childlike in him, whilst the prostitute understands best his
caprices and refinements. The mother has the craving to teach her child,
to give him everything, even when the child is represented by the lover;
the prostitute strives to impose herself on the man, to receive
everything from him. The mother as the upholder of the race is friendly
to all its members; it is only when there is an exclusive choice to be
made between her child and others that she becomes hard and relentless;
and so she can be both more full of love and more bitter than the
prostitute.

The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of the race; the
prostitute is completely outside it. The mother is the sole advocate and
priestess of the race. The will of the race to live is embodied in her,
whilst the existence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was
pushing a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality had
relation only to the future generation. That the mother cares only for
the life of her own race is plain from the absence of consideration for
animals shown by the best of mothers. A good mother, with the greatest
peace of mind and content, will slaughter fowl after fowl for her
family. The mother of children is a cruel step-mother to all other
living things.

Another striking aspect of the mother’s relation to the preservation of
the race reveals itself in the matter of food. She cannot bear to see
food wasted, however little may be left over; whilst the prostitute
wilfully squanders the quantities of food and drink she demands. The
mother is stingy and mean; the prostitute open-handed and lavish. The
mother’s object in life is to preserve the race, and her delight is to
see her children eat and to encourage their appetites. And so she
becomes the good housekeeper. Ceres was a good mother, a fact expressed
in her Greek name, Demeter. The mother takes care of the body, but does
not trouble about the mind.[15] The relation between mother and child
remains material from the kissing and hugging of childhood to the
protective care of maturity. All her devotion is for the success and
prosperity of her child in material things.

  [15] Compare the conversation in Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” Act ii., between
  the father of Solveig and Aase (perhaps the best-drawn mother in all
  literature) when they were discussing the search for their son:

  Aase. “We shall find him.”

  Her Husband. “And save his soul.”

  Aase. “And his body.”

Maternal love, then, cannot be truly represented as resting on moral
grounds. Let any one ask himself if he does not believe that his
mother’s love would not be just as great for him if he were a totally
different person. The individuality of the child has no part in the
maternal love; the mere fact of its being her own child is sufficient,
and so the love cannot be regarded as moral. In the love of a man for a
woman, or between persons of the same sex, there is always some
reference to the personal qualities of the individual; a mother’s love
extends itself indifferently to anything that she has borne. It destroys
the moral conception if we realise that the love of a mother for her
child remains the same whether the child becomes a saint or a sinner, a
king or a beggar, an angel or a fiend. Precisely the same conclusion
will be reached from reflecting how children think that they have a
claim on their mother’s love simply because she is their mother.
Maternal love is non-moral because it has no relation to the
individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an
ethical relation only between two individualities. The relation of
mother and child is always a kind of physical reflex. If the little one
suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in the next room, she will
at once rush to it as if she herself had been hurt; and, as the children
grow up, every wish or trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared
by the mother as if they were her own. There is an unbreakable link
between the mother and child, physical, like the cord that united the
two before childbirth. This is the real nature of the maternal relation;
and, for my part, I protest against the fashion in which it is praised,
its very indiscriminate character being made a merit. I believe myself
that many great artists have recognised this, but have chosen to be
silent about it. The extraordinary over-praising of Raphael is losing
ground, and the singers of maternal love are no higher than Fischart or
Richepin.

Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess
it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to
show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin; for all
morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having
no free will, do not possess. The ethical imperative can be heard only
by a rational creature; there is no such thing as natural morality, for
all morality must be self-conscious.

Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that
she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain
of beings that passes through her, place the prostitute in a sense above
the mother, so far at least as it is possible to speak of higher or
lower from the ethical point of view when women are being discussed.

The matron whose whole time is taken up in looking after her husband and
children, who is working in, or superintending the work of, the house,
garden, or other forms of labour, ranks intellectually very low. The
most highly-developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in
poetry, belong to the prostitute category; to these, the Aspasia-type,
must be added the women of the romantic school, foremost among whom must
be placed Karoline Michaelis-Böhmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling.

It coincides with what has been said that only those men are sexually
attracted by the mother-type who have no desire for mental productivity.
The man whose fatherhood is confined to the children of his loins is he
whom we should expect to choose the motherly productive woman. Great men
have always preferred women of the prostitute type.[16] Their choice
falls on the sterile woman, and, if there is issue, it is unfit and
soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood has as little to do with morality as
motherhood. It is non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv.; and it is
illogical, because it deals with illusions. No man ever knows to what
extent he is the father of his own child. And its duration is short and
fleeting; every generation and every race of human beings soon
disappears.

  [16] Wherever I am using this term I refer, of course, not merely to
  mercenary women of the streets.

The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the motherly woman, the type
most upheld as the one and only possible one for women, is accordingly
quite unjustified. Although most men are certain that every woman can
have her consummation only in motherhood, I must confess that the
prostitute--not as a person, but as a phenomenon--is much more estimable
in my opinion.

There are various causes of this universal reverence for the mother.

One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother seems to the man
nearer his ideal of chastity; but the woman who desires children is no
more chaste than the man-coveting prostitute.

The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in the maternal type
by raising her morally (although with no reason) and socially over the
prostitute type. The latter does not submit to any valuations of the man
nor to the ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman; secretly,
as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or flagrantly
as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in opposition to them.
This is the explanation of the social ostracisms, the practical outlawry
which is the present almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother
readily submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because she is
interested only in the child and the preservation of the race.

It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her own life
exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring with it the
punishment of exclusion from society. She is not so brave as the mother,
it is true, being thoroughly cowardly; but she has the correlative of
cowardice, impudence, and she is not ashamed of her shamelessness. She
is naturally inclined to polygamy, and always ready to attract more men
than the one who would suffice as the founder of a family. She gives
free play to the fulfilment of her desire, and feels a queen, and her
most ardent wish is for more power. It is easy to grieve or shock the
motherly woman; no one can injure or offend the prostitute; for the
mother has her honour to defend as the guardian of the species, whilst
the prostitute has forsworn all social respect, and prides herself in
her freedom. The only thought that disturbs her is the possibility of
losing her power. She expects, and cannot think otherwise than that
every man wishes to possess her, that they think of nothing but her, and
live for her. And certainly she possesses the greatest power over men,
the only influence that has a strong effect on the life of humanity that
is not ordered by the regulations of men.

In this lies the analogy between the prostitute and men who have been
famous in politics. As it is only once in many centuries that a great
conqueror arises, like Napoleon or Alexander, so it is with the great
courtesan; but when she does appear she marches triumphantly across the
world.

There is a relationship between such men and courtesans (every
politician is to a certain extent a tribune of the people, and that in
itself implies a kind of prostitution). They have the same feeling for
power, the same demand to be in relations with all men, even the
humblest. Just as the great conqueror believes that he confers a favour
on any one to whom he talks, so also with the prostitute. Observe her as
she talks to a policeman, or buys something in a shop, you see the sense
of conferring a favour explicit in her. And men most readily accept this
view that they are receiving favours from the politician or prostitute
(one may recall how a great genius like Goethe regarded his meeting with
Napoleon at Erfurt; and on the other side we have the myth of Pandora,
and the story of the birth of Venus).

I may now return to the subject of great men of action which I opened
in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man as Carlyle has exalted the man of
action, as, for instance, in his chapter on “The Hero as King.” I have
already shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here that all
great men of action, even the greatest of them, such as Cæsar, Cromwell,
Napoleon, have not hesitated to employ falsehood; that Alexander the
Great did not hesitate to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But
untruthfulness is incompatible with genius. The “Memoirs of Napoleon,”
written at St. Helena, are full of misstatements and watery sophistry,
and his last words, that “he had loved only France,” were an altruistic
pose. Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof
that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses.
One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with
which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the
conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater
than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in
stifling the disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition
was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man may
honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame but personal
ambition will not be his aim. He will not try to knit the whole world to
himself by superficial, transitory bonds, to heap up all the things of
the world in a pyramid over his name. The man of action shares with the
epileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around
him, to make them appanages of his petty self. The great man feels
himself defined and separate from the world, a monad amongst monads,
and, as a true microcosm, he feels the world already within him; he
realises in the fullest sense of personal experience that he has a
definite, assured, intelligible relation to the world whole. The great
tribune and the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off
from the world; they merge with it, and demand it all as decoration or
adornment of their empirical persons, and they are incapable of love,
affection, or friendship.

The king of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the stars is the
perfect image of the conqueror. The great genius honours himself, and
has not to live in a condition of give and take with the populace, as is
necessary for the politician. The great politician makes his voice
resound in the world, but he has also to sing in the streets; he may
make the world his chessboard, but he has also to strut in a booth; he
is no more a despot than he is a beggar for alms. He has to court the
populace, and here he joins with the prostitute. The politician is a man
of the streets. He must be completed by the public. It is the masses
that he requires, not real individualities. If he is not clever he tries
to be rid of the great men, or if, like Napoleon, he is cunning, he
pretends to honour them in order that he may make them harmless. His
dependence on the public makes some such course necessary. A politician
cannot do all that he wishes, even if he is a Napoleon, and if, unlike
Napoleon, he actually wished to realise ideals, he would soon be taught
better by the public, his real master. The will of him who covets power
is bound.

Every emperor is conscious of this relation between himself and the
masses, and has an almost instinctive love of great assemblages of his
people, or his army, or of his electors. Not Marcus Aurelius or
Diocletian, but Kleo, Mark Antony, Themistocles, and Mirabeau are the
embodiments of the real politician. Ambition means going amongst the
people. The tribune has to follow the prostitute in this respect.
According to Emerson, Napoleon used to go _incognito_ amongst the people
to excite their hurrahs and praise. Schiller imagined the same course
for his Wallenstein.

Hitherto the phenomena of the great man of action have been regarded
even by artists and philosophers as unique. I think that my analysis has
shown that there is the strongest resemblance between them and
prostitutes. To see an analogy between Antonius (Cæsar) and Cleopatra
may appear at first far-fetched, but none the less it exists. The great
man of action has to despise his inner life, in order that he may live
altogether “in the world,” and he must perish, like the things of the
world. The prostitute abandons the lasting purpose of her sex, to live
in the instincts of the moment. The great prostitute and the great
tribune are firebrands causing destruction all around them, leaving
death and devastation in their paths, and pass like meteors unconnected
with the course of human life, indifferent to its objects, and soon
disappearing, whilst the genius and the mother work for the future in
silence. The prostitute and the tribune may be called the enemies of
God; they are both anti-moral phenomena.

Great men of action, then, must be excluded from the category of genius.
The true genius, whether he be an artist or a philosopher, is always
strongly marked by his relation to the constructive side of the world.

The motive that actuates the prostitute requires further investigation.
The purpose of the motherly woman was easy to understand; she is the
upholder of the race. But the fundamental idea of prostitution is much
more mysterious, and no one can have meditated long on the subject
without often doubting if it were possible to get an explanation.
Perhaps the relation of the two types to the sexual act may assist the
inquiry. I hope that no one will consider such a subject below the
dignity of a philosopher. The spirit in which the inquiry is made is the
chief matter. It is at least clear that the painters of Leda and Danäe
have pondered over the problem, and many great writers--I have in mind
Zola’s “Confession of Claude,” his “Hortense,” “Renée,” and “Nana,”
Tolstoi’s “Resurrection,” Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” and “Rita,” and above
all the “Sonja” of that great soul Dostoyevski--must have been thinking
of the general problem rather than merely wishing to describe particular
cases.

The maternal woman regards the sexual relations as means to an end; the
prostitute considers them as the end itself. That sexual congress may
have another purpose than mere reproduction is plain, as many animals
and plants are devoid of it. On the other hand, in the animal kingdom
sexual congress is always in connection with reproduction and is never
simply lust; and, moreover, takes place only at times suitable for
breeding. Desire is simply the means employed by nature to secure the
continuity of the species.

Although sexual congress is an end in itself for the prostitute, it must
not be assumed that it is meaningless in the mother-type. Women who are
sexually anæsthetic no doubt exist in both classes, but they are very
rare, and many apparent cases may really be phenomena of hysteria.

The final importance attached by the prostitute to the sexual act is
made plain by the fact that it is only that type in which coquetry
occurs. Coquetry has invariably a sexual significance. Its purpose is to
picture to the man the conquest of the woman before it has occurred, in
order to induce him to make the conquest an actual fact. The readiness
of the type to coquet with every man is an expression of her nature;
whether it proceeds further depends on merely accidental circumstances.

The maternal type regards the sexual act as the beginning of a series of
important events, and so attaches value to it equally with the
prostitute, although in a different fashion. The one is contented,
completed, satisfied; her life is made richer and of fuller meaning to
her by it. The other, for whom the act is everything, the compression
and end of all life, is never satisfied, never to be satisfied, were she
visited by all the men in the world.

The body of a woman, as I have already shown, is sexual throughout, and
the special sexual acts are only intensifications of a distributed
sensation. Here, also, the difference between the two types displays
itself. The prostitute type in coquetting is merely using the general
sexuality of her body as an end in itself; for her there is a difference
only in degree between flirtation and sexual congress. The maternal type
is equally sexual, but with a different purpose; all her life, through
all her body, she is being impregnated. In this fact lies the
explanation of the “impression” which I referred to as being
indubitable, although it is denied by men of science and physicians.

Paternity is a diffused relation. Many instances, disputed by men of
science, point to an influence not brought about directly by the
reproductive cells. White women who have borne a child to a black man,
are said if they bear children afterwards to white men, to have retained
enough impression from the first mate to show an effect on the
subsequent children. All such facts, grouped under the names of
“telegony,” “germinal infection,” and so on, although disputed by
scientists, speak for my view. And so also the motherly woman,
throughout her whole life, is impressed by lovers, by voices, by words,
by inanimate things. All the influences that come to her she turns to
the purpose of her being, to the shaping of her child, and the “actual”
father has to share his paternity with perhaps other men and many other
things.

The woman is impregnated not only through the genital tract but through
every fibre of her being. All life makes an impression on her and throws
its image on her child. This universality, in the purely physical
sphere, is analogous to genius.

It is quite different with the prostitute. Whilst the maternal woman
turns the whole world, the love of her lover, and all the impressions
that she receives to the purposes of the child, the prostitute absorbs
everything for herself. But just as she has this absorbing need of the
man, so the man can get something from her which he fails to find in the
badly dressed, tasteless, pre-occupied maternal type. Something within
him requires pleasure, and this he gets from the daughters of joy.
Unlike the mother, these think of the pleasures of the world, of
dancing, of dressing, of theatres and concerts, of pleasure-resorts.
They know the use of gold, turning it to luxury instead of to comfort,
they flame through the world, making all its ways a triumphant march for
their beautiful bodies.

The prostitute is the great seductress of the world, the female Don
Juan, the being in the woman that knows the art of love, that cultivates
it, teaches it, and enjoys it.

Very deep-seated differences are linked with what I have been
describing. The mother-woman craves for respectability in the man, not
because she grasps its value as an idea, but because it is the supporter
of the life of the world. She herself works, and is not idle like the
prostitute; she is filled with care for the future, and so requires from
the man a corresponding practical responsibility, and will not seduce
him to pleasure. The prostitute, on the other hand, is most attracted by
a careless, idle, dissipated man. A man that has lost self-restraint
repels the mother-woman, is attractive to the prostitute. There are
women who are dissatisfied with a son that is idle at school; there are
others who encourage him. The diligent boy pleases the mother-woman, the
idle and careless boy wins approval from the prostitute type. This
distinction reaches high up amongst the respectable classes of society,
but a salient example of it is seen in the fact that the “bullies” loved
by women of the streets are usually criminals. The souteneur is always a
criminal, a thief, a fraudulent person, or sometimes even a murderer.

I am almost on the point of saying that, however little woman is to be
regarded as immoral (she is only non-moral), prostitution stands in some
deep relation with crime, whilst motherhood is equally bound with the
opposite tendency. We must avoid regarding the prostitute as the female
analogue of the criminal; women, as I have already pointed out, are not
criminals; they are too low in the moral scale for that designation.
None the less, there is a constant connection between the prostitute
type and crime. The great courtesan is comparable with that great
criminal, the conqueror, and readily enters into actual relations with
him; the petty courtesan entertains the thief and the pickpocket. The
mother type is in fact the guardian of the life of the world, the
prostitute type is its enemy. But just as the mother is in harmony, not
with the soul but with the body, so the prostitute is no diabolic
destroyer of the idea, but only a corrupter of empirical phenomena.
Physical life and physical death, both of which are in intimate
connection with the sexual act, are displayed by the woman in her two
capacities of mother and prostitute.

It is still impossible to give a clearer solution than that which I have
attempted, of the real significance of motherhood and prostitution. I am
on an unfamiliar path, almost untrodden by any earlier wayfarer.
Religious myths and philosophy alike have been unable to propound
solutions. I have found some clues however. The anti-moral significance
of prostitution is in harmony with the fact that it appears only amongst
mankind. In all the animal kingdom the females are used only for
reproduction; there are no true females that are sterile. There are
analogies to prostitution, however, amongst male animals; one has only
to think of the display and decoration of the peacock, of the shining
glow-worm, of singing birds, of the love dances of many male birds.
These secondary sexual manifestations, however, are mere advertisements
of sexuality.

Prostitution is a human phenomenon; animals and plants are non-moral;
they are never disposed to immorality and possess only motherhood. Here
is a deep secret, hidden in the nature and origin of mankind. I ought to
correct my earlier exposition by insisting that I have come to regard
the prostitute element as a possibility in all women just as much as the
merely animal capacity for motherhood. It is something which penetrates
the nature of the human female, something with which the most
animal-like mother is tinged, something which corresponds in the human
female, to the characters that separate the human male from the animal
male. Just as the immoral possibility of man is something that
distinguishes him from the male animal, so the quality of the prostitute
distinguishes the human female from the animal female. I shall have
something to say as to the general relation of man to this element in
woman, towards the end of my investigation, but possibly the ultimate
origin of prostitution is a deep mystery into which none can penetrate.


CHAPTER XI

EROTICS AND ÆSTHETICS

The arguments which are in common use to justify a high opinion of woman
have now been examined in all except a few points to which I shall
recur, from the point of view of critical philosophy, and have been
controverted. I hope that I have justified my deliberate choice of
ground, although, indeed, Schopenhauer’s fate should have been a warning
to me. His depreciation of women in his philosophical work “On Women,”
has been frequently attributed to the circumstance that a beautiful
Venetian girl, in whose company he was, fell in love with the extremely
handsome personal appearance of Byron; as if a low opinion of women were
not more likely to come to him who had had the best not the worst
fortune with them.

The practice of merely calling any one who assails woman a misogynist,
instead of refuting argument by argument, has much to commend it. Hatred
is never impartial, and, therefore, to describe a man as having an
animus against the object of his criticism, is at once to lay him open
to the charge of insincerity, immorality, and partiality, and one that
can be made with a hyperbole of accusation and evasion of the point,
which only equal its lack of justification. This sort of answer never
fails in its object, which is to exempt the vindicator from refuting the
actual statements. It is the oldest and handiest weapon of the large
majority of men, who never wish to see woman as she is. No men who
really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men
either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.

There is no doubt that it is a fallacious method in a theoretical
argument to refer to one’s opponent’s psychological motives instead of
bringing forward proofs to controvert his statements.

It is not necessary for me to say that in logical controversy the
adversaries should place themselves under an impersonal conception of
truth, and their aim should be to reach a result, irrespective of their
own concrete opinions. If, however, in an argument, one side has come to
a certain conclusion by a logical chain of reasoning, and the other side
merely opposes the conclusion without having followed the reasoning
process, it is at once fair and appropriate to examine the psychological
motives which have induced the adversaries to abandon argument for
abuse. I shall now put the champions of women to the test and see how
much of their attitude is due to sentimentality, how much of it is
disinterested, and how much due to selfish motives.

All objections raised against those who despise women arise from the
erotic relations in which man stands to woman. This relationship is
absolutely different from the purely sexual attraction which occurs in
the animal world, and plays a most important part in human affairs. It
is quite erroneous to say that sexuality and eroticism, sexual impulse
and love, are fundamentally one and the same thing, the second an
embellishing, refining, spiritualising sublimation of the first;
although practically all medical men hold this view, and even such men
as Kant and Schopenhauer thought so. Before I go into the reasons for
maintaining the existence of this great distinction, I should like to
say something about the views of these two men.

Kant’s opinion is not of much weight, because love as sexual impulse
must have been as little known to him as possible, probably less than in
the case of any other man. He was so little erotic that he never felt
the kindred desire to travel.[17] He represents too lofty and pure a
type to speak with authority on this matter: his one passion was
metaphysics.

  [17] The association of these two desires may surprise readers. It
  rests on a metaphysical ground, much of which will be more apparent
  when I have developed my theory of eroticism further. Time, like
  space, is conceived of as unlimited, and man, in his desire for
  freedom, in his efforts stimulated by his power of free will to
  transcend his limits, has the craving for unlimited time and unlimited
  space. The desire for travel is simply an expression of this
  restlessness, this fundamental chafing of the spirit against its
  bonds. But just as eternity is not prolonged time, but the negation of
  time, so however far a man wanders, he can extend his area but cannot
  abolish space. And so his efforts to transcend space must always be
  heroic failures: I shall show that his eroticism is a similar notable
  failure.

As for Schopenhauer, he had just as little idea of the higher form of
eroticism; his sexuality was of the gross order. This can be seen from
the following: Schopenhauer’s countenance shows very little kindliness
and a good deal of fierceness (a circumstance which must have caused him
great sorrow. There is no exhibition of ethical sympathy if one is very
sorry for oneself. The most sympathetic persons are those who, like Kant
and Nietzsche, have no particle of self-pity).

But it may be said with safety that only those who are most sympathetic
are capable of a strong passion: those “who take no interest in things”
are incapable of love. This does not imply that they have diabolical
natures. They may, on the contrary, stand very high morally without
knowing what their neighbours are thinking or doing, and without having
a sense for other than sexual relations with women, as was the case with
Schopenhauer. He was a man who knew only too well what the sexual
impulse was, but he never was in love; if that were not so, the bias in
his famous work, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” would be
inexplicable; in it the most important doctrine is that the unconscious
goal of all love is nothing more than “the formation of the next
generation.”

This view, as I hope to prove, is false. It is true that a love entirely
without sexuality has never been known. However high a man may stand he
is still a being with senses. What absolutely disposes of the opposite
view is this: all love, as such--without going into æsthetic principles
of love--is antagonistic to those elements (of the relationship) which
press towards sexual union; in fact, such elements tend to negate love.
Love and desire are two unlike, mutually exclusive, opposing conditions,
and during the time a man really loves, the thought of physical union
with the object of his love is insupportable. Because there is no hope
which is entirely free from fear does not alter the fact that hope and
fear are utterly opposite principles. It is just the same in the case of
sexual impulse and love. The more erotic a man is the less he will be
troubled with his sexuality, and _vice versâ_.

If it be the case that there is no adoration utterly free from desire,
there is no reason why the two should be identified, since it might be
possible for a superior being to attain the highest phases of both. That
person lies, or has never known what love is, who says he loves a woman
whom he desires; so much difference is there between sexual impulse and
love. This is what makes talk of love after marriage seem, in most
cases, make-believe.

The following will show how obtuse the view of those is who persist,
with unconscious cynicism, in maintaining the identity of love and
sexual impulse. Sexual attraction increases with physical proximity;
love is strongest in the absence of the loved one; it needs separation,
a certain distance, to preserve it. In fact, what all the travels in the
world could not achieve, what time could not accomplish, may be brought
about by accidental, unintentional, physical contact with the beloved
object, in which the sexual impulse is awakened, and which suffices to
kill love on the spot. Then, again, in the case of more highly
differentiated, great men, the type of girl desired, and the type of
girl loved but never desired, are always totally different in face,
form, and disposition; they are two different beings.

Then there is the “platonic love,” which professors of psychiatry have
such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only “platonic”
love, because any other so-called love belongs to the kingdom of the
senses: it is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madonna; the
Babylonian woman is the symbol of sexual desire.

Kant’s enumeration of the transcendental ideas of love would have to be
extended if it is to be held. For the purely spiritual love, the love of
Plato and Bruno, which is absolutely free from desire, is none the less
a transcendental concept; nor is its significance as a concept impaired,
because such a love has never been fully realised.

It is the problem put forward in “Tannhäuser.” We have Tannhäuser,
Wolfram, Venus, and Maria. The fact that two lovers, who have found each
other once for all--Tristan and Isolde--choose death instead of the
bridal bed, is just as absolute a proof of a higher, maybe metaphysical,
something in mankind, as the martyrdom of a Giordano Bruno.

  “Dir, hohe Liebe, töne
  Begeistert mein Gesang,
  Die mir in Engelschöne
  Tief in die Seele drang!
  Du nahst als Gott gesandte:
  Ich folg’ aus holder Fern’,--
  So führst du in die Lande,
  Wo ewig strahlt dein Stern.”

Who is the object of such love? Is it woman, as she has been represented
in this work, who lacks all higher qualities, who gets her value from
another, who has no power to attain value on her own account?
Impossible. It is the ideally beautiful, the immaculate woman, who is
loved in such high fashion. The source of this beauty and chastity in
women must now be found.

The question as to whether the female sex is the more beautiful, and as
to whether it deserves the title of “the” beautiful, has been much
disputed.

It may be well to consider by whom and how far woman is considered
beautiful.

It is well known that woman is not most beautiful in the nude. I admit
that in pictures or statues the nude female may look well. But the
sexual impulse makes it impossible to look at a living woman in a nude
condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an
essential feature in judging any object of beauty. But apart from this,
an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of
something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incompatible with beauty.

A nude woman may be beautiful in details, but the general effect is not
beautiful; she inevitably creates the feeling that she is looking for
something, and this induces disinclination rather than desire in the
spectator. The sight of an upright female form, in the nude, makes most
patent her purposelessness, the sense of her purpose in life being
derived from something outside herself; in the recumbent position this
feeling is greatly diminished. It is evident that artists have perceived
this in reproducing the nude.

But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not
even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are
the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically
beautiful. If the idea were justified that man’s love for woman is the
direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer
that “the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed
sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by
the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of
the beauty of woman,” it would follow that the genitalia could not be
excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy
exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful,
and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to
the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to
the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has
least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she
is a woman.

A woman’s nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense
of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the
statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of
clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises
from those who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man
who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as
such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no
longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only
one case of shamelessness--a declaration of love the sincerity of which
a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent
the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of
love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their
readiness to believe such protestations.

The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and
what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in
æsthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract
truth which is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good
which furnishes the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of
the good is established by the determination to link the will with the
good. In æsthetics beauty is created by love; there is no determining
law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself
to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is
no abstract, no super-individual “right” taste).

All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the requirements
of love; and so the beauty of woman is not apart from love, it is not an
objective to which love is directed, but woman’s beauty is the love of
man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing.

Just as hatefulness comes from hating, so love creates beauty. This is
only another way of expressing the fact that beauty has as little to do
with the sexual impulse as the sexual impulse has to do with love.
Beauty is something that can neither be felt, touched, nor mixed with
other things; it is only at a distance that it can be plainly discerned,
and when it is approached it withdraws itself. The sexual impulse which
seeks for sexual union with woman is a denial of such beauty; the woman
who has been possessed and enjoyed, will never again be worshipped for
her beauty.

I now come to the second question: what are the innocence and morality
of a woman?

It will be convenient to start with a few facts that concern the origin
of all love. Bodily cleanliness, as has often been remarked, is in men a
general indication of morality and rectitude; or at least it may be said
that uncleanly men are seldom of high character. It may be noticed that
when men, who formerly paid little attention to bodily cleanliness,
begin to strive for a higher perfection of character, they at the same
time take more trouble with the care of the body. In the same way, when
men suddenly become imbued with passion they experience a simultaneous
desire for bodily cleanliness, and it may almost be said of them that
only at such a time do they wash themselves thoroughly. If we now turn
to gifted men, we shall see that in their case love frequently begins
with self-mortification, humiliation, and restraint. A moral change sets
in, a process of purification seems to emanate from the object loved,
even if her lover has never spoken to her, or only seen her a few times
in the distance. It is, then, impossible that this process should have
its origin in that person: very often it may be a bread-and-butter miss,
a stolid lump, more often a sensuous coquette, in whom no one can see
the marvellous characteristics with which his love endows her, save her
lover. Can any one believe that it is a concrete person who is loved?
Does she not in reality serve as the starting point for incomparably
greater emotions than she could inspire?

In love, man is only loving himself. Not his empirical self, not the
weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and smallnesses which he
outwardly exhibits; but all that he wants to be, all that he ought to
be, his truest, deepest, intelligible nature, free from all fetters of
necessity, from all taint of earth.

In his actual physical existence, this being is limited by space and
time and by the shackles of the senses; however deep he may look into
himself, he finds himself damaged and spotted, and sees nowhere the
image of speckless purity for which he seeks. And yet there is nothing
he covets so much as to realise his own ideal, to find his real higher
self. And as he cannot find this true self within himself, he has to
seek it without himself. He projects his ideal of an absolutely worthy
existence, the ideal that he is unable to isolate within himself, upon
another human being, and this act, and this alone, is none other than
love and the significance of love. Only a person who has done wrong and
is conscious of it can love, and so a child can never love. It is only
because love represents the highest, most unattainable goal of all
longing, because it cannot be realised in experience but must remain an
idea; only because it is localised on some other human being, and yet
remains at a distance, so that the ideal never attains its realisation;
only because of such conditions can love be associated with the
awakening of the desire for purification, with the reaching after a goal
that is purely spiritual, and so cannot be blemished by physical union
with the beloved person; only thus, is love the highest and strongest
effort of the will towards the supreme good; only thus does it bring the
true being of man to a state between body and spirit, between the senses
and the moral nature, between God and the beasts. A human being only
finds himself when, in this fashion, he loves. And thus it comes about
that only when they love do many men realise the existence of their own
personality and of the personality of another, that “I” and “thou”
become for them more than grammatical expressions. And so also comes
about the great part played in their love story by the names of the two
lovers. There is no doubt but that it is through love that many men
first come to know of their own real nature, and to be convinced that
they possess a soul.

It is this which makes a lover desire to keep his beloved at a
distance--on no account to injure her purity by contact with him--in
order to assure himself of her and of his own existence. Many an
inflexible empiricist, coming under the influence of love, becomes an
enthusiastic mystic; the most striking example being Auguste Comte, the
founder of positivism, whose whole theories were revolutionised by his
feelings for Clotilde de Vaux.

It is not only for the artist, but for the whole of mankind that _Amo,
ergo sum_ holds good psychologically.

Love is a phenomenon of projection just as hate is, not a phenomenon of
equation as friendship is. The latter presupposes an equality of both
individuals: love always implies inequality, disproportion. To endow an
individual with all that one might be and yet never can be, to make her
ideal--that is love. Beauty is the symbol of this act of worship. It is
this that so often surprises and angers a lover when he is convinced
that beauty does not imply morality in a woman. He feels that the nature
of the offence is increased by “such depravity” being possible in
conjunction with such “beauty.” He is not aware that the woman in
question seems beautiful to him because he still loves her; otherwise
the incongruity between the external and internal would no longer pain
him.

The reason an ordinary prostitute can never seem beautiful is because it
is naturally impossible to endow her with the projection of value; she
can satisfy only the taste of vulgar minds. She is the mate of the worst
sort of men. In this we have the explanation of a relation utterly
opposed to morality: woman in general is simply indifferent to ethics,
she is non-moral, and, therefore, unlike the anti-moral criminal, who is
instinctively disliked, or the devil who is hideous in every one’s
imagination, serves as a receptacle for projected worthiness; as she
neither does good nor evil, she neither resists nor resents this
imposition of the ideal on her personality. It is patent that woman’s
morality is acquired; but this morality is man’s, which he in an access
of supreme love and devotion has conveyed to her.

Since all beauty is always only the constantly renewed endeavour to
embody the highest form of value, there is a pre-eminently satisfying
element in it, in the face of which all desire, all self-seeking fade
away.

All forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the æsthetic
function, are in reality also attempts on his part to realise the ideal.
Beauty is the symbol of perfection in being. Therefore beauty is
inviolable; it is static and not dynamic; so that any alteration with
regard to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of personal
worthiness, the love of perfection, materialise in the idea of beauty.
And so the beauty of nature is born, a beauty that the criminal can
never know, as ethics first create nature. Thus it is that nature always
and everywhere, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impression
of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal symbol of the moral
law, as natural beauty is the manifestation of nobility of the soul;
logic thus becomes the embodiment of ethics! Just as love creates a new
woman for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of the
All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the universe; and
just as there is no natural beauty without form, without a law of
nature, so also there is no art without form, no artistic beauty which
does not conform to the laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a
realisation of artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of
the moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose image is
enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which the artist regards as his
teacher, is the law which he creates out of his own being.

I return to my own theme from these analyses of art, which are no more
than elaborations of the thoughts of Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller
writing under their influence). The main proposition for which I have
argued is that man’s belief in the morality of woman, his projection of
his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman as beautiful, are
one and the same thing, the second being the sensuous side of the first.

It is thus intelligible, although an inversion of the truth, when, in
morality, a beautiful soul is spoken of, or when, following Shaftesbury
and Herbart, ethics are subordinated to æsthetics; following Socrates
and Plato we may identify the good and the beautiful, but we must not
forget that beauty is only a bodily image in which morality tries to
represent itself, that all æsthetics are created by ethics. Every
individual and temporal presentation of this attempted incarnation must
necessarily be illusory, and can have no more than a fictitious reality.
And so all individual cases of beauty are impermanent; the love that is
directed to a woman must perish with the age of the woman. The idea of
beauty is the idea of nature and is permanent, whilst every beautiful
thing, every part of nature, is perishable. The eternal can realise
itself in the limited and the concrete only by an illusion; it is
self-deception to seek the fulness of love in a woman. As all love that
attaches itself to a person must be impermanent, the love of woman is
doomed to unhappiness. All such love has this source of failure inherent
in it. It is an heroic attempt to seek for permanent worth where there
is no worth. The love that is attached to enduring worth is attached to
the absolute, to the idea of God, whether that idea be a pantheistic
conception of enduring nature, or remain transcendental; the love that
attaches itself to an individual thing, as to a woman, must fail.

I have already partly explained why man takes this burden on himself.
Just as hatred is a projection of our own evil qualities on other
persons in order that we may stand apart from them and hate them; just
as the devil was invented to serve as a vehicle of all the evil impulses
in man; so love has the purpose of helping man in his battle for good,
when he feels that he himself is not strong enough. Love and hate are
alike forms of cowardice. In hate we picture to ourselves that our own
hateful qualities exist in another, and by so doing we feel ourselves
partly freed from them. In love we project what is good in us, and so
having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and
value them.

Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from
the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound
down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their
real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality.
Sexuality uses the woman as the means to produce pleasure and children
of the body; erotics use her as the means to create worth and children
of the soul. A little understood conception of Plato is full of the
deepest meaning: that love is not directed towards beauty, but towards
the procreation of beauty; that it seeks to win immortality for the
things of the mind, just as the lower sexual impulse is directed towards
the perpetuation of the species.

It is more than a merely formal analogy, a superficial, verbal
resemblance, to speak of the fruitfulness of the mind, of its conception
and reproduction, or, in the words of Plato, to speak of the children of
the soul. As bodily sexuality is the effort of an organic being to
perpetuate its own form, so love is the attempt to make permanent one’s
own soul or individuality. Sexuality and love are alike the effort to
realise oneself, the one by a bodily image, the other by an image of the
soul. But it is only the man of genius who can approach this entirely
unsensuous love, and it is only he who seeks to produce eternal children
in whom his deepest nature shall live for ever.

The parallel may be carried further. Since Novalis first called
attention to it, many have insisted on the association between sexual
desire and cruelty. All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction,
birth, and death are indissolubly associated; the thought of untimely
death awakens sexual desire in its fiercest form, as the determination
to reproduce oneself. And so sexual union, considered ethically,
psychologically, and biologically, is allied to murder; it is the
negation of the woman and the man; in its extreme case it robs them of
their consciousness to give life to the child. The highest form of
eroticism, as much as the lowest form of sexuality, uses the woman not
for herself but as means to an end--to preserve the individuality of the
artist. The artist has used the woman merely as the screen on which to
project his own idea.

The real psychology of the loved woman is always a matter of
indifference. In the moment when a man loves a woman, he neither
understands her nor wishes to understand her, although understanding is
the only moral basis of association in mankind. A human being cannot
love another that he fully understands, because he would then
necessarily see the imperfections which are an inevitable part of the
human individual, and love can attach itself only to perfection. Love of
a woman is possible only when it does not consider her real qualities,
and so is able to replace the actual psychical reality by a different
and quite imaginary reality. The attempt to realise one’s ideal in a
woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the
empirical personality of the woman. And so the attempt is cruel to the
woman; it is the egoism of love that disregards the woman, and cares
nothing for her real inner life.

Thus the parallel between sexuality and love is complete. Love is
murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and
the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence. Ordinary
sexuality regards the woman only as a means of gratifying passion or of
begetting children. The higher eroticism is merciless to the woman,
requiring her to be merely the vehicle of a projected personality, or
the mother of psychical children. Love is not only anti-logical, as it
denies the objective truth of the woman and requires only an illusory
image of her, but it is anti-ethical with regard to her.

I am far from despising the heights to which this eroticism may reach,
as, for instance, in Madonna worship. Who could blind his eyes to the
amazing phenomenon presented by Dante? It was an extraordinary
transference of his own ideal to the person of a concrete woman whom the
artist had seen only once and when she was a young girl, and who for all
he knew might have grown up into a Xantippe. The complete neglect of
whatever worth the woman herself might have had, in order that she might
better serve as the vehicle of his projected conception of worthiness,
was never more clearly exhibited. And the three-fold immorality of this
higher eroticism becomes more plain than ever. It is an unlimited
selfishness with regard to the actual woman, as she is wholly rejected
for the ideal woman. It is a felony towards the lover himself, inasmuch
as he detaches virtue and worthiness from himself; and it is a
deliberate turning away from the truth, a preferring of sham to reality.

The last form in which the immorality reveals itself is that love
prevents the worthlessness of woman from being realised, inasmuch as it
always replaced her by an imaginary projection. Madonna worship itself
is fundamentally immoral, inasmuch as it is a shutting of the eyes to
truth. The Madonna worship of the great artists is a destruction of
woman, and is possible only by a complete neglect of the women as they
exist in experience, a replacement of actuality by a symbol, a
re-creation of woman to serve the purposes of man, and a murder of woman
as she exists.

When a particular man attracts a particular woman the influence is not
his beauty. Only man has an instinct for beauty, and the ideals of both
manly beauty and of womanly beauty have been created by man, not by
woman. The qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of developed
sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the higher mind.
Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper, and her worship is permeated
with a fear like that of a bird for a snake, of a man for the fabled
Medusa head, as she feels that the object of her adoration is the power
that will destroy her.

The course of my argument is now apparent. As logic and ethics have a
relation only to man, it was not to be expected that woman would stand
in any better position with regard to æsthetics. Æsthetics and logic are
closely interconnected, as is apparent in philosophy, in mathematics, in
artistic work, and in music. I have now shown the intimate relation of
æsthetics to ethics. As Kant showed, æsthetics, just as much as ethics
and logic, depend on the free will of the subject. As the woman has not
free will, she cannot have the faculty of projecting beauty outside
herself.

The foregoing involves the proposition that woman cannot love. Women
have made no ideal of man to correspond with the male conception of the
Madonna. What woman requires from man is not purity, chastity, morality,
but something else. Woman is incapable of desiring virtue in a man.

It is almost an insoluble riddle that woman, herself incapable of love,
should attract the love of man. It has seemed to me a possible myth or
parable, that in the beginning, when men became men by some miraculous
act of God, a soul was bestowed only on them. Men, when they love, are
partly conscious of this deep injustice to woman, and make the fruitless
but heroic effort to give her their own soul. But such a speculation is
outside the limits of either science or philosophy.

I have now shown what woman does not wish; there remains to show what
she does wish, and how this wish is diametrically opposed to the will of
man.


CHAPTER XII

THE NATURE OF WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE IN THE UNIVERSE

  “Erst Mann und Weib zusammen
  Machen den Menschen aus.”--KANT.

The further we go in the analysis of woman’s claim to esteem the more we
must deny her of what is lofty and noble, great and beautiful. As this
chapter is about to take the deciding and most extreme step in that
direction, I should like to make a few remarks as to my position. The
last thing I wish to advocate is the Asiatic standpoint with regard to
the treatment of women. Those who have carefully followed my remarks as
to the injustice that all forms of sexuality and erotics visit on woman
will surely see that this work is not meant to plead for the harem. But
it is quite possible to desire the legal equality of men and women
without believing in their moral and intellectual equality, just as in
condemning to the utmost any harshness in the male treatment of the
female sex, one does not overlook the tremendous, cosmic, contrast and
organic differences between them. There are no men in whom there is no
trace of the transcendent, who are altogether bad; and there is no woman
of whom that could truly be said. However degraded a man may be, he is
immeasurably above the most superior woman, so much so that comparison
and classification of the two are impossible; but even so, no one has
any right to denounce or defame woman, however inferior she must be
considered. A true adjustment of the claims for legal equality can be
undertaken on no other basis than the recognition of a complete,
deep-seated polar opposition of the sexes. I trust that I may escape
confusion of my views as to woman with the superficial doctrine of P. J.
Möbius--a doctrine only interesting as a brave reaction against the
general tendency. Women are not “physiologically weak-minded,” and I
cannot share the view that women of conspicuous ability are to be
regarded as morbid specimens.

From a moral point of view one should only be glad to recognise in these
women (who are always more masculine than the rest) the exact opposite
of degeneration, that is to say, it must be acknowledged that they have
made a step forward and gained a victory over themselves; from the
biological standpoint they are just as little or as much phenomena of
degeneration as are womanish men (unethically considered). Intermediate
sexual forms are normal, not pathological phenomena, in all classes of
organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence.

Woman is neither high-minded nor low-minded, strong-minded nor
weak-minded. She is the opposite of all these. Mind cannot be predicated
of her at all; she is mindless. That, however, does not imply
weak-mindedness in the ordinary sense of the term, the absence of the
capacity to “get her bearings” in ordinary everyday life. Cunning,
calculation, “cleverness,” are much more usual and constant in the woman
than in the man, if there be a personal selfish end in view. A woman is
never so stupid as a man can be.

But has woman no meaning at all? Has she no general purpose in the
scheme of the world? Has she not a destiny; and, in spite of all her
senselessness and emptiness, a significance in the universe?

Has she a mission, or is her existence an accident and an absurdity?

In order to understand her meaning, it is necessary to start from a
phenomenon which, although old and well recognised, has never received
its proper meed of consideration. It is from nothing more nor less than
the phenomenon of _match-making_ from which we may be able to infer
most correctly the real nature of woman.

Its analysis shows it to be the force which brings together and helps
forward two people in their knowledge of one another, which helps them
to a sexual union, whether in the form of marriage or not. This desire
to bring about an understanding between two people is possessed by all
women from their earliest childhood; the very youngest girls are always
ready to act as messengers for their sisters’ lovers. And if the
instinct of match-making can be indulged in only after the particular
woman in question has brought about her own consummation in marriage, it
is none the less present before that time, and the only things which are
at work against it are her jealousy of her contemporaries, and her
anxiety about their chances with regard to her lover, until she has
finally secured him by reason of her money, her social position, and so
forth.

As soon as women have got rid of their own case by their own marriage,
they hasten to help the sons and daughters of their acquaintances to
marry. The fact that older women, in whom the desire for sexual
satisfaction has died out, are such match-makers is so fully recognised
that the idea has wrongly spread that they are the only real
match-makers.

They urge not only women but men to marry, a man’s own mother often
being the most active and persistent advocate of his marriage. It is the
desire and purpose of every mother to see her son married, without any
thought of his individual taste; a wish which some have been blind
enough to regard as another charm in maternal love, of which such a poor
account was given in an earlier chapter. It is possible that many
mothers may hope that their sons should obtain permanent happiness
through marriage, however unfit they may be for it; but undoubtedly this
hope is absent with the majority, and in any case it is the match-making
instinct, the sheer objection to bachelordom, which is the strongest
motive of all.

It is clear that women obey a purely instinctive, inherent impulse,
when they try to get their daughters married.

It is certainly not for logical, and only in a small degree for material
reasons, that they go to such lengths to attain their ends, and it is
certainly not because of any desire expressed by their daughters (very
often it is in direct opposition to the girl’s choice); and since the
match-making instinct is not confined to the members of a woman’s own
family, it is impossible to speak of it as being part of the
“altruistic” or “moral” attitude of maternal love; although most women
if they were charged with match-making projects would undoubtedly answer
“that it is their duty to think of the future welfare of their dear
children.”

A mother makes no difference in arranging a marriage for her own
daughter and for any other girl, and is just as glad to do it for the
latter if it does not interfere with the interests of her own family; it
is the same thing, match-making throughout, and there is no
psychological difference in making a match for her own daughter and
doing the same thing for a stranger. I would even go so far as to say
that a mother is not inconsolable if a stranger, however common and
undesirable, desires and seduces her daughter.

The attitude of one sex to certain traits of the other can often be
applied as a criterion as to how far certain peculiarities of character
are exclusively the property of the one sex or are shared by the other.
So far, we have had to deny to women many characters which they would
gladly claim, but which are exclusively masculine; in match-making,
however, we have a characteristic which is really and exclusively
feminine, the exceptions being either in the case of very womanish men
or else special instances which will be fully dealt with later on, in
chap. xiii. Every real man will have nothing to do with this instinct in
his wife, even when his own daughters, whom he would gladly see settled
in life, are concerned; he dislikes and despises the whole business, and
leaves it entirely to his wife, as being altogether in her province.
This is a striking instance of a purely feminine psychical
characteristic, being not only unattractive to a man, but even
repulsive to him when he is aware of it: while the male characteristics
in themselves are sufficient to please the female, man has to denude
woman of hers before he can love her.

But the match-making instinct exerts a much deeper and more important
influence on the nature of woman than can be gathered from the little I
have said on this subject. I wish now to draw attention to woman’s
attitude at a play: she is always waiting to see if the hero and
heroine, the lovers in the piece, will quarrel. This is nothing but
match-making, and psychologically does not differ a hair from it: it is
the ever present desire to see the man and woman united. But that is not
all; the tremendous excitement with which women await the crucial point
in a decent or indecent book is due to nothing less than the desire to
see the sexual union of the principal characters, and is coupled with an
actual excitation at the thought, and positive appreciation of the force
which is behind sexual union. It is not possible to state this formally
and logically, the only thing is to try and understand how it is that
the two things are psychologically one with women. The mother’s
excitement on her daughter’s wedding-day is of the same quality as that
engendered by reading a story by Prévost, or Sudermann’s “Katzensteg.”
It is quite true that men are very interested by novels which end in
sexual union, but in quite a different way from women; they thoroughly
appreciate the sexual act in imagination, but they do not follow the
gradual approach of the two people concerned from the very beginning;
and their interest does not grow, as woman’s does, in constant
proportion to the reciprocal value which the two people have for one
another.

The breathless pleasure with which the various obstacles are overcome,
the feeling of disappointment at each thwarting of the sexual purpose,
is altogether womanish and unmanly; but it is always present with woman.
She is continually on the watch for sexual developments, whether in real
life or in literature. Has no one ever wondered why women are so keen
and “disinterested” about bringing other men and women together? The
satisfaction they derive from it arises from a personal stimulus at the
thought of the sexual union of others.

But the full extent to which match-making influences the point of view
of all women is not yet fully grasped. On a summer evening when lovers
may be seen in dark corners of public places, or on the seats and banks
round about, it is always the women who wilfully and curiously try to
see what is happening, whilst men who have to pass that way do so
unwillingly, looking the other way, because of a sense of intrusion.
Just in the same way it is women who turn in the streets to look at
nearly every couple they meet, and gaze after them. This espionage and
turning round are none the less “match-making,” because they are
sub-conscious acts. If a man does not want to see a thing he turns his
back on it, and does not look round; but women are glad to see two
people in love with one another, and take pleasure in surprising them in
their love-making, because of their innate and super-personal desire
that sexual union should occur.

But man, as was seen much further back, only cares for that which has a
positive value. A woman when she sees two lovers together is always
awaiting developments, that is to say, she expects, anticipates, hopes,
and desires an outcome. I know an elderly married woman who listened
expectantly at the door for some time, when a servant of hers had
allowed her sweetheart to come into her room, before she walked in and
gave her notice.

The idea of union is always eagerly grasped and never repelled whatever
form it may take (even where animals are concerned).[18] She experiences
no disgust at the nauseating details of the subject, and makes no
attempt to think of anything pleasanter. This accounts for a great deal
of what is so apparently mysterious in the psychic life of woman. Her
wish for the activity of her own sexual life is her strongest impulse,
but it is only a special case of her deep, her only vital interest, the
interest that sexual unions shall take place; the wish that as much of
it as possible shall occur, in all cases, places, and times.

  [18] The one apparent exception to this rule is fully discussed in
  this chapter.

This universal desire may either be concentrated on the act itself or on
the (possible) child; in the first case, the woman is of the prostitute
type and participates merely for the sake of the act; in the second, she
is of the mother type, but not merely with the idea of bearing children
herself; she desires that every marriage she knows of or has helped to
bring about should be fruitful, and the nearer she is to the absolute
mother the more conspicuous is this idea; the real mother is also the
real grandmother (even if she remains a virgin; Johann Tesman’s
marvellous portrayal of “Tante Jule” in Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” is an
example of what I mean). Every real mother has the same purpose, that of
helping on matrimony; she is the mother of all mankind; she welcomes
every pregnancy.

The prostitute does not want other women to be with child, but to be
prostitutes like herself.

A woman’s relations with married men show how she subordinates her own
sexuality to her match-making instinct, the latter being the dominant
power.

Woman objects more strongly to bachelordom than anything else, because
she is altogether a match-maker, and this makes her try to get men to
marry; but if a man is already married she at once loses most of her
interest in him, however much she liked him before. If the woman herself
is already married, that is to say, when each man she meets is not a
possible solution to her own fate, one would not imagine that a married
man would find less favour with her because he was married than when he
was a bachelor if the woman herself is unfaithful; but women seldom
carry on an intrigue with another woman’s husband, except when they wish
to triumph over her by making him neglect her. This shows that the
disposition of woman is towards the fact of pairing; when men are
already paired she seldom attempts to make them unfaithful, for the fact
of their being paired has satisfied her instinct.

This match-making is the most common characteristic of the human female;
the wish to become a mother-in-law is much more general than even the
desire to become a mother, the intensity and extent of which is usually
over-rated.

My readers may possibly not understand the emphasis I have laid on a
phenomenon which is usually looked upon as amusing as it is disgusting;
and it may be thought that I have given undue importance to it.

But let us see why I have done so. Match-making is essentially the
phenomenon of all others which gives us the key to the nature of woman,
and we must not, as has always been the case, merely acknowledge the
fact and pass on, but we should try to analyse and explain it. One of
our commonest phrases runs: “Every woman is a bit of a match-maker.”

But we must remember that in this, and nothing else, lies the actual
essence of woman. After mature consideration of the most varied types of
women and with due regard to the special classes besides those which I
have discussed, I am of opinion that the only positively general female
characteristic is that of match-making, that is, her uniform willingness
to further the idea of sexual union.

Any definition of the nature of woman which goes no further than to
declare that she has the strong instinct for her own union would be too
narrow; any definition that would link her instincts to the child or to
the husband, or to both, would be too wide. The most general and
comprehensive statement of the nature of woman is that it is completely
adapted and disposed for the special mission of aiding and abetting the
bodily union of the sexes. All women are match-makers, and this property
of the woman to be the advocate of the idea of pairing is the only one
which is found in women of all ages, in young girls, in adults, and in
the aged. The old woman is no longer interested in her own union, but
she devotes herself to the pairing of others. This habit of the old
woman is nothing new, it is only the continuance of her enduring
instinct surviving the complications that were caused when her personal
interests came into conflict with her general desire; it is the now
unselfish pursuit of the impersonal idea.

It is convenient to recapitulate at this point what my investigation has
shown as to the sexuality of women. I have shown that woman is engrossed
exclusively by sexuality, not intermittently, but throughout her life;
that her whole being, bodily and mental, is nothing but sexuality
itself. I added, moreover, that she was so constituted that her whole
body and being continually were in sexual relations with her
environment, and that just as the sexual organs were the centre of woman
physically, so the sexual idea was the centre of her mental nature. The
idea of pairing is the only conception which has positive worth for
women. The woman is the bearer of the thought of the continuity of the
species. The high value which she attaches to the idea of pairing is not
selfish and individual, it is super-individual, and, if I may be
forgiven the desecration of the phrase, it is the transcendental
function of woman. And just as femaleness is no more than the embodiment
of the idea of pairing, so is it sexuality in the abstract. Pairing is
the supreme good for the woman; she seeks to effect it always and
everywhere. Her personal sexuality is only a special case of this
universal, generalised, impersonal instinct.

The effort of woman to realise this idea of pairing is so fundamentally
opposed to that conception of innocence and purity, the higher virginity
which man’s erotic nature has demanded from women, that not all his
erotic incense would have obscured her real nature but for one factor. I
have now to explain this factor which has veiled from man the true
nature of woman, and which in itself is one of the deepest problems of
woman, I mean her absolute duplicity. Her pairing instinct and her
duplicity, the latter so great as to conceal even from woman herself
what is the real essence of her nature, must be explained together.

All that may have seemed like clear gain is now again called into
question. Self-observation was found lacking in women, and yet there
certainly are women who observe very closely all that happens to them.
They were denied the love of truth, and yet one knows many women who
would not tell a lie for anything. It has been said that they are
lacking in consciousness of guilt; but there are many women who reproach
themselves bitterly for most trifling matters, besides “penitents” who
mortify their flesh. Modesty was left to man, but what is to be said of
the womanly modesty, that bashfulness, which, according to Hamerling,
only women have? Is there no foundation for the way in which the idea
has grown and found such acceptance? And then again: Can religion be
absent, in spite of so many “professing” women? Are we to exclude all
women from the moral purity, all the womanly virtues, which poets and
historians have ascribed to her? Are we to say that woman is merely
sexual, that sexuality only receives its proper due from her when it is
so well known that women are shocked at the slightest allusion to sexual
matters, that instead of giving way to it they are often irritated and
disgusted at the idea of impurity, and quite often detest sexual union
for themselves and regard it just as many men do?

It is, of course, manifest that one and the same point is bound up in
all these antitheses, and on the answer given to them depends the final
and decisive judgment on woman. And it is clear that if only one single
female creature were really asexual, or could be shown to have a real
relationship to the idea of personal moral worth, everything that I have
said about woman, its general value as psychically characteristic of the
sex, would be irretrievably demolished, and the whole position which
this book has taken up would be shattered at one blow.

These apparently contradictory phenomena must be satisfactorily
explained, and it must be shown that what is at the bottom of it all and
makes it seem so equivocal arises from the very nature of woman which I
have been trying to explain all along.

In order to understand these fallacious contradictions one must first of
all remember the tremendous “accessibility,” to use another word, the
“impressionability,” of women. Their extraordinary aptitude for anything
new, and their easy acceptance of other people’s views have not yet been
sufficiently emphasised in this book.

As a rule, the woman adapts herself to the man, his views become hers,
his likes and dislikes are shared by her, every word he says is an
incentive to her, and the stronger his sexual influence on her the more
this is so. Woman does not perceive that this influence which man has on
her causes her to deviate from the line of her own development; she does
not look upon it as a sort of unwarrantable intrusion; she does not try
to shake off what is really an invasion of her private life; she is not
ashamed of being receptive; on the contrary, she is really pleased when
she can be so, and prefers man to mould her mentally. She rejoices in
being dependent, and her expectations from man resolve themselves into
the moment when she may be perfectly passive.

But it is not only from her lover (although she would like that best),
but also from her father and mother, uncles and aunts, brothers and
sisters, near relations and distant acquaintances, that a woman takes
what she thinks and believes, being only too glad to get her opinions
“ready made.”

It is not only inexperienced girls but even elderly and married women
who copy each other in everything, from the nice new dress or pretty
coiffure down to the places where they get their things, and the very
recipes by which they cook.

And it never seems to occur to them that they are doing something
derogatory on their part, as it ought to do if they possessed an
individuality of their own and strove to work out their own salvation. A
woman’s thoughts and actions have no definite, independent relations to
things in themselves; they are not the result of the reaction of her
individuality to the world. They accept what is imposed on them gladly,
and adhere to it with the greatest firmness. That is why woman is so
intolerant when there has been a breach of conventional laws. I must
quote an amusing instance, bearing on this side of woman’s character,
from Herbert Spencer. It is the custom in various tribes of Indians in
North and South America for the men to hunt and fight and leave all the
laborious and menial tasks to their wives. The Dakotan women are so
imbued with the idea of the reasonableness and fitness of this
arrangement that, instead of feeling injured by it, the greatest insult
that one of these women can offer to another would be implied in some
such words as follows: “You disgraceful creature.... I saw your husband
carrying home wood for the fires. What was his wife doing that he had to
demean himself by doing woman’s work?”

The extraordinary way in which woman can be influenced by external
agencies is similar in its nature to her suggestibility, which is far
greater and more general than man’s; they are both in accordance with
woman’s desire to play the passive and never the active part in the
sexual act and all that leads to it.[19]

  [19] The quiescent, inactive, large egg-cells are sought out by the
  mobile, active, and slender spermatozoa.

It is the universal passivity of woman’s nature which makes her accept
and assume man’s valuations of things, although these are utterly at
variance with her nature. The way in which woman can be impregnated with
the masculine point of view, the saturation of her innermost thoughts
with a foreign element, her false recognition of morality, which cannot
be called hypocrisy because it does not conceal anything anti-moral, her
assumption and practise of things which in themselves are not in her
realm, are all very well if the woman does not try to use her own
judgment, and they succeed in keeping up the fiction of her superior
morality. Complications first arise when these acquired valuations come
into collision with the only inborn, genuine, and universally feminine
valuation, the supreme value she sets on pairing.

Woman’s acceptance of pairing as the supreme good is quite unconscious
on her part. As she has no sense of individuality she has nothing to
contrast with pairing; and so, unlike man, she cannot realise its
significance, or even notice the presence in herself of this instinct.

No woman knows, or ever has known, or ever will know, what she does when
she enters into association with man. Femaleness is identical with
pairing, and a woman would have to get outside herself in order to see
and understand that she pairs. Thus it is that the deepest desire of
woman, all that she means, and all that she is, remain unrecognised by
her. There is nothing, then, to prevent the male negative valuation of
pairing overshadowing the female positive valuation of it in the
consciousness of the woman. The susceptibility of woman is so great that
she can even act in opposition to what she is, to the one thing on which
she really sets a positive value!

But the imposture which she enacts when she allows herself to be
incorporated with man’s opinions of sexuality and shamelessness, even of
the imposture itself, and when she uses the masculine standard for her
actions, is such a colossal fraud that she is never conscious of it; she
has acquired a second nature, without even guessing that it is not her
real one; she takes herself seriously, believes she is something and
that she believes in something; she is convinced of the sincerity and
originality of her moralisings and opinions; the lie is as deeply rooted
as that; it is organic. I cannot do better than speak of the ontological
untruthfulness of woman.

Wolfram von Eschenbach says of his hero:

        “... So keusch und rein
  Ruht’ er bei seiner Königin,
  Dass kein Genügen fänd’ darin
  So manches Weib beim lieben Mann.
  Dass doch so manche in Gedanken
  Zur Üppigkeit will überschwanken,
  Die sonst sich spröde zeigen kann!
  Vor Fremden züchtig sie erscheinen,
  Doch ist des Herzens tiefstes Meinen
  Das Widerspiel vom äussern Schein.”

Wolfram indicates clearly enough what is at the bottom of woman’s
heart, but he does not say all that is to be said. Women deceive
themselves as well as others on this point. One cannot artificially
suppress and supplant one’s real nature, the physical as well as the
other side, without something happening. The hygienic penalty that must
be paid for woman’s denial of her real nature is hysteria.

Of all the neurotic and psychic phenomena, those of hysteria are the
most fascinating for psychologists; they represent a far more difficult
and, therefore, a more interesting study than those observed in
melancholia or in simple paranoia.

The majority of psychiatrists have a distrust of psychological analyses
which it is not easy for them to shake off; every statement of
pathological alteration of tissues or intoxication by certain means is
for them _a limine_ credible; it is only in psychical matters that they
refuse to recognise a primary cause. But since no reason has so far been
given why psychical phenomena should be of importance secondary to
physical phenomena, it is quite justifiable to disregard such
prejudices.

It is quite possible--there is nothing to prevent it being so--that a
very great deal, perhaps everything, may depend on the proper
interpretation of the “psychical mechanism” of hysteria. That this is so
is proved by the fact that the few conclusions of any value with
reference to hysteria so far discovered have been arrived at in this
way; the investigations carried out by Pierre Janet, Oskar Vogt, and
particularly by J. Breuer and S. Freud, show what I mean. All good work
on hysteria will undoubtedly follow the lines these men have worked on;
that is to say, by investigation of the psychological processes which
led up to the disease.

I believe myself that what may be called a psychological sexual
traumatism is at the root of hysteria. The typical picture of a
hysterical case is not very different from the following: A woman has
always accepted the male views on sexual matters; they are in reality
totally foreign to her nature, and sometime, by some chance, out of the
conflict between what her nature asserts to be true and what she has
always accepted as true and believed to be true, there comes what may be
called a “wounding of the mind.” It is thus possible for the person
affected to declare a sexual desire to be an “extraneous body in her
consciousness,” a sensation which she _thinks_ she detests, but which in
reality has its origin in her own nature. The tremendous intensity with
which she endeavours to suppress the desire (and which only serves to
increase it) so that she may the more vehemently and indignantly reject
the thought--these are the alternations which are seen in hysteria. And
the chronic untruthfulness of woman becomes acute if the woman has ever
allowed herself to be imbued with man’s ethically negative valuation of
sexuality. It is well known that hysterical women manifest the strongest
suggestibility with men. Hysteria is the organic crisis of the organic
untruthfulness of woman.

I do not deny that there are hysterical men, but these are comparatively
few; and since man’s psychic possibilities are endless, that of becoming
“female” is amongst them, and, therefore, he can be hysterical. There
are undoubtedly many untruthful men, but in them the crisis takes a
different form, man’s untruthfulness being of a different kind and never
so hopeless in character as woman’s.

This examination into the organic untruthfulness of woman, into her
inability to be honest about herself which alone makes it possible for
her to think that she thinks what is really totally opposed to her
nature, appears to me to offer a satisfactory explanation of those
difficulties which the ætiology of hysteria present.

Hysteria shows that untruthfulness, however far it may reach, cannot
suppress everything. By education or environment woman adopts a whole
system of ideas and valuations which are foreign to her, or, rather, has
patiently submitted to have them impressed on her; and it would need a
tremendous shock to get rid of this strongly-rooted psychical
complexity, and to transplant woman to that condition of intellectual
helplessness which is so characteristic of hysteria.

An extraordinary shock suffices to destroy the artificial structure, and
to place woman in the arena to undertake a fight between her
unconscious, oppressed nature, and her certainly conscious but unnatural
mind. The see-sawing which now begins between the two explains the
unusual psychic discontinuity during the hysterical phase, the continual
changes of mood, none of which are subject to the control of a dominant,
central, controlling nucleus of individuality. It is extraordinary how
many contradictions can co-exist in the hysterical. Sometimes they are
highly intelligent and able to judge correctly and keenly oppose
hypnotism and so forth. Then, again, they are excited by most trivial
causes, and are most subject to hypnotic trances. Sometimes they are
abnormally chaste, at other times extremely sensual.

All this is no longer difficult to explain. The absolute sincerity, the
painful love of truth, the avoidance of everything sexual, the careful
judgment, and the strength of will--all these form part of that spurious
personality which woman in her passivity has taken upon herself to
exhibit to herself and to the world at large. Everything that belongs to
her original temperament and her real sense form that “other self,” that
“unconscious mind” which can delight in obscurities and which is so open
to suggestion.

It has been endeavoured to show that in what is known as the “duplex”
and “multiplex personality,” the “double conscience,” the “dual ego,”
lies one of the strongest arguments against the belief in the soul. As a
matter of fact, these phenomena are the very reasons why we ought to
believe in a soul. The “dividing up of the personality” is only possible
when there never has been a personality, as with woman. All the
celebrated cases which Janet has described in his book, “L’Automatisme
Psychologique,” concern women, not in a single instance man. It is only
woman who, minus soul or an intelligible ego, has not the power to
become conscious of what is in her; who cannot throw the light of truth
on her inmost self; who can by her completely passive inundation by a
consciousness belonging to another, allow what is in her own nature to
be suppressed by an extraneous element; who can display the hysterical
phenomena described by Janet. Hysteria is the bankruptcy of this
superficial sham self which has been put on, and the woman becomes for
the time being a _tabula rasa_, whilst the working in her of her own
genuine nature appears to her as something coming from without. This
apparent “secondary personality,” this “foreign body in the
consciousness,” this false self, is, in reality, the true female nature,
sexuality itself appearing, and a proper understanding of this fact, and
of the complications that must ensue from the ebbings and flowings of
the false, supposed to be true, and the true supposed to be false, lie
at the root of the most difficult phenomena of hysteria.

Woman’s incapacity for truth--which I hold to be consequent on her lack
of free will with regard to the truth, in accordance with Kant’s
“Indeterminism”--conditions her falsity. Any one who has had anything to
do with women knows how often they give offhand quite patently untrue
reasons for what they have said or done, under the momentary necessity
of answering a question. It is, however, hysterical subjects who are
most careful to avoid unveracity (in a most marked and premeditated way
before strangers); but however paradoxical it may sound it is exactly in
this that their untruthfulness lies! They do not know that this desire
for truth has come to them from outside and is no part of their real
nature.

They have slavishly accepted the postulate of morality, and, therefore,
wish to show at every opportunity, like a good servant, how faithfully
they follow instructions.

It is always suspicious when a man is frequently spoken of as
exceptionally trustworthy: he must have gone out of his way to let
people know it, and it would be safe to wager that in reality he is a
rogue. No confidence must be placed in the genuineness of hysterical
morality, which doctors (no doubt in good faith) often emphasise by
remarks as to the high moral position of their patients.

I repeat: hysterical patients do not consciously simulate. It can only
be made clear to them by suggestion that they actually have been
simulating, and all the “confessions” of the dissimulation can only be
explained in the same way. Otherwise they believe in their own natural
honesty and morality. Neither are the various things which torture them
imaginary; it is much more likely that in the fact that they feel them,
and that the symptoms first disappear with what Breuer calls “catharsis”
(the successive bringing to their consciousness of the true causes of
their illness by hypnotism), lies the proof of their organic
untruthfulness.

The self-accusations which hysterical people are so full of are nothing
but unconscious dissimulation. The sense of guilt, which is equally
poignant in great and most trifling things, cannot be genuine; if the
hysterical self-torturers possessed a standard of morality for
themselves and others they would not be so indiscriminate in their
self-accusations, and not cast as much blame on themselves for a slight
error as for real wrong-doing.

The most distinguishing character of the unconscious untruthfulness of
their self-reproaches is their habit of telling others how wicked they
are, what terrible things they have done, and then they ask if they (the
hysterical) are not hopelessly abandoned sort of people. No one who
really feels remorse could talk in such a way. The fallacy of
representing the hysterical as being eminently moral is one which even
Breuer and Freud have shared. The hysterical simply become imbued with
moral ideas which are foreign to them in their normal state. They
subordinate themselves to this code, they cease to prove things for
themselves, they no longer exercise their own judgment.

Probably these hysterical subjects approach more closely than any other
natures to the moral ideal of the social and utilitarian ethics which
regard a lie as moral if it is for the good of society or of the race.
Hysterical women realise that ideal ontogenetically inasmuch as their
standard of morality comes from without, not from within, and
practically as they appear to act most readily from altruistic motives.
For them duty towards others is not merely a special application of duty
towards oneself.

The untruthfulness of the hysterical is proportional to their belief in
their own accuracy. From their complete inability to attain personal
truth, to be honest about themselves--the hysterical never think for
themselves, they want other people to think about them, they want to
arouse the interest of others--it follows that the hysterical are the
best mediums for hypnotic purposes. But any one who allows him or
herself to be hypnotised is doing the most immoral thing possible. It is
yielding to complete slavery; it is a renunciation of the will and
consciousness; it means allowing another person to do what he likes with
the subject. Hypnosis shows how all possibility of truth depends upon
the wish to be truthful, but it must be the real wish of the person
concerned: when a hypnotised person is told to do something, he does it
when he comes out of the trance, and if asked his reasons will give a
plausible motive on the spot, not only before others, but he will
justify his action to himself by quite fanciful reasons. In this we
have, so to speak, an experimental proof of Kant’s “Ethical Code.”

All women can be hypnotised and like being hypnotised, but this
proclivity is exaggerated in hysterical women. Even the memory of
definite events in their life can be destroyed by the mere suggestion of
the hypnotiser. Breuer’s experiments on hypnotised patients show clearly
that the consciousness of guilt in them is not deeply seated, as
otherwise it could not be got rid of at the mere suggestion of the
hypnotiser. But the sham conviction of responsibility, so readily
exhibited by women of hysterical constitution, rapidly disappears at the
moment when nature, the sexual impulse, appears to drive through the
superficial restraints. In the hysterical paroxysm what happens is that
the woman, while no longer believing it altogether herself, asseverates
more and more loudly: “I do not want that at all, some one not really me
is forcing it on me, but I do not want it at all.” Every stimulation
from outside will now be brought into relation with that demand, which
as she partly believes, is being forced on her, but which, in reality,
corresponds with the deepest wish of her nature. That is why women in a
hysterical attack are so easily seduced. The “attitudes passionelles” of
the hysterical are merely passionate repudiations of sexual desire,
which are loud merely because they are not real, and are more plaintive
than at other times because the danger is greater. It is easy to
understand why the sexual experiences of the time preceding puberty play
so large a part in acute hysteria. The influence of extraneous moral
views can be imposed comparatively easily on the child, as they have
little to overcome in the almost unawakened state of the sexual
inclinations. But, later on, the suppressed, although not wholly
vanquished, nature lays hold of these old experiences, reinterprets them
in the light of the new contents of consciousness, and the crisis takes
place. The different forms that the paroxysms assume and their shifting
nature are due very largely to the fact that the subject does not admit
the true cause, the presence of a sexual desire, any consciousness of it
being attributed by her to some extraneous influence, some self that is
not her “real self.”

Medical observation or interpretation of hysteria is wrong; it allows
itself to be deceived by the patients, who in turn deceive themselves.
It is not the rejecting ego but the rejected which is the true and
original nature of the hysterical patients, however much they pretend to
themselves and others that it is foreign to them.

If the rejecting ego were really their natural ego they could act in
opposition to the disturbing element which they say is foreign to them,
and be fully conscious of it, and differentiate and recognise it in
their memory. But the fraud is evident, because the rejecting ego is
only borrowed, and they lack the courage to look their own desire in the
face, although something seems to say that it is the real, inborn, and
only powerful one they have. Even the desire itself has no real
identity, for it is not seated in a real individual, and, as it is
suppressed, leaps, so to speak, from one part of the body to the other.
It may be that my attempt at an explanation will be thought fanciful,
but at least it appears to be true that the various forms of hysteria
are one and the same thing. This one thing is what the hysterical
patient will not admit is part of her, although it is what is pressing
on her. If she were able to ascribe it to herself and criticise it in
the way in which she admits trivial matters of another kind, she would
be in a measure outside and above her own experiences. The frantic rage
of hysterical women at what they say is imposed on them by some strange
will, whilst it in reality is their own will, shows that they are just
as much under the domination of sexuality as are non-hysterical women,
are just as subject to their destiny and incapable of averting it, since
they, too, are without any intelligible, free ego.

But it may be asked, with reason, why all women are not hysterical,
since all women are liars? This brings us to a necessary inquiry as to
the hysterical constitution. If my theory has been on the right lines,
it ought to be able to give an answer in accordance with facts.
According to it, the hysterical woman is one who has passively accepted
in entirety the masculine and conventional valuations instead of
allowing her own mental character its proper play. The woman who is not
to be led is the antithesis of the hysterical woman. I must not delay
over this point; it really belongs to special female characterology. The
hysterical woman is hysterical because she is servile; mentally she is
identical with the maid-servant. Her opposite (who does not really
exist) is the shrewish dame. So that women may be subdivided into the
maid who serves, and the woman who commands.[20]

  [20] We may find the analogy to this in men: there are masculine
  “servants” who are so by nature, and there is the masculine form of
  the shrew--_e.g._, the policeman. It is a noticeable fact that a
  policeman usually finds his sexual complement in the housemaid.

The servant is born and not made, and there are many women in good
circumstances who are “born servants,” although they never need to put
their rightful position to the test! The servant and the mistress are a
sort of “complete woman” when considered as a “whole.”[21]

  [21] A real dame would never dream of asking her husband what she was
  to do, what she is to give him for dinner, &c.; the hysterical woman,
  on the contrary, is always lacking in ideas, and wants suggestions
  from others. This is a rough way of indicating the two types.

The consequences of this theory are fully borne out by experience. The
Xanthippe is the woman who has the least resemblance to the hysterical
type. She vents her spleen (which is really the outcome of unsatisfied
sexual desires) on others, whereas the hysterical woman visits hers on
herself. The “shrew” detests other women, the “servant” detests herself.
The drudge weeps out her woes alone, without really feeling
lonely--loneliness is identical with morality, and a condition which
implies true duality or manifoldness; the shrew hates to be alone
because she must have some one to scold, whilst hysterical women vent
their passion on themselves. The shrew lies openly and boldly but
without knowing it, because it is her nature to think herself always in
the right, and she insults those who contradict her. The servant submits
wonderingly to the demands made of her which are so foreign to her
nature: the hypocrisy of this pliant acquiescence is apparent in her
hysterical attacks when the conflict with her own sexual emotions
begins. It is because of this receptivity and susceptibility that
hysteria and the hysterical type of woman are so leniently dealt with:
it is this type, and not the shrewish type, that will be cited in
opposition to my views.[22]

  [22] It is the “yielding type” and not the virago type of woman that
  men think capable of love. Such a woman’s love is only the mental
  sense of satisfaction aroused by the maleness of some particular man,
  and, therefore, it is only possible with the hysterical; it has
  nothing to do with her individual power of loving, and can have
  nothing to do with it. The bashfulness of woman is also due to her
  “obsession” by one man; this also causes her neglect of all other men.

Untruthfulness, organic untruthfulness, characterises both types, and
accordingly all women. It is quite wrong to say that women lie. That
would imply that they sometimes speak the truth. Sincerity, _pro foro
interno et externo_, is the virtue of all others of which women are
absolutely incapable, which is impossible for them!

The point I am urging is that woman is never genuine at any period of
her life, not even when she, in hysteria, slavishly accepts the aspect
of truth laid on her by another, and apparently speaks in accordance
with those demands.

A woman can laugh, cry, blush, or even look wicked at will: the shrew,
when she has some object in view; the “maid,” when she has to make a
decision for herself. Men have not the organic and physiological
qualifications for such dissimulation.

If we are able to show that the supposed love of truth in these types of
woman is no more than their natural hypocrisy in a mask, it is only to
be expected that all the other qualities for which woman has been
praised will suffer under analysis. Her modesty, her self-respect, and
her religious fervour are loudly acclaimed. Womanly modesty, none the
less, is nothing but prudery, _i.e._, an extravagant denial and
rejection of her natural immodesty. Whenever a woman evinces any trace
of what could really be called modesty, hysteria is certainly answerable
for it. The woman who is absolutely unhysterical and not to be
influenced, _i.e._, the absolute shrew, will not be ashamed of any
reproaches her husband may shower on her, however just; incipient
hysteria is present when a woman blushes under her husband’s direct
censure; but hysteria in its most marked form is present when a woman
blushes when she is quite alone: it is only then that she may be said to
be fully impregnated with the masculine standard of values.

The women who most nearly approximate to what has been called sexual
anæsthesia or frigidity are always hysterical, as Paul Solliers, with
whom I entirely agree, discovered. Sexual anæsthesia is merely one of
the many hysterical, that is to say, unreal, simulated forms of
anæsthesia. Oskar Vogt, in particular (and general observation has
confirmed him), proved that such anæsthesia does not involve a real
lack of sensation, but is simply due to an inhibition which keeps
certain sensations in check, and excludes them from the consciousness.

If the anæsthetised arm of a hypnotised subject is pricked a certain
number of times, and the medium is told to say how many times he has
been pricked, he is able to do so, although otherwise he would not have
perceived them. So also with sexual frigidity; it is an order given by
the controlling force of the super-imposed asexual ideas; but this, like
all other forms of anæsthesia, can be counteracted by a sufficiently
strong “order.”

The repulsion to sexuality in general shown by the hysterical woman
corresponds in its nature with her insensibility to sexual matters in
her own case. Such a repulsion, an intense disinclination for everything
sexual, is really present in many women, and this may be urged as an
exception to my generalisation as to the universality in woman of the
match-making tendency. But women who are made ill by discovering two
people in sexual intercourse are always hysterical. In this we have a
special justification of the theory which holds match-making to be the
true nature of woman, and which looks upon her own sexuality as merely a
special case of it. A woman may be made hysterical not only by a sexual
suggestion to herself which she outwardly resists whilst inwardly
assenting to it, but may be just as much so by the sight of two people
in sexual intercourse, for, though she thinks the matter has no value
for her, her inborn assent to it forces itself through all outward and
artificial barriers, and overcomes the super-imposed and incorporated
method of thought in which she usually lives. That is to say, she feels
herself involved in the sexual union of others.

Something similar takes place in the hysterical “consciousness of
guilt,” which has already been spoken about. The absolute shrew never
feels herself really in the wrong; the woman who is slightly hysterical
only feels so in the presence of men; the woman who is thoroughly
hysterical feels it in the presence of the particular man who dominates
her. One cannot prove the existence of a sense of guilt in woman by the
mortifications to which “devotees” and “penitents” subject themselves.
It is these extreme cases of self-discipline which make one suspicious.
Doing penance proves, in most cases, that the doer has not overcome his
fault, that the sense of guilt has not really entered consciousness; it
appears really to be much rather an attempt to force repentance from the
outside, to make up for not really feeling it.

The difference between the conviction of guilt in hysterical women and
in men, and the origin of the self-reproaches of the former, are of some
importance. When the hysterical woman realises that she has done or
thought something immoral, she tries to rectify it by some code which
she seeks to obey and to substitute in her mind in place of the immoral
thought. She does not really get rid of the thought which is too deeply
rooted in her nature; she does not really face it, try to understand it,
and so purge herself of it. She simply, from point to point, case by
case, tries to adhere to the moral code without ever transforming
herself, reforming her idea. The moral character in the woman is
elaborated bit by bit; in the male right conduct comes from moral
character. The vow remodels the whole man; the change takes place in the
only possible way, from within outwards, and leads to a real morality
which is not only a justification by works. The morality of the woman is
merely superficial and is not real morality.

The current opinion that woman is religious is equally erroneous. Female
mysticism, when it is anything more than mere superstition, is either
thinly veiled sexuality (the identification of the Deity and the lover
has been frequently discussed, as, for instance, in Maupassant’s
“Bel-Ami,” or in Hauptmann’s “Hannele’s Himmelfahrt”) as in numberless
spiritualists and theosophists, or it is a mere passive and unconscious
acceptance of man’s religious views which are clung to the more firmly
because of woman’s natural disinclination for them. The lover is readily
transformed into a Saviour; very readily (as is well known to be the
case with many nuns) the Saviour becomes the lover. All the great women
visionaries known to history were hysterical; the most famous, Santa
Teresa, was not misnamed “the patron saint of hysteria.” At any rate, if
woman’s religiousness were genuine, and if it proceeded from her own
nature, she would have done something great in the religious world; but
she never has done anything of any importance. I should like to put
shortly what I take to be the difference between the masculine and
feminine creeds; man’s religion consists in a supreme belief in himself,
woman’s in a supreme belief in other people.

There is left to consider the self-respect which is often described as
being so highly developed in the hysterical. That it is only man’s
self-respect which has been so thoroughly forced into woman, is clear
from its nature and the way it shows itself, as Vogt, who extended and
verified experiments first made by Freud, discovered from self-respect
under hypnotism. The extraneous masculine will creates by its influence
a “self-respecting” subject in the hypnotised woman by inducing a
limitation of the field of the unhypnotised state. Apart from
suggestion, in the ordinary life of the hysterical it is only the man
with whom they are “impregnated” who is respected in them. Any knowledge
of human nature which women have comes from their absorption of the
right sort of man. In the paroxysms of hysteria this artificial
self-respect disappears with the revolt of oppressed nature.

This is quite parallel to the clairvoyance of hysterical mediums, which
is undoubted, but has as little to do with “occult” spiritism as the
ordinary hypnotic phenomena. Just as Vogt’s patients made strenuous
efforts to observe themselves carefully under the powerful will of the
suggestor, the clairvoyante, under the influence of the dominating voice
of the man who is imposing his will on her, is capable of telepathic
performances, and at his command can, blindfolded, read communications
held by people unknown to her at a great distance away; this I saw
happen at München under circumstances which precluded any chance of
fraud.

In woman there are not strong passions opposed to the desire for the
good and true as is the case with man. The masculine will has more power
over woman than over the man himself; it can realise something in women
which, in his own case, has to encounter too many obstacles. He himself
has to battle with an anti-moral and anti-logical opposition in himself.
The masculine will can obtain such power over woman’s mind that he makes
her, in a sense, clairvoyant, and breaks down her limitations of
mentality.

Thus it comes about that woman is more telepathic than man, can appear
more innocent, and can accomplish more as a “seer,” and it is only when
she becomes a medium, _i.e._, the object, that she realises in herself
most easily and surely the masculine will for the good and true. Wala
can be made to understand, but not until Dotan subdues her. She meets
him half-way, for her one desire is to be conquered.

The subject of hysteria, so far as the purposes of this book are
concerned, is now exhausted.

The women who are uniformly quoted as proofs of female morality are
always of the hysterical type, and it is the very observance of
morality, in doing things according to the moral law as if this moral
law were a law of their personality instead of being only an acquired
habit, that the unreality, the immorality of this morality is shown.

The hysterical diathesis is an absurd imitation of the masculine mind, a
parody of free will which woman parades at the very moment when she is
most under a masculine influence.

Woman is not a free agent; she is altogether subject to her desire to be
under man’s influence, herself and all others: she is under the sway of
the phallus, and irretrievably succumbs to her destiny, even if it leads
to actively developed sexuality. At the most a woman can reach an
indistinct feeling of her un-freedom, a cloudy idea of the possibility
of controlling her destiny--manifestly only a flickering spark of the
free, intelligible subject, the scanty remains of inherited maleness in
her, which, by contrast, gives her even this slight comprehension. It is
also impossible for a woman to have a clear idea of her destiny, or of
the forces within her: it is only he who is free who can discern fate,
because he is not chained by necessity; part of his personality, at
least, places him in the position of spectator and a combatant outside
his own fate and makes him so far superior to it. One of the most
conclusive proofs of human freedom is contained in the fact that man has
been able to create the idea of causality. Women consider themselves
most free when they are most bound; and they are not troubled by the
passions, because they are simply the embodiment of them. It is only a
man who can talk of the “dira necessitas” within him; it is only he
could have created the idea of destiny, because it is only he who, in
addition to the empirical, conditioned existence, possesses a free,
intelligible ego.

As I have shown, woman can reach no more than a vague half-consciousness
of the fact that she is a conditioned being, and so she is unable to
overcome the sexuality that binds her. Hysteria is the only attempt on
her part to overcome it, and, as I have shown, it is not a genuine
attempt. The hysteria itself is what the hysterical woman tries to
resist, and the falsity of this effort against slavery is the measure of
its hopelessness. The most notable examples of the sex (I have in mind
Hebbel’s Judith and Wagner’s Kundry) may feel that is because they wish
it that servitude is a necessity for them, but this realisation does not
give them power to resist it; at the last moment they will kiss the man
who ravishes them, and succumb with pleasure to those whom they have
been resisting violently. It is as if woman were under a curse. At times
she feels the weight of it, but she never flees from it. Her shrieks and
ravings are not really genuine, and she succumbs to her fate at the
moment when it has seemed most repulsive to her.

After a long analysis, then, it has been found that there is no
exception to the complete absence in women of any true, inalienable
relation to worth. Even what is covered by such current terms as
“womanly love,” “womanly virtue,” “womanly devoutness,” “womanly
modesty,” has failed to invalidate my conclusions. I have maintained my
ground in face of the strongest opposition, even including that which
comes from woman’s hysterical imitations of the male morality.

Woman, the normal receptive woman of whom I am speaking, is impregnated
by the man not only physically (and I set down the astonishing mental
alteration in women after marriage to a physical phenomenon akin to
telegony), but at every age of her life, by man’s consciousness and by
man’s social arrangements. Thus it comes about that although woman lacks
all the characters of the male sex, she can assume them so cleverly and
so slavishly that it is possible to make mistakes such as the idea of
the higher morality of women.

But this astounding receptivity of woman is not isolated, and must be
brought into practical and theoretical connection with the other
positive and negative characteristics of woman.

What has the match-making instinct in woman to do with her plasticity?
What connection is there between her untruthfulness and her sexuality?
How does it come about that there is such a strange mixture of all these
things in woman?

This brings us to ask the reason why women can assimilate everything.
Whence does she derive the falsity which makes it possible for her to
prefer to believe only what others have told her, to have only what they
(choose to) give her, to be merely what they make her?

In order to give the right answer to these questions we must turn once
more, for the last time, from the actual point. It was found that the
power of recognition which animals possess, and which is the psychical
equivalent of universal organic response to repeated stimuli, was
curiously like and unlike human memory; both signify an equally lasting
influence of an impression which was limited to a definite period; but
memory is differentiated from mere passive recognition by its power of
actively reproducing the past.

Later on, it was seen that mere individuation, the characteristic of all
organic differentiation, and individuality, man’s possession, are
different. And finally it was found that it was necessary to distinguish
carefully between love, peculiar to man, and the sexual instinct, shared
by the animals. The two are allied inasmuch as they are both efforts at
immortality.

The desire for worth was referred to as a human character, absent in the
animals where there is only a desire for satisfaction. The two are
analogous, and yet fundamentally different. Pleasure is craved; worth is
what we feel we ought to crave. The two have been confused, with the
worst results for psychology and ethics. There has been a similar
confusion between personality and persons, between recognition and
memory, sexuality and love.

All these antitheses have been continually confused, and, what is even
more striking, almost always by men with the same views and theories,
and with the same object--that of trying to obliterate the difference
between man and the lower animals.

There are other less known distinctions which have been equally
neglected. Limited consciousness is an animal trait; the active power of
noticing is a purely human one. It is evident that there is something in
common in the two facts, but still they are very different. Desire, or
impulse, and will are nearly always spoken of as if they were identical.
The former is common to all living creatures, but man has, in addition,
a will, which is free, and no factor of psychology, because it is the
foundation of all psychological experiences. The identification of
impulse and will is not solely due to Darwin; it occurred also in
Schopenhauer’s conception of the will, which was sometimes biological,
sometimes purely philosophical.

I may group the two sets of factors as follows:

  Common to men and animals,  Limited to mankind, and in
  fundamentally organic.      particular to the males of
                              mankind.

  Individuation.              Individuality.

  Recognition.                Memory.

  Pleasure.                   Sense of worth or value.

  Sexual desire.              Love.

  Limitation of the field of  Faculty of “taking
  consciousness.              notice.”

  Impulse.                    Will.

The series shows that man possesses not only each character which is
found in all living things, but also an analogous and higher character
peculiar to himself. The old tendency at once to identify the two series
and to contrast them seems to show the existence of something binding
together the two series, and at the same time separating them. One may
recall in this connection the Buddhistic conception of there being in
man a superstructure added to the characters of lower existences. It is
as if man possessed all the properties of the beasts, with, in each
case, some special quality added. What is this that has been added? How
far does it resemble, and in what respects does it differ from, the more
primitive set?

The terms in the left-hand row are fundamental characteristics of all
animal and vegetable life. All such life is individual life, not the
life of undivided masses; it manifests itself as the impulse to satisfy
needs, as sexual impulse for the purpose of reproduction. Individuality,
memory, will, love, are those qualities of a second life, which,
although related to organic life to a certain extent, are _toto cœlo_
different from it.

This brings us face to face with the religious idea of the eternal,
higher, _new_ life, and especially with the Christian form of it.

As well as a share in organic life, man shares another life, the ζωη
αιωνιος of the New Dispensation. Just as all earthly life is sustained
by earthly food, this other life requires spiritual sustenance
(symbolised in the communion service). The birth and death of the former
have their counterparts in the latter--the moral re-birth of man, the
“regeneration”--and the end: the final loss of the soul through error or
crime. The one is determined from without by the bonds of natural
causation; the other is ruled by the moral imperative from within. The
one is limited and confined to a definite purpose; the other is
unlimited, eternal and moral. The characters which are in the left row
are common to all forms of lower life; those in the right-hand column
are the corresponding presages of eternal life, manifestations of a
higher existence in which man, and only man, has a share. The perpetual
intermingling and the fresh complications which arise between the higher
and lower natures are the making of all history of the human mind; this
is the plot of the history of the universe.

It is possible that some may perceive in this second life something
which in man might have been derived from the other lower characters;
such a possibility dismiss at once.

A clearer grasp of this sensuous, impressionable lower life will make it
clear that, as I have explained in earlier chapters, the case is
reversed; the lower life is merely a projection of the higher on the
world of the senses, a reflection of it in the sphere of necessity, as a
degradation of it, or its Fall. And the great problem is how the
eternal, lofty idea came to be bound with earth. This problem is the
guilt of the world. My investigation is now on the threshold of what
cannot be investigated; of a problem that so far no one has dared to
answer, and that never will be answered by any human being. It is the
riddle of the universe and of life; the binding of the unlimited in the
bonds of space, of the eternal in time, of the spirit in matter. It is
the relation of freedom to necessity, of something to nothing, of God to
the devil. The dualism of the world is beyond comprehension; it is the
plot of the story of man’s Fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding
of eternal life in a perishable being, of the innocent in the guilty.

But it is evident that neither I nor any other man can understand this.
I can understand sin only when I cease to commit it, and the moment I
understand it I cease to commit it. So also I can never comprehend life
while I am still alive. There is no moment of my life when I am not
bound down by this sham existence, and it must be impossible for me to
understand the bond until I am free from it. When I understand a thing I
am already outside it; I cannot comprehend my sinfulness while I am
still sinful.

As the absolute female has no trace of individuality and will, no sense
of worth or of love, she can have no part in the higher, transcendental
life. The intelligible, hyperempirical existence of the male transcends
matter, space, and time. He is certainly mortal, but he is immortal as
well. And so he has the power to choose between the two, between the
life which is lost with death and the life to which death is only a
stepping-stone. The deepest will of man is towards this perfect,
timeless existence; he is compact of the desire for immortality. That
the woman has no craving for perpetual life is too apparent; there is
nothing in her of that eternal which man tries to interpose and must
interpose between his real self and his projected, empirical self. Some
sort of relation to the idea of supreme value, to the idea of the
absolute, that perfect freedom which he has not yet attained, because he
is bound by necessity, but which he can attain because mind is superior
to matter; such a relation to the purpose of things generally, or to the
divine, every man has. And although his life on earth is accompanied by
separation and detachment from the absolute, his mind is always longing
to be free from the taint of original sin.

Just as the love of his parents was not pure in purpose, but sought more
or less a physical embodiment, the son, who is the outcome of that love,
will possess his share of mortal life as well as of eternal: we are
horrified at the thought of death, we fight against it, cling to this
mortal life, and prove from that that we were anxious to be born as we
were born, and that we still desire to be born of this world.

But since every male has a relation to the idea of the highest value,
and would be incomplete without it, no male is really ever happy. It is
only women who are happy. No man is happy, because he has a relation to
freedom, and yet during his earthly life he is always bound in some way.
None but a perfectly passive being, such as the absolute female, or a
universally active being, like the divine, can be happy. Happiness is
the sense of perfect consummation, and this feeling a man can never
have; but there are women who fancy themselves perfect. The male always
has problems behind him and efforts before him: all problems originate
in the past; the future is the sphere for efforts. Time has no
objective, no meaning, for woman; no woman questions herself as to the
reason of her existence; and yet the sole purpose of time is to give
expression to the fact that this life can and must mean something.

Happiness for the male! That would imply wholly independent activity,
complete freedom; he is always bound, although not with the heaviest
bonds, and his sense of guilt increases the further he is removed from
the idea of freedom.

Mortal life is a calamity, and must remain so whilst mankind is a
passive victim of sensation; so long as he remains not form, but merely
the matter on which form is impressed. Every man, however, has some
glimmer of higher things; the genius most certainly and most directly.
This trace of light, however, does not come from his perceptions; so far
as he is ruled by these, man is merely a passive victim of surrounding
things. His spontaneity, his freedom, come from his power of judging as
to values, and his highest approach to absolute spontaneity and freedom
comes from love and from artistic or philosophical creation. Through
these he obtains some faint sense of what happiness might be.

Woman can really never be quite unhappy, for happiness is an empty word
for her, a word created by unhappy men. Women never mind letting others
see their unhappiness, as it is not real; behind it there lies no
consciousness of guilt, no sense of the sin of the world.

The last and absolute proof of the thoroughly negative character of
woman’s life, of her complete want of a higher existence, is derived
from the way in which women commit suicide.

Such suicides are accompanied practically always by thoughts of other
people, what they will think, how they will mourn over them, how
grieved--or angry--they will be. Every woman is convinced that her
unhappiness is undeserved at the time she kills herself; she pities
herself exceedingly with the sort of self-compassion which is only a
“weeping with others when they weep.”

How is it possible for a woman to look upon her unhappiness as personal
when she possesses no idea of a destiny? The most appallingly decisive
proof of the emptiness and nullity of women is that they never once
succeed in knowing the problem of their own lives, and death leaves them
ignorant of it, because they are unable to realise the higher life of
personality.

I am now ready to answer the question which I put forward as the chief
object of this portion of my book, the question as to the significance
of the male and female in the universe. Women have no existence and no
essence; they are not, they are nothing. Mankind occurs as male or
female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in ontological
reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest
interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the
genius, has such a relation, and for him the absolute is either the
conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a
philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of
absolute beauty, and then he is an artist. But both views mean the same.
Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither affirms nor denies it;
she is neither moral nor anti-moral; mathematically speaking, she has no
sign; she is purposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil,
never egoistical (and therefore has often been said to be altruistic);
she is as non-moral as she is non-logical. But all existence is moral
and logical existence. So woman has no existence.

Woman is untruthful. An animal has just as little metaphysical reality
as the actual woman, but it cannot speak, and consequently it does not
lie. In order to speak the truth one must _be_ something; truth is
dependent on an existence, and only that can have a relation to an
existence which is in itself something. Man desires truth all the time;
that is to say, he all along desires only to be something. The
cognition-impulse is in the end identical with the desire for
immortality. Any one who objects to a statement without ever having
realised it; any one who gives outward acquiescence without the inner
affirmation, such persons, like woman, have no real existence and must
of necessity lie. So that woman always lies, even if, objectively, she
speaks the truth.

Woman is the great emissary of pairing. The living units of the lower
forms of life are individuals, organisms; the living units of the higher
forms of life are individualities, souls, monads, “meta-organisms,” a
term which Hellenbach uses and which is not without point.

Each monad, however, is differentiated from every other monad, and is as
distinct from it as only two things can be. Monads have no windows, but,
instead, have the universe in themselves. Man as monad, as a potential
or actual individuality, that is, as having genius, has in addition
differentiation and distinction, individuation and discrimination; the
simple undifferentiated unit is exclusively female. Each monad creates
for itself a detached entity, a whole; but it looks upon every other ego
as a perfect totality also, and never intrudes upon it. Man has limits,
and accepts them and desires them; woman, who does not recognise her own
entity, is not in a position to regard or perceive the privacy of those
around her, and neither respects, nor honours, nor leaves it alone: as
there is no such thing as one-ness for her there can be no plurality,
only an indistinct state of fusion with others. Because there is no “I”
in woman she cannot grasp the “thou”; according to her perception the I
and thou are just a pair, an undifferentiated one; this makes it
possible for woman to bring people together, to match-make. The object
of her love is that of her sympathy--the community, the blending of
everything.[23]

  [23] All individuality is an enemy of the community. This is seen most
  markedly in men of genius, but it is just the same with regard to the
  sexes.

Woman has no limits to her ego which could be broken through, and which
she would have to guard.

The chief difference between man’s and woman’s friendship is referable
to this fact. Man’s friendship is an attempt to see eye to eye with
those who individually and collectively are striving after the same
idea; woman’s friendship is a combination for the purpose of
match-making. It is the only kind of intimate and unreserved intercourse
possible between women, when they are not merely anxious to meet each
other for the purpose of gossiping or discussing every day affairs.[24]

  [24] Men’s friendships avoid breaking down their friends’ personal
  reserve. Women expect intimacy from their friends.

If, for instance, one of two girls or women is much prettier than the
other, the plainer of the two experiences a certain sexual satisfaction
at the admiration which the other receives. The principal condition of
all friendship between women is the exclusion of rivalry; every woman
compares herself physically with every woman she gets to know. In cases
where one is more beautiful than the other, the plainer of the two will
idolise the other, because, though neither of them is in the least
conscious of it, the next best thing to her own sexual satisfaction for
the one is the success of the other; it is always the same; woman
participates in every sexual union. The completely impersonal existence
of women, as well as the super-individual nature of their sexuality,
clearly shows match-making to be the fundamental trait of their beings.

The least that even the ugliest woman demands, and from which she
derives a certain amount of pleasure, is that any one of her sex should
be admired and desired.

It follows from the absorbing and absorbable nature of woman’s life
that women can never feel really jealous. However ignoble jealousy and
the spirit of revenge may be, they both contain an element of greatness,
of which women, whether for good or evil, are incapable. In jealousy
there lies a despairing claim to an assumed right, and the idea of
justice is out of woman’s reach. But that is not the chief reason why a
woman can never be really jealous of any man. If a man, even if he were
the man she was madly in love with, were sitting in the next room making
love to another woman, the thoughts that would be aroused in her breast
would be so sexually exciting that they would leave no room for
jealousy. To a man, such a scene, if he knew of it, would be absolutely
repulsive, and it would be nauseous to him to be near it; woman would
feverishly follow each detail, or she would become hysterical if it
dawned on her what she was doing.

A man is never really affected by the idea of the pairing of others: he
is outside and above any such circumstance which has no meaning for him;
a woman, however, would be scarcely responsible for her interest in the
process, she would be in a state of feverish excitement and as if
spellbound by the thought of her proximity to it.

A man’s interest in his fellow men, who are problems for him, may extend
to their sexual affairs; but the curiosity which is specially for these
things is peculiar to woman, whether with regard to men or women. It is
the love affairs of a man which, from first to last, interest women; and
a man is only intellectually mysterious and charming to a woman so long
as she is not clear as to these.

From all this it is again manifest that femaleness and match-making are
identical; even a superficial study of the case would have resulted in
the same conclusions. But I had a much wider purpose, and I hope I have
clearly shown the connection between woman positive as match-maker, and
woman negative as utterly lacking in the higher life. Woman has but one
idea, an idea she cannot be conscious of, as it is her sole idea, and
that is absolutely opposed to the spiritual idea. Whether as a mother
seeking reputable matrimony, or the Bacchante of the Venusberg, whether
she wishes to be the foundress of a family, or is content to be lost in
the maze of pleasure-seekers, she always is in relation to the general
idea of the race as a whole of which she is an inseparable part, and she
follows the instinct which most of all makes for community.

She, as the missionary of union, must be a creature without limits or
individuality. I have prolonged this side of my investigation because
its important result has been omitted from all earlier characterology.

At this stage it well may be asked if women are really to be considered
human beings at all, or if my theory does not unite them with plants and
animals? For, according to the theory, women, just as little as plants
and animals, have any real existence, any relation to the intelligible
whole. Man alone is a microcosm, a mirror of the universe.

In Ibsen’s “Little Eyolf” there is a beautiful and apposite passage.

“Rita. ‘After all, we are only human beings.’

“Allmers. ‘But we have some kinship with the sky and the sea, Rita.’

“Rita. ‘You, perhaps; not me.’”

Woman, according to the poet, according to Buddha, and in my
interpretation, has no relation to the all, to the world whole, to God.
Is she then human, or an animal, or a plant?

Anatomists will find the question ridiculous, and will at once dismiss
the philosophy which could lead up to such a possibility. For them woman
is the female of _Homo sapiens_, differentiated from all other living
beings, and occupying the same position with regard to the human male
that the females of other species occupy with regard to their males. And
he will not allow the philosopher to say, “What has the anatomist to do
with me? Let him mind his own business.”

As a matter of fact, women are sisters of the flowers, and are in close
relationship with the animals. Many of their sexual perversities and
affections for animals (Pasiphäe myth and Leda myth) indicate this. But
they are human beings. Even the absolute woman, whom we think of as
without any trace of intelligible ego, is still the complement of man.
And there is no doubt that the fact of the special sexual and erotic
completion of the human male by the human female, even if it is not the
moral phenomenon which advocates of marriage would have us believe, is
still of tremendous importance to the woman problem. Animals are mere
individuals; women are persons, although they are not personalities.

An appearance of discriminative power, though not the reality, language,
though not conversation, memory, though it has no continuity or unity of
consciousness--must all be granted to them.

They possess counterfeits of everything masculine, and thus are subject
to those transformations which the defenders of womanliness are so fond
of quoting. The result of this is a sort of amphi-sexuality of many
ideas (honour, shame, love, imagination, fear, sensibility, and so on),
which have both a masculine and feminine significance.

There now remains to discuss the real meaning of the contrast between
the sexes.

The parts played by the male and female principles in the animal and
vegetable kingdoms are not now under consideration; we are dealing
solely with humanity.

That such principles of maleness and femaleness must be accepted as
theoretical conceptions, and not as metaphysical ideas, was the point of
this investigation from the beginning. The whole object of the book has
been to settle the question, in man at least, of the really important
differences between man and woman, quite apart from the mere
physiological-sexual differentiation. Furthermore, the view which sees
nothing more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than an arrangement
for physiological division of labour--an idea for which, I believe, the
zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is responsible--appears, according to this
work, quite untenable; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a
superficial and intellectually complacent view.

Darwinism, indeed, is responsible for making popular the view that
sexually differentiated organisms have been derived from earlier stages
in which there was no sexual dimorphism; but long before Darwin, Gustav
Theodor Fechner had already shown that the sexes could not be supposed
to have arisen from an undifferentiated stage by any principle such as
division of labour, adaptation to the struggle for existence, and so
forth.

The ideas “man” and “woman” cannot be investigated separately; their
significance can be found out only by placing them side by side and
contrasting them. The key to their natures must be found in their
relations to each other. In attempting to discover the nature of erotics
I went a little way into this subject. The relation of man to woman is
simply that of subject to object. Woman seeks her consummation as the
object. She is the plaything of husband or child, and, however we may
try to hide it, she is anxious to be nothing but such a chattel.

No one misunderstands so thoroughly what a woman wants as he who tries
to find out what is passing within her, endeavouring to share her
feelings and hopes, her experiences and her real nature.

Woman does not wish to be treated as an active agent; she wants to
remain always and throughout--this is just her womanhood--purely
passive, to feel herself under another’s will. She demands only to be
desired physically, to be taken possession of, like a new property.

Just as mere sensation only attains reality when it is apprehended,
_i.e._, when it becomes objective, so a woman is brought to a sense of
her existence only by her husband or children--by these as subjects to
whom she is the object--so obtaining the gift of an existence.

The contrast between the subject and the object in the theory of
knowledge corresponds ontologically to the contrast between form and
matter. It is no more than a translation of this distinction from the
theory of experience to metaphysics. Matter, which in itself is
absolutely unindividualised and so can assume any form, of itself has
no definite and lasting qualities, and has as little essence as mere
perception, the matter of experience, has in itself any existence. If
the Platonic conception is followed out, it will be apparent that that
great thinker asserted to be nothing what the ordinary Philistine
regards as the highest form of reality. According to Plato, the negation
of existence is no other than matter. Form is the only real existence.
Aristotle carried the Platonic conception into the regions of biology.
For Plato form is the parent and creator of all reality. For Aristotle,
in the sexual process the male principle is the active, formative agent,
the female principle the passive matter on which the form is impressed.
In my view, the significance of woman in humanity is explained by the
Platonic and Aristotelian conception. Woman is the material on which man
acts. Man as the microcosm is compounded of the lower and higher life.
Woman is matter, is nothing. This knowledge gives us the keystone to our
structure, and it makes everything clear that was indistinct, it gives
things a coherent form. Woman’s sexual part depends on contact; it is
the absorbing and not the liberating impulse. It coincides with this,
that the keenest sense woman has, and the only one she has more highly
developed than man, is the sense of touch. The eye and the ear lead to
the unlimited and give glimpses of infinity; the sense of touch
necessitates physical limitations to our own actions: one is affected by
what one feels; it is the eminently sordid sense, and suited to the
physical requirements of an earth-bound being.

Man is form, woman is matter: if that is so it must find expression in
the relations between their respective psychic experiences.

The summing up of the connected nature of man’s mental life, as opposed
to the inarticulate and chaotic condition of woman’s, illustrates the
above antithesis of form and matter.

Matter needs to be formed: and thus woman demands that man should clear
her confusion of thought, give meaning to her henid ideas. Women are
matter, which can assume any shape. Those experiments which ascribe to
girls a better memory for learning by rote than boys are explained in
this way: they are due to the nullity and inanity of women, who can be
saturated with anything and everything, whilst man only retains what has
an interest for him, forgetting all else.

This accounts for what has been called woman’s submissiveness, the way
she is influenced by the opinions of others, her suggestibility, the way
in which man moulds her formless nature. Woman is nothing; therefore,
and only therefore, she can become everything, whilst man can only
remain what he is. A man can make what he likes of a woman: the most a
woman can do is to help a man to achieve what he wants.

A man’s real nature is never altered by education: woman, on the other
hand, by external influences, can be taught to suppress her most
characteristic self, the real value she sets on sexuality.

Woman can appear everything and deny everything, but in reality she is
never anything.

Women have neither this nor that characteristic; their peculiarity
consists in having no characteristics at all; the complexity and
terrible mystery about women come to this; it is this which makes them
above and beyond man’s understanding--man, who always wants to get to
the heart of things.

It may be said, even by those who may wish to agree with the foregoing
arguments, that they have not indicated what man really is. Has he any
special male characteristics, like match-making and want of character in
women? Is there a definite idea of what man is, as there is of woman,
and can this idea be similarly formulated?

Here is the answer: The idea of maleness consists in the fact of an
individuality, of an essential monad, and is covered by it. Each monad,
however, is as different as possible from every other monad, and
therefore cannot be classified in one comprehensive idea common to many
other monads. Man is the microcosm; he contains all kinds of
possibilities. This must not be confused with the universal
susceptibility of woman who becomes all without _being_ anything, whilst
man is all, as much or as little, according to his gifts, as he will.
Man contains woman, for he contains matter, and he can allow this part
of his nature to develop itself, _i.e._, to thrive and enervate him; or
he can recognise and fight against it--so that he, and he alone, can get
at the truth about woman. But woman cannot develop except through man.

The meaning of man and woman is first arrived at when we examine their
mutual sexual and erotic relations. Woman’s deepest desire is to be
formed by man, and so to receive her being. Woman desires that man
should impart opinions to her quite different to those she held before,
she is content to let herself be turned by him from what she had till
then thought right. She wishes to be taken to pieces as a whole, so that
he may build her up again.

Woman is first created by man’s will--he dominates her and changes her
whole being (hypnotism). Here is the explanation of the relation of the
psychical to the physical in man and woman. Man assumes a reciprocal
action of body and mind, in the sense rather that the dominant mind
creates the body, than that the mind merely projects itself on
phenomena, whilst the woman accepts both mental and psychical phenomena
empirically. None the less, even in the woman there is some reciprocal
action. However, whilst in the man, as Schopenhauer truly taught, the
human being is his own creation, his own will makes and re-makes the
body, the woman is bodily influenced and changed by an alien will
(suggestion).

Man not only forms himself, but woman also--a far easier matter. The
myths of the book of Genesis and other cosmogonies, which teach that
woman was created out of man, are nearer the truth than the biological
theories of descent, according to which males have been evolved from
females.

We have now to come to the question left open in chap. ix., as to how
woman, who is herself without soul or will, is yet able to realise to
what extent a man may be endowed with them; and we may now endeavour to
answer it. Of this one must be certain, that what woman notices, that
for which she has a sense, is not the special nature of man, but only
the general fact and possibly the grade of his maleness. It is quite
erroneous to suppose that woman has an innate capacity to understand the
individuality of a man. The lover, who is so easily fooled by the
unconscious simulation of a deeper comprehension on the part of his
sweetheart, may believe that he understands himself through a girl; but
those who are less easily satisfied cannot help seeing that women only
possess a sense of the fact not of the individuality of the soul, only
for the formal general fact, not for the differentiation of the
personality. In order to perceive and apperceive the special form,
matter must not itself be formless; woman’s relation to man, however, is
nothing but that of matter to form, and her comprehension of him nothing
but willingness to be as much formed as possible by him; the instinct of
those without existence for existence. Furthermore, this “comprehension”
is not theoretical, it is not sympathetic, it is only a desire to be
sympathetic; it is importunate and egoistical. Woman has no relation to
man and no sense of man, but only for maleness; and if she is to be
considered as more sexual than man, this greater claim is nothing but
the intense desire for the fullest and most definite formation, it is
the demand for the greatest possible quantity of existence.

And, finally, match-making is nothing else than this. The sexuality of
women is super-individual, because they are not limited, formed,
individualised entities, in the higher sense of the word.

The supremest moment in a woman’s life, when her original nature, her
natural desire manifests itself, is that in which her own sexual union
takes place. She embraces the man passionately and presses him to her;
it is the greatest joy of passivity, stronger even than the contented
feeling of a hypnotised person, the desire of matter which has just been
formed, and wishes to keep that form for ever. That is why a woman is so
grateful to her possessor, even if the gratitude is limited to the
moment, as in the case of prostitutes with no memory, or, if it lasts
longer, as in the case of more highly differentiated women.

This endless striving of the poor to attach themselves to riches, the
altogether formless and therefore super-individual striving of the
inarticulate to obtain form by contact, to keep it indefinitely and so
gain an existence, is the deepest motive in pairing.

Pairing is only possible because woman is not a monad, and has no sense
of individuality; it is the endless striving of nothing to be something.

It is thus that the duality of man and woman has gradually developed
into complete dualism, to the dualism of the higher and lower lives, of
subject and object, of form and matter, something and nothing. All
metaphysical, all transcendental existence is logical and moral
existence; woman is non-logical and non-moral. She has no dislike for
what is logical and moral, she is not anti-logical, she is not
anti-moral. She is not the negation, she is, rather, nothing. She is
neither the affirmation nor the denial. A man has in himself the
possibility of being the absolute something or the absolute nothing, and
therefore his actions are directed towards the one or the other; woman
does not sin, for she herself is the sin which is a possibility in man.

The abstract male is the image of God, the absolute something; the
female, and the female element in the male, is the symbol of nothing;
that is the significance of the woman in the universe, and in this way
male and female complete and condition one another. Woman has a meaning
and a function in the universe as the opposite of man; and as the human
male surpasses the animal male, so the human female surpasses the female
of zoology. It is not that limited existence and limited negation (as in
the animal kingdom) are at war in humanity; what there stand in
opposition are unlimited existence and unlimited negation. And so male
and female make up humanity.

The meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the
opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity. And
so nothing is so despicable as a man become female, and such a person
will be regarded as the supreme criminal even by himself. And so also is
to be explained the deepest fear of man; the fear of the woman, which is
the fear of unconsciousness, the alluring abyss of annihilation.

An old woman manifests once for all what woman really is. The beauty of
woman, as may be experimentally proved, is only created by love of a
man; a woman becomes more beautiful when a man loves her because she is
passively responding to the will which is in her lover; however deep
this may sound, it is only a matter of everyday experience.

All the qualities of woman depend on her non-existence, on her want of
character; because she has no true, permanent, but only a mortal life,
in her character as the advocate of pairing she furthers the sexual part
of life, and is fundamentally transformed by and susceptible to the man
who has a physical influence over her.

Thus the three fundamental characters of woman with which this chapter
has dealt come together in the conception of her as the non-existent.
Her instability and untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the
premiss of her non-existence. Her only positive character, the
conception of her as the pairing agent, comes from it by a simple
process of analysis. The nature of woman is no more than pairing, no
more than super-individual sexuality.

If we turn to the table of the two kinds of life given earlier in this
chapter, it will be apparent that every inclination from the higher to
the lower is a crime against oneself. Immorality is the will towards
negation, the craving to change the formed into the formless, the wish
for destruction. And from this comes the intimate relation between
femaleness and crime. There is a close relation between the immoral and
the non-moral. It is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the
absolute in him, turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence. The
acceptance of the Phallus is immoral. It has always been thought of as
hateful; it has been the image of Satan, and Dante made it the central
pillar of hell.

Thus comes about the domination of the male sexuality over the female.
It is only when man is sexual that woman has existence and meaning.

Her existence is bound up with the Phallus, and so that is her supreme
lord and welcome master.

Sex, in the form of man, is woman’s fate; the Don Juan is the only type
of man who has complete power over her.

The curse, which was said to be heavy on woman, is the evil will of man:
nothing is only a tool in the hand of the will for nothing. The early
Fathers expressed it pathetically when they called woman the handmaid of
the devil. For matter in itself is nothing, it can only obtain existence
through form. The fall of “form” is the corruption that takes place when
form endeavours to relapse into the formless. When man became sexual he
formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has
accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation;
she is sexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; when
man, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he is giving
woman form, calling her into existence. Therefore woman’s one object
must be to keep man sexual. She desires man as Phallus, and for this she
is the advocate of pairing. She is incapable of making use of any
creature except as a means to an end, the end being pairing; and she has
but one purpose, that of continuing the guilt of man, for she would
disappear the moment man had overcome his sexuality.

Man created woman, and will always create her afresh, as long as he is
sexual. Just as he gives woman consciousness, so he gives her existence.
Woman is the sin of man.

He tries to pay the debt by love. Here we have the explanation of what
seemed like an obscure myth at the end of the previous chapter. Now we
see what was hidden in it: that woman is nothing before man’s fall, nor
without it; that he does not rob her of anything she had before. The
crime man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in
assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism.

Whence otherwise would come the generosity of love, which can never be
satisfied by giving? How is it that love is so anxious to endow woman
with a soul, and not any other creature? Whence comes it that a child
cannot love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty,
with the repeated forming of woman, with the renewing of sin? Woman is
nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every
man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself and his own
guilt.

But woman is not herself guilty; she is made so by the guilt of others,
and everything for which woman is blamed should be laid at man’s door.

Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman
instead of nullifying her. The “something” folds the “nothing” in its
arms, and thinks thus to free the universe of negation and drown all
objections; whereas the nothing would only disappear if the something
put it away.

Since man’s hatred for woman is not conscious hatred of his own
sexuality, his love is his most intense effort to save woman as woman,
instead of desiring to nullify her in himself. And the consciousness of
guilt comes from the fact that the object of guilt is coveted instead of
being annihilated.

Woman alone, then, is guilt; and is so through man’s fault. And if
femaleness signifies pairing, it is only because all guilt endeavours to
increase its circle. What woman, always unconsciously, accomplishes, she
does because she cannot help it; it is her reason for being, her whole
nature. She is only a part of man, his other, ineradicable, his lower
part. So matter appears to be as inexplicable a riddle as form; woman as
unending as man, negation as eternal as existence; but this eternity is
only the eternity of guilt.


CHAPTER XIII

JUDAISM

It would not be surprising if to many it should seem from the foregoing
arguments that “men” have come out of them too well, and, as a
collective body, have been placed on an exaggeratedly lofty pedestal.
The conclusions drawn from these arguments, however surprised every
Philistine and young simpleton would be to learn that in himself he
comprises the whole world, cannot be opposed and confuted by cheap
reasoning; yet the treatment of the male sex must not simply be
considered too indulgent, or due to a direct tendency to omit all the
repulsive and small side of manhood in order to favourably represent its
best points.

The accusation would be unjustified. It does not enter the author’s mind
to idealise man in order more easily to lower the estimation of woman.
So much narrowness and so much coarseness often thrive beneath the
empirical representation of manhood that it is a question of the better
possibilities lying in every man, neglected by him or perceived either
with painful clearness or dull animosity; possibilities which as such in
woman neither actually nor meditatively ever come to any account. And
here the author cannot in any wise really rely on the dissimilarities
between men, however little he may impugn their importance. It is,
therefore, a question of establishing what woman is not, and truly in
her there is infinitely much wanting which is never quite missing even
in the most mediocre and plebeian of men. That which is the positive
attribute of the woman, in so far as a positive can be spoken of in
regard to such a being, will constantly be found also in many men.
There are, as has already often been demonstrated, men who have become
women or have remained women; but there is no woman who has surpassed
certain circumscribed, not particularly elevated moral and intellectual
limits. And, therefore, I must again assert that the woman of the
highest standard is immeasurably beneath the man of lowest standard.

These objections may go even further and touch a point where the
ignoring of theory must assuredly become reprehensible. There are, to
wit, nations and races whose men, though they can in no wise be regarded
as intermediate forms of the sexes, are found to approach so slightly
and so rarely to the ideal of manhood as set forth in my argument, that
the principles, indeed the entire foundation on which this work rests,
would seem to be severely shaken by their existence. What shall we make,
for example, out of the Chinese, with their feminine freedom from
internal cravings and their incapacity for every effort? One might feel
tempted to believe in the complete effeminacy of the whole race. It can
at least be no mere whim of the entire nation that the Chinaman
habitually wears a pigtail, and that the growth of his beard is of the
very thinnest. But how does the matter stand with the negroes? A genius
has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard
of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to
be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of
imprudence.

If, consequently, the principle of the intermediate forms of the sexes
may perhaps enjoy a prospect of becoming of importance to racial
anthropology (since in some peoples a greater share of womanishness
would seem to be generally disseminated), it must yet be conceded that
the foregoing deductions refer above all to Aryan men and Aryan women.
In how far, in the other great races of mankind, uniformity with the
standard of the Aryan race may reign, or what has prevented and hindered
this; to arrive more nearly at such knowledge would require in the first
instance the most intense research into racial characteristics.

The Jewish race, which has been chosen by me as a subject of discussion,
because, as will be shown, it presents the gravest and most formidable
difficulties for my views, appears to possess a certain anthropological
relationship with both negroes and Mongolians. The readily curling hair
points to the negro; admixture of Mongolian blood is suggested by the
perfectly Chinese or Malay formation of face and skull which is so often
to be met with amongst the Jews and which is associated with a yellowish
complexion. This is nothing more than the result of everyday experience,
and these remarks must not be otherwise understood; the anthropological
question of the origin of the Jewish race is apparently insoluble, and
even such an interesting answer to it as that given by H. S. Chamberlain
has recently met with much opposition. The author does not possess the
knowledge necessary to treat of this; what will be here briefly, but as
far as possible profoundly analysed, is the psychical peculiarity of the
Jewish race.

This is an obligatory task imposed by psychological observation and
analysis. It is undertaken independently of past history, the details of
which must be uncertain. The Jewish race offers a problem of the deepest
significance for the study of all races, and in itself it is intimately
bound up with many of the most troublesome problems of the day.

I must, however, make clear what I mean by Judaism; I mean neither a
race nor a people nor a recognised creed. I think of it as a tendency of
the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all
mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion
only amongst the Jews. Antisemitism itself will confirm my point of
view.

The purest Aryans by descent and disposition are seldom Antisemites,
although they are often unpleasantly moved by some of the peculiar
Jewish traits; they cannot in the least understand the Antisemite
movement, and are, in consequence of their defence of the Jews, often
called Philosemites; and yet these persons writing on the subject of
the hatred of Jews, have been guilty of the most profound
misunderstanding of the Jewish character. The aggressive Antisemites, on
the other hand, nearly always display certain Jewish characters,
sometimes apparent in their faces, although they may have no real
admixture of Jewish blood.[25]

  [25] Zola was a typical case of a person absolutely without trace of
  the Jewish qualities, and, therefore, a philosemite. The greatest
  geniuses, on the other hand, have nearly always been antisemites
  (Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Herder, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul,
  Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Wagner); this comes about from the fact as
  geniuses they have something of everything in their natures, and so
  can understand Judaism.

The explanation is simple. People love in others the qualities they
would like to have but do not actually have in any great degree; so also
we hate in others only what we do not wish to be, and what
notwithstanding we are partly. We hate only qualities to which we
approximate, but which we realise first in other persons.

Thus the fact is explained that the bitterest Antisemites are to be
found amongst the Jews themselves. For only the quite Jewish Jews, like
the completely Aryan Aryans, are not at all Antisemitically disposed;
among the remainder only the commoner natures are actively Antisemitic
and pass sentence on others without having once sat in judgment on
themselves in these matters; and very few exercise their Antisemitism
first on themselves. This one thing, however, remains none the less
certain: whoever detests the Jewish disposition detests it first of all
in himself; that he should persecute it in others is merely his
endeavour to separate himself in this way from Jewishness; he strives to
shake it off and to localise it in his fellow-creatures, and so for a
moment to dream himself free of it. Hatred, like love, is a projected
phenomenon; that person alone is hated who reminds one unpleasantly of
oneself.

The Antisemitism of the Jews bears testimony to the fact that no one who
has had experience of them considers them loveable--not even the Jew
himself; the Antisemitism of the Aryans grants us an insight no less
full of significance: it is that the Jew and the Jewish race must not
be confounded. There are Aryans who are more Jewish than Jews, and real
Jews who are more Aryan than certain Aryans. I need not enumerate those
non-semites who had much Jewishness in them, the lesser (like the
well-known Frederick Nicolai of the eighteenth century) nor those of
moderate greatness (here Frederick Schiller can scarcely be omitted),
nor will I analyse their Jewishness. Above all Richard Wagner--the
bitterest Antisemite--cannot be held free from an accretion of
Jewishness even in his art, however little one be misled by the feeling
which sees in him the greatest artist enshrined in historical humanity;
and this, though indubitably his Siegfried is the most un-Jewish type
imaginable. As Wagner’s aversion to grand opera and the stage really led
to the strongest attraction, an attraction of which he was himself
conscious, so his music, which, in the unique simplicity of its motifs,
is the most powerful in the world, cannot be declared free from
obtrusiveness, loudness, and lack of distinction; from some
consciousness of this Wagner tried to gain coherence by the extreme
instrumentation of his works. It cannot be denied (there can be no
mistake about it) that Wagner’s music produces the deepest impression
not only on Jewish Antisemites, who have never completely shaken off
Jewishness, but also on Indo-Germanic Antisemites. From the music of
“Parsifal,” which to genuine Jews will ever remain as unapproachable as
its poetry, from the Pilgrim’s march and the procession to Rome in
“Tannhäuser,” and assuredly from many another part, they turn away.
Doubtless, also, none but a German could make so clearly manifest the
very essence of the German race as Wagner has succeeded in doing in the
“Meistersingers of Nurnberg.” In Wagner one thinks constantly of that
side of his character which leans towards Feuerbach, instead of towards
Schopenhauer. Here no narrow psychological depreciation of this great
man is intended. Judaism was to him the greatest help in reaching a
clearer understanding and assertion of the extremes within him in his
struggle to reach “Siegfried” and “Parsifal,” and in giving to German
nature the highest means of expression which has probably ever been
found in the pages of history. Yet a greater than Wagner was obliged to
overcome the Jewishness within him before he found his special vocation;
and it is, as previously stated, perhaps its great significance in the
world’s history and the immense merit of Judaism that it and nothing
else, leads the Aryan to a knowledge of himself and warns him against
himself. For this the Aryan has to thank the Jew that, through him, he
knows to guard against Judaism as a possibility within himself. This
example will sufficiently illustrate what, in my estimation, is to be
understood by Judaism.

I do not refer to a nation or to a race, to a creed or to a scripture.
When I speak of the Jew I mean neither an individual nor the whole body,
but mankind in general, in so far as it has a share in the platonic idea
of Judaism. My purpose is to analyse this idea.

That these researches should be included in a work devoted to the
characterology of the sexes may seem an undue extension of my subject.
But some reflection will lead to the surprising result that Judaism is
saturated with femininity, with precisely those qualities the essence of
which I have shown to be in the strongest opposition to the male nature.
It would not be difficult to make a case for the view that the Jew is
more saturated with femininity than the Aryan, to such an extent that
the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.

This interpretation would be erroneous. It is most important to lay
stress on the agreements and differences simply because so many points
that become obvious in dissecting woman reappear in the Jew.

Let me begin with the analogies. It is notable that the Jews, even now
when at least a relative security of tenure is possible, prefer moveable
property, and, in spite of their acquisitiveness, have little real sense
of personal property, especially in its most characteristic form, landed
property. Property is indissolubly connected with the self, with
individuality. It is in harmony with the foregoing that the Jew is so
readily disposed to communism. Communism must be distinguished clearly
from socialism, the former being based on a community of goods, an
absence of individual property, the latter meaning, in the first place a
co-operation of individual with individual, of worker with worker, and a
recognition of human individuality in every one. Socialism is Aryan
(Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fichte). Communism is Jewish (Marx). Modern
social democracy has moved far apart from the earlier socialism,
precisely because Jews have taken so large a share in developing it. In
spite of the associative element in it, the Marxian doctrine does not
lead in any way towards the State as a union of all the separate
individual aims, as the higher unit combining the purposes of the lower
units. Such a conception is as foreign to the Jew as it is to the woman.

For these reasons Zionism must remain an impracticable ideal,
notwithstanding the fashion in which it has brought together some of the
noblest qualities of the Jews. Zionism is the negation of Judaism, for
the conception of Judaism involves a world-wide distribution of the
Jews. Citizenship is an un-Jewish thing, and there has never been and
never will be a true Jewish State. The State involves the aggregation of
individual aims, the formation of and obedience to self-imposed laws;
and the symbol of the State, if nothing more, is its head chosen by free
election. The opposite conception is that of anarchy, with which
present-day communism is closely allied. The ideal State has never been
historically realised, but in every case there is at least a minimum of
this higher unit, this conception of an ideal power which distinguishes
the State from the mere collection of human beings in barracks.
Rousseau’s much-despised theory of the conscious co-operation of
individuals to form a State deserves more attention than it now
receives. Some ethical notion of free combination must always be
included.

The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like
the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of
true society is due to his lack of a free intelligible ego. Like women,
Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free
independent individuals mutually respecting each other’s individuality.

As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word
“gentleman” does not exist amongst the Jews. The genuine Jew fails in
this innate good breeding by which alone individuals honour their own
individuality and respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility,
and this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced back
for thousands of years.

The familiar Jewish arrogance has a similar explanation; it springs from
want of true knowledge of himself and the consequent overpowering need
he feels to enhance his own personality by depreciating that of his
fellow-creatures. And so, although his descent is incomparably longer
than that of the members of Aryan aristocracies, he has an inordinate
love for titles. The Aryan respect for his ancestors is rooted in the
conception that they were _his_ ancestors; it depends on his valuation
of his own personality, and, in spite of the communistic strength and
antiquity of the Jewish traditions, this individual sense of ancestry is
lacking.

The faults of the Jewish race have often been attributed to the
repression of that race by Aryans, and many Christians are still
disposed to blame themselves in this respect. But the self-reproach is
not justified. Outward circumstances do not mould a race in one
direction, unless there is in the race the innate tendency to respond to
the moulding forces; the total result comes at least as much from the
natural disposition as from the modifying circumstances. We know now
that the proof of the inheritance of acquired characters has broken
down, and, in the human race still more than the lower forms of life, it
is certain that individual and racial characters persist in spite of all
adaptive moulding. When men change, it is from within, outwards, unless
the change, as in the case of women, is a mere superficial imitation of
real change, and is not rooted in their natures. And how can we
reconcile the idea that the Jewish character is a modern modification
with the history of the foundation of the race, given in the Old
Testament without any disapprobation of how the patriarch Jacob deceived
his dying father, cheated his brother Esau and over-reached his
father-in-law, Laban?

The defenders of the Jew have rightly acquitted him of any tendency to
heinous crimes, and the legal statistics of different countries confirm
this. The Jew is not really anti-moral. But, none the less, he does not
represent the highest ethical type. He is rather non-moral, neither very
good nor very bad, with nothing in him of either the angel or the devil.
Notwithstanding the Book of Job and the story of Eden, it is plain that
the conceptions of a Supreme Good and a Supreme Evil are not truly
Jewish; I have no wish to enter upon the lengthy and controversial
topics of Biblical criticism, but at the least I shall be on sure ground
when I say that these conceptions play the least significant part in
modern Jewish life. Orthodox or unorthodox, the modern Jew does not
concern himself with God and the Devil, with Heaven and Hell. If he does
not reach the heights of the Aryan, he is also less inclined to commit
murder or other crimes of violence.

So also in the case of the woman; it is easier for her defenders to
point to the infrequency of her commission of serious crimes than to
prove her intrinsic morality. The homology of Jew and woman becomes
closer the further examination goes. There is no female devil, and no
female angel; only love, with its blind aversion from actuality, sees in
woman a heavenly nature, and only hate sees in her a prodigy of
wickedness. Greatness is absent from the nature of the woman and the
Jew, the greatness of morality, or the greatness of evil. In the Aryan
man, the good and bad principles of Kant’s religious philosophy are ever
present, ever in strife. In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not
distinct from one another.

Jews, then, do not live as free, self-governing individuals, choosing
between virtue and vice in the Aryan fashion. They are a mere collection
of similar individuals each cast in the same mould, the whole forming
as it were a continuous plasmodium. The Antisemite has often thought of
this as a defensive and aggressive union, and has formulated the
conception of a Jewish “solidarity.” There is a deep confusion here.
When some accusation is made against some unknown member of the Jewish
race, all Jews secretly take the part of the accused, and wish, hope
for, and seek to establish his innocence. But it must not be thought
that they are interesting themselves more in the fate of the individual
Jew than they would do in the case of an individual Christian. It is the
menace to Judaism in general, the fear that the shameful shadow may do
harm to Judaism as a whole, which is the origin of the apparent feeling
of sympathy. In the same way, women are delighted when a member of their
sex is depreciated, and will themselves assist, until the proceeding
seems to throw a disadvantageous light over the sex in general, so
frightening men from marriage. The race or sex alone is defended, not
the individual.

It would be easy to understand why the family (in its biological not its
legal sense) plays a larger _rôle_ amongst the Jews than amongst any
other people; the English, who in certain ways are akin to the Jews,
coming next. The family, in this biological sense, is feminine and
maternal in its origin, and has no relation to the State or to society.
The fusion, the continuity of the members of the family, reaches its
highest point amongst the Jews. In the Indo-Germanic races, especially
in the case of the more gifted, but also in quite ordinary individuals,
there is never complete harmony between father and son; consciously, or
unconsciously, there is always in the mind of the son a certain feeling
of impatience against the man who, unasked, brought him into the world,
gave him a name, and determined his limitations in this earthly life. It
is only amongst the Jews that the son feels deeply rooted in the family
and is fully at one with his father. It scarcely ever happens amongst
Christians that father and son are really friends. Amongst Christians
even the daughters stand a little further apart from the family circle
than happens with Jewesses, and more frequently take up some calling
which isolates them and gives them independent interests.

We reach at this point a fact in relation to the argument of the last
chapter. I showed there that the essential element in the pairing
instinct was an indistinct sense of individuality and of the limits
between individuals. Men who are match-makers have always a Jewish
element in them. The Jew is always more absorbed by sexual matters than
the Aryan, although he is notably less potent sexually and less liable
to be enmeshed in a great passion. The Jews are habitual match-makers,
and in no race does it so often happen that marriages are arranged by
men. This kind of activity is certainly peculiarly necessary in their
case, for, as I have already stated, there is no people amongst which
marriages for love are so rare. The organic disposition of the Jews
towards match-making is associated with their racial failure to
comprehend asceticism. It is interesting to note that the Jewish Rabbis
have always been addicted to speculations as to the begetting of
children and have a rich tradition on the subject, a natural result in
the case of the people who invented the phrase as to the duty of
“multiplying and replenishing the earth.”

The pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between
individuals; and the Jew, _par excellence_, is the breaker down of such
limits. He is at the opposite pole from aristocrats, with whom the
preservation of the limits between individuals is the leading idea. The
Jew is an inborn communist. The Jew’s careless manners in society and
his want of social tact turn on this quality, for the reserves of social
intercourse are simply barriers to protect individuality.

I desire at this point again to lay stress on the fact, although it
should be self-evident, that, in spite of my low estimate of the Jew,
nothing could be further from my intention than to lend the faintest
support to any practical or theoretical persecution of Jews. I am
dealing with Judaism, in the platonic sense, as an idea. There is no
more an absolute Jew than an absolute Christian. I am not speaking
against the individual, whom, indeed, if that had been so, I should have
wounded grossly and unnecessarily. Watchwords, such as “Buy only from
Christians,” have in reality a Jewish taint; they have a meaning only
for those who regard the race and not the individual, and what is to be
compared with them is the Jewish use of the word “Goy,” which is now
almost obsolete. I have no wish to boycott the Jew, or by any such
immoral means to attempt to solve the Jewish question. Nor will Zionism
solve that question; as H. S. Chamberlain has pointed out, since the
destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, Judaism has ceased to be
national, and has become a spreading parasite, straggling all over the
earth and finding true root nowhere. Before Zionism is possible, the Jew
must first conquer Judaism.

To defeat Judaism, the Jew must first understand himself, and war
against himself. So far, the Jew has reached no further than to make and
enjoy jokes against his own peculiarities. Unconsciously he respects the
Aryan more than himself. Only steady resolution, united to the highest
self-respect, can free the Jew from Jewishness. This resolution, be it
ever so strong, ever so honourable, can only be understood and carried
out by the individual, not by the group. Therefore the Jewish question
can only be solved individually; every single Jew must try to solve it
in his proper person.

There is no other solution to the question and can be no other; Zionism
will never succeed in answering it.

The Jew, indeed, who has overcome, the Jew who has become a Christian,
has the fullest right to be regarded by the Aryan in his individual
capacity, and no longer be condemned as belonging to a race above which
his moral efforts have raised him. He may rest assured that no one will
dispute his well-founded claim. The Aryan of good social standing always
feels the need to respect the Jew; his Antisemitism being no joy, no
amusement to him. Therefore he is displeased when Jews make revelations
about Jews, and he who does so may expect as few thanks from that
quarter as from over-sensitive Judaism itself. Above all, the Aryan
desires that the Jew should justify Antisemitism by being baptized. But
the danger of this outward acknowledgment of his inward struggles need
not trouble the Jew who wishes for liberty within him. He will long to
reach the holy baptism of the Spirit, of which that of the body is but
the outward symbol.

To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism
really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems;
Judaism is a much deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and
in very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even the
parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and then it may help
us further.

In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness and cringing, are
ever at strife; in the former self-consciousness and contrition, in the
latter arrogance and bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew
lies his failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish
disposition springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the “Decalogue,”
the most immoral book of laws in the universe, which enjoins on obedient
followers, submission to the powerful will of an exterior influence,
with the reward of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His
relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly fears,
whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise the Jew; he, like
the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority. According to the
definition of Schopenhauer, the word ‘God’ indicates a man who made the
world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of the Jew. Of the
divine in man, of “the God who in my bosom dwells,” the true Jew knows
nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant,
the priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant by divine,
for what the saying, “I am with you always even to the end of the
world”--for the meaning of all these the Jew remains without
understanding. For the God in man is the human soul, and the absolute
Jew is devoid of a soul.

It is inevitable, then, that we should find no trace of belief in
immortality in the Old Testament. Those who have no soul can have no
craving for immortality, and so it is with the woman and the Jew; “Anima
naturaliter Christiana,” said Tertullian.

The absence from the Jew of true mysticism--Chamberlain has remarked on
this--has a similar origin. They have nothing but the grossest
superstition and the system of divinatory magic known as the “Kabbala.”
Jewish monotheism has no relation to a true belief in God; it is not a
religion of reason, but a belief of old women founded on fear.

Why is it that the Jewish slave of Jehovah should become so readily a
materialist or a freethinker? It is merely the alternative phase to
slavery; arrogance about what is not understood is the other side of the
slavish intelligence. When it is fully recognised that Judaism is to be
regarded rather as an idea in which other races have a share, than as
the absolute property of a particular race, then the Judaic element in
modern materialistic science will be better understood. Wagner has given
expression to Judaism in music; there remains to say something about
Judaism in modern science.

Judaism in science, in the widest interpretation of it, is the endeavour
to remove all transcendentalism. The Aryan feels that the effort to
grasp everything, and to refer everything to some system of deductions,
really robs things of their true meaning; for him, what cannot be
discovered is what gives the world its significance. The Jew has no fear
of these hidden and secret elements, for he has no consciousness of
their presence. He tries to take a view of the world as flat and
commonplace as possible, and to refuse to see all the secret and
spiritual meanings of things. His view is non-philosophical rather than
anti-philosophical.

Because fear of God in the Jew has no relation with real religion, the
Jew is of all persons the least perturbed by mechanical, materialistic
theories of the world; he is readily beguiled by Darwinism and the
ridiculous notion that men are derived from monkeys; and now he is
disposed to accept the view that the soul of man is an evolution that
has taken place within the human race; formerly, he was a mad devotee of
Buchner, now he is ready to follow Ostwald.

It is due to a real disposition that the Jews should be so prominent in
the study of chemistry; they cling naturally to matter, and expect to
find the solution of everything in its properties. And yet one who was
the greatest German investigator of all times, Kepler himself, wrote the
following hexameter on chemistry:

  “O curas Chymicorum! O quantum in pulvere inane!”

The present turn of medical science is largely due to the influence of
the Jews, who in such numbers have embraced the medical profession. From
the earliest times, until the dominance of the Jews, medicine was
closely allied with religion. But now they would make it a matter of
drugs, a mere administration of chemicals. But it can never be that the
organic will be explained by the inorganic. Fechner and Preyer were
right when they said that death came from life, not life from death. We
see this taking place daily in individuals (in human beings, for
instance, old age prepares for death by a calcification of the tissues).
And as yet no one has seen the organic arise from the inorganic. From
the time of Schwammerdam to that of Pasteur it has become more and more
certain that living things never arise from what is not alive. Surely
this ontogenetic observation should be applied to phylogeny, and we
should be equally certain that, in the past, the dead arose from the
living. The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these on a level
with their own dead ashes. We should return from this Judaistic science
to the nobler conceptions of Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Euler,
Newton and Linnæus, Lamarck and Faraday, Sprengel and Cuvier. The
freethinkers of to-day, soulless and not believing in the soul, are
incapable of filling the places of these great men and of reverently
realising the presence of intrinsic secrets in nature.

It is this want of depth which explains the absence of truly great Jews;
like women, they are without any trace of genius. The philosopher
Spinoza, about whose purely Jewish descent there can be no doubt, is
incomparably the greatest Jew of the last nine hundred years, much
greater than the poet Heine (who, indeed, was almost destitute of any
quality of true greatness) or than that original, if shallow painter,
Israels. The extraordinary fashion in which Spinoza has been
over-estimated is less due to his intrinsic merit than to the fortuitous
circumstance that he was the only thinker to whom Goethe gave his
attention.

For Spinoza himself there was no deep problem in nature (and in this he
showed his Jewish character), as, otherwise, he would not have
elaborated his mathematical method, a method according to which the
explanation of things was to be found in themselves. This system formed
a refuge into which Spinoza could escape from himself, and it is not
unnatural that it should have been attractive to Goethe, who was the
most introspective of men, as it might have seemed to offer to him
tranquillity and rest.

Spinoza showed his Jewishness and the limits that always confine the
Jewish spirit in a still plainer fashion; I am not thinking of his
failure to comprehend the State or of his adhesion to the Hobbesian
doctrine of universal warfare as the primitive condition of mankind. The
matter goes deeper. I have in mind his complete rejection of
free-will--the Jew is always a slave and a determinist--and his view
that individuals were mere accidents into which the universal substance
had fallen. The Jew is never a believer in monads. And so there is no
wider philosophical gulf than that between Spinoza and his much more
eminent contemporary, Leibnitz, the protagonist of the monad theory, or
its still greater creator, Bruno, whose superficial likeness with
Spinoza has been exaggerated in the most grotesque fashion.

Just as Jews and women are without extreme good and extreme evil, so
they never show either genius or the depth of stupidity of which mankind
is capable. The specific kind of intelligence for which Jews and women
alike are notorious is due simply to the alertness of an exaggerated
egotism; it is due, moreover, to the boundless capacity shown by both
for pursuing any object with equal zeal, because they have no intrinsic
standard of value--nothing in their own souls by which to judge of the
worthiness of any particular object. And so they have unhampered natural
instincts, such as are not present to help the Aryan man when his
transcendental standard fails him.

I may now touch upon the likeness of the English to the Jews, a topic
discussed at length by Wagner. It cannot be doubted that of the Germanic
races the English are in closest relationship with the Jews. Their
orthodoxy and their devotion to the Sabbath afford a direct indication.
The religion of the Englishman is always tinged with hypocrisy, and his
asceticism is largely prudery. The English, like women, have been most
unproductive in religion and in music; there may be irreligious poets,
although not great artists, but there is no irreligious musician. So,
also, the English have produced no great architects or philosophers.
Berkeley, like Swift and Sterne, were Irish; Carlyle, Hamilton, and
Burns were Scotch. Shakespeare and Shelley, the two greatest Englishmen,
stand far from the pinnacle of humanity; they do not reach so far as
Angelo and Beethoven. If we consider English philosophers we shall see
that there has been a great degeneration since the Middle Ages. It began
with William of Ockham and Duns Scotus; it proceeded through Roger Bacon
and his namesake, the Chancellor; through Hobbes, who, mentally, was so
near akin to Spinoza; through the superficial Locke to Hartley,
Priestley, Bentham, the two Mills, Lewes, Huxley, and Spencer. These are
the greatest names in the history of English philosophy, for Adam Smith
and David Hume were Scotchmen. It must always be remembered against
England, that from her there came the soulless psychology. The
Englishman has impressed himself on the German as a rigorous empiricist
and as a practical politician, but these two sides exhaust his
importance in philosophy. There has never yet been a true philosopher
who made empiricism his basis, and no Englishman has got beyond
empiricism without external help.

None the less, the Englishman must not be confused with the Jew. There
is more of the transcendental element in him, and his mind is directed
rather from the transcendental to the practical, than from the practical
towards the transcendental. Otherwise he would not be so readily
disposed to humour, unlike the Jew, who is ready to be witty only at his
own expense or on sexual things.

I am well aware how difficult are the problems of laughter and
humour--just as difficult as any problems that are peculiar to man and
not shared by him with the beasts; so difficult that neither
Schopenhauer nor Jean Paul himself were able to elucidate them. Humour
has many aspects; in some men it seems to be an expression of pity for
themselves or for others, but this element is not sufficient to
distinguish it.

The essence of humour appears to me to consist in a laying of stress on
empirical things, in order that their unreality may become more obvious.
Everything that is realised is laughable, and in this way humour seems
to be the antithesis of eroticism. The latter welds men and the world
together, and unites them in a great purpose; the former loses the bonds
of synthesis and shows the world as a silly affair. The two stand
somewhat in the relation of polarised and unpolarised light.

When the great erotic wishes to pass from the limited to the illimited,
humour pounces down on him, pushes him in front of the stage, and laughs
at him from the wings. The humourist has not the craving to transcend
space; he is content with small things; his dominion is neither the sea
nor the mountains, but the flat level plain. He shuns the idyllic, and
plunges deeply into the commonplace, only, however, to show its
unreality. He turns from the immanence of things and will not hear the
transcendental even spoken of. Wit seeks out contradictions in the
sphere of experience; humour goes deeper and shows that experience is a
blind and closed system; both compromise the phenomenal world by showing
that everything is possible in it. Tragedy, on the other hand, shows
what must for all eternity be impossible in the phenomenal world; and
thus tragedy and comedy alike, each in their own way, are negations of
the empiric.

The Jew who does not set out, like the humourist, from the
transcendental, and does not move towards it, like the erotic, has no
interest in depreciating what is called the actual world, and that never
becomes for him the paraphernalia of a juggler or the nightmare of a
mad-house. Humour, because it recognises the transcendental, if only by
the mode of resolutely concealing it, is essentially tolerant; satire,
on the other hand, is essentially intolerant, and is congruous with the
disposition of the Jew and the woman. Jews and women are devoid of
humour, but addicted to mockery. In Rome there was even a woman
(Sulpicia) who wrote satires. Satire, because of its intolerance, is
impossible to men in society. The humourist, who knows how to keep the
trifles and littlenesses of phenomena from troubling himself or others,
is a welcome guest. Humour, like love, moves away obstacles from our
path; it makes possible a way of regarding the world. The Jew,
therefore, is least addicted to society, and the Englishman most adapted
for it.

The comparison of the Jew with the Englishman fades out much more
quickly than that with the woman. Both comparisons first arose in the
heat of the conflict as to the worth and the nature of Jews. I may again
refer to Wagner, who not only interested himself deeply in the problem
of Judaism, but rediscovered the Jew in the Englishman, and threw the
shadow of Ahasuerus over his Kundry, probably the most perfect
representation of woman in art.

The fact that no woman in the world represents the idea of the wife so
completely as the Jewess (and not only in the eyes of Jews) still
further supports the comparison between Jews and women. In the case of
the Aryans, the metaphysical qualities of the male are part of his
sexual attraction for the woman, and so, in a fashion, she puts on an
appearance of these. The Jew, on the other hand, has no transcendental
quality, and in the shaping and moulding of the wife leaves the natural
tendencies of the female nature a more unhampered sphere; and the Jewish
woman, accordingly, plays the part required of her, as house-mother or
odalisque, as Cybele or Cyprian, in the fullest way.

The congruity between Jews and women further reveals itself in the
extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism,
the “mobility” of their minds, their lack of deeply-rooted and original
ideas, in fact the mode in which, like women, because they are nothing
in themselves, they can become everything. The Jew is an individual, not
an individuality; he is in constant close relation with the lower life,
and has no share in the higher metaphysical life.

At this point the comparison between the Jew and the woman breaks down;
the being-nothing and becoming-all-things differs in the two. The woman
is material which passively assumes any form impressed upon it. In the
Jew there is a definite aggressiveness; it is not because of the great
impression that others make on him that he is receptive; he is no more
subject to suggestion than the Aryan man, but he adapts himself to every
circumstance and every race, becoming, like the parasite, a new creature
in every different host, although remaining essentially the same. He
assimilates himself to everything, and assimilates everything; he is not
dominated by others, but submits himself to them. The Jew is gifted, the
woman is not gifted, and the giftedness of the Jew reveals itself in
many forms of activity, as, for instance, in jurisprudence; but these
activities are always relative and never seated in the creative freedom
of the will.

The Jew is as persistent as the woman, but his persistence is not that
of the individual but of the race. He is not unconditioned like the
Aryan, but his limitations differ from those of the woman.

The true peculiarity of the Jew reveals itself best in his essentially
irreligious nature. I cannot here enter on a discussion as to the idea
of religion; but it is enough to say that it is associated essentially
with an acceptance of the higher and eternal in man as different in
kind, and in no sense to be derived from the phenomenal life. The Jew is
eminently the unbeliever. Faith is that act of man by which he enters
into relation with being, and religious faith is directed towards
absolute, eternal being, the “life everlasting” of the religious phrase.
The Jew is really nothing because he believes in nothing.

Belief is everything. It does not matter if a man does not believe in
God; let him believe in atheism. But the Jew believes nothing; he does
not believe his own belief; he doubts as to his own doubt. He is never
absorbed by his own joy, or engrossed by his own sorrow. He never takes
himself in earnest, and so never takes any one else in earnest. He is
content to be a Jew, and accepts any disadvantages that come from the
fact.

We have now reached the fundamental difference between the Jew and the
woman. Neither believe in themselves; but the woman believes in others,
in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a
centre of gravity, although it is outside her own being. The Jew
believes in nothing, within him or without him. His want of desire for
permanent landed property and his attachment to movable goods are more
than symbolical.

The woman believes in the man, in the man outside her, or in the man
from whom she takes her inspiration, and in this fashion can take
herself in earnest. The Jew takes nothing seriously; he is frivolous,
and jests about anything, about the Christian’s Christianity, the Jew’s
baptism. He is neither a true realist nor a true empiricist. Here I must
state certain limitations to my agreement with Chamberlain’s
conclusions. The Jew is not really a convinced empiricist in the fashion
of the English philosophers. The empiricist believes in the possibility
of reaching a complete system of knowledge on an empirical basis; he
hopes for the perfection of science. The Jew does not really believe in
knowledge, nor is he a sceptic, for he doubts his own scepticism. On the
other hand, a brooding care hovers over the non-metaphysical system of
Avenarius, and even in Ernst Mach’s adherence to relativity there are
signs of a deeply reverent attitude. The empiricists must not be accused
of Judaism because they are shallow.

The Jew is the impious man in the widest sense. Piety is not something
near things nor outside things; it is the groundwork of everything. The
Jew has been incorrectly called vulgar, simply because he does not
concern himself with metaphysics. All true culture that comes from
within, all that a man believes to be true and that so is true for him,
depend on reverence. Reverence is not limited to the mystic or the
religious man; all science and all scepticism, everything that a man
truly believes, have reverence as the fundamental quality. Naturally it
displays itself in different ways, in high seriousness and sanctity, in
earnestness and enthusiasm. The Jew is never either enthusiastic or
indifferent, he is neither ecstatic nor cold. He reaches neither the
heights nor the depths. His restraint becomes meagreness, his
copiousness becomes bombast. Should he venture into the boundless realms
of inspired thought, he seldom reaches beyond pathos. And although he
cannot embrace the whole world, he is for ever covetous of it.

Discrimination and generalisation, strength and love, science and
poetry, every real and deep emotion of the human heart, have reverence
as their essential basis. It is not necessary that faith, as in men of
genius, should be in relation only to metaphysical entity; it can extend
also to the empirical world and appear fully there, and yet none the
less be faith in oneself, in worth, in truth, in the absolute, in God.

As the comprehensive view of religion and piety that I have given may
lead to misconstruction, I propose to elucidate it further. True piety
is not merely the possession of piety, but also the struggle to possess
it; it is found equally in the convinced believer in God (Handel or
Fechner), and also in the doubting seeker (Lenau and Dürer); it need
not be made obvious to the world (as in the case of Bach), it may
display itself only in a reverent attitude (Mozart). Nor is piety
necessarily connected with the appearance of a Founder; the ancient
Greeks were the most reverent people that have lived, and hence their
culture was highest; but their religion had no personal Founder.

Religion is the creation of the all; and all that humanity can be is
only through religion. So far from the Jew being religious, as has been
assumed, he is profoundly irreligious.

Were there need to elaborate my verdict on the Jews I might point out
that the Jews, alone of peoples, do not try to make converts to their
faith, and that when converts are made they serve as objects of puzzled
ridicule to them. Need I refer to the meaningless formality and the
repetitions of Jewish prayer? Need I remind readers that the Jewish
religion is a mere historical tradition, a memorial of such incidents as
the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, with the consequent thanks of
cowards to their Saviour; and that it is no guide to the meaning and
conduct of life? The Jew is truly irreligious and furthest of mankind
from faith. There is no relation between the Jew himself and the
universe; he has none of the heroism of faith, just as he has none of
the disaster of absolute unbelief.

It is not, then, mysticism that the Jew is without, as Chamberlain
maintains, but reverence. If he were only an honest-minded materialist
or a frank evolutionist! He is not a critic, but only critical; he is
not a sceptic in the Cartesian sense, not a doubter who sets out from
doubt towards truth, but an ironist; as, for instance, to take a
conspicuous example, Heine.

What, then, is the Jew if he is nothing that a man can be? What goes on
within him if he is utterly without finality, if there is no ground in
him which the plumb line of psychology may reach?

The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or
multiple. There are always before him two or many possibilities, where
the Aryan, although he sees as widely, feels himself limited in his
choice. I think that the idea of Judaism consists in this want of
reality, this absence of any fundamental relation to the
thing-in-and-for-itself. He stands, so to speak, outside reality,
without ever entering it. He can never make himself one with
anything--never enter into real relationships. He is a zealot without
zeal; he has no share in the unlimited, the unconditioned. He is without
simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each new
interpretation, so seeming more alert than the Aryan. Internal
multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal simplicity that of the
Aryan.

It might be urged that the Jewish double-mindedness is modern, and is
the result of new knowledge struggling with the old orthodoxy. The
education of the Jew, however, only accentuates his natural qualities,
and the doubting Jew turns with a renewed zeal to money-making, in which
only he can find his standard of value. A curious proof of the absence
of simplicity in the mind of the Jew is that he seldom sings, not from
bashfulness, but because he does not believe in his own singing. Just as
the acuteness of Jews has nothing to do with true power of
differentiating, so his shyness about singing or even about speaking in
clear positive tones has nothing to do with real reserve. It is a kind
of inverted pride; having no true sense of his own worth, he fears being
made ridiculous by his singing or speech. The embarrassment of the Jew
extends to things which have nothing to do with the real ego.

It has been seen how difficult it is to define the Jew. He has neither
severity nor tenderness. He is both tenacious and weak. He is neither
king nor leader, slave nor vassal. He has no share in enthusiasm, and
yet he has little equanimity. Nothing is self-evident to him, and yet he
is astonished at nothing. He has no trace of Lohengrin in him, and none
of Telramund. He is ridiculous as a member of a students’ corps and he
is equally ridiculous as a “philister.” Because he believes in nothing,
he takes refuge in materialism; from this arises his avarice, which is
simply an attempt to convince himself that something has a permanent
value. And yet he is no real tradesman; what is unreal, insecure in
German commerce, is the result of the Jewish speculative interest.

The erotics of the Jew are sentimentalism, and their humour is satire.
Perhaps examples may help to explain my interpretation of the Jewish
character, and I point readily to Ibsen’s King Hakon in the
“Pretenders,” and to his Dr. Stockmann in “The Enemy of the People.”
These may make clear what is for ever absent in the Jew. Judaism and
Christianity form the greatest possible contrasts; the former is bereft
of all true faith and of inner identity, the latter is the highest
expression of the highest faith. Christianity is heroism at its highest
point; Judaism is the extreme of cowardliness.

Chamberlain has said much that is true and striking as to the fearful
awe-struck want of understanding that the Jew displays with regard to
the person and teaching of Christ, for the combination of warrior and
sufferer in Him, for His life and death. None the less, it would be
wrong to state that the Jew is an enemy of Christ, that he represents
the anti-Christ; it is only that he feels no relation with Him. It is
strong-minded Aryans, malefactors, who hate Jesus. The Jew does not get
beyond being bewildered and disturbed by Him, as something that passes
his wit to understand.

And yet it has stood the Jew in good stead that the New Testament seemed
the outcome and fine flower of the Old, the fulfilment of its Messianic
prophecies. The polar opposition between Judaism and Christianity makes
the origin of the latter from the former a deep riddle; it is the riddle
of the psychology of the founder of religions.

What is the difference between the genius who founds a religion and
other kinds of genius? What is it that has led him to found the
religion?

The main difference is no other than that he did not always believe in
the God he worships. Tradition relates of Buddha, as of Christ, that
they were subject to greater temptations than other men. Two others,
Mahomet and Luther, were epileptic. Epilepsy is the disease of the
criminal; Cæsar, Narses, Napoleon, the greatest of the criminals, were
epileptics.

The founder of a religion is the man who has lived without God and yet
has struggled towards the greatest faith. How is it possible for a bad
man to transform himself? As Kant, although he was compelled to admit
the fact, asked in his “Philosophy of Religion,” how can an evil tree
bring forth good fruit? The inconceivable mystery of the transformation
into a good man of one who has lived evilly all the days and years of
his life has actually realised itself in the case of some six or seven
historical personages. These have been the founders of religions.

Other men of genius are good from their birth; the religious founder
acquires goodness. The old existence ceases utterly and is replaced by
the new. The greater the man, the more must perish in him at the
regeneration. I am inclined to think that Socrates, alone amongst the
Greeks, approached closely to the founders of religion; perhaps he made
the decisive struggle with evil in the four-and-twenty hours during
which he stood alone at Potidæa.

The founder of a religion is the man for whom no problem has been solved
from his birth. He is the man with the least possible sureness of
conviction, for whom everything is doubtful and uncertain, and who has
to conquer everything for himself in this life. One has to struggle
against illness and physical weakness, another trembles on the brink of
the crimes which are possible for him, yet another has been in the bonds
of sin from his birth. It is only a formal statement to say that
original sin is the same in all persons; it differs materially for each
person. Here one, there another, each as he was born, has chosen what is
senseless and worthless, has preferred instinct to his will, or pleasure
to love; only the founder of a religion has had original sin in its
absolute form; in him everything is doubtful, everything is in question.
He has to meet every problem and free himself from all guilt. He has to
reach firm ground from the deepest abyss; he has to surmount the
nothingness in him and bind himself to the utmost reality. And so it
may be said of him that he frees himself of original sin, that in him
God becomes man, but also that the man becomes God; in him was all error
and all guilt; in him there comes to be all expiation and redemption.

Thus the founder of a religion is the greatest of the geniuses, for he
has vanquished the most. He is the man who has accomplished victoriously
what the deepest thinkers of mankind have thought of only timorously as
a possibility, the complete regeneration of a man, the reversal of his
will. Other great men of genius have, indeed, to fight against evil, but
the bent of their souls is towards the good. The founder of a religion
has so much in him of evil, of the perverse, of earthly passion, that he
must fight with the enemy within him for forty days in the wilderness,
without food or sleep. It was only thus that he can conquer and overcome
the death within him and free himself for the highest life. Were it
otherwise there would be no impulse to found a faith. The founder of a
religion is thus the very antipodes of the emperor; emperor and Galilean
are at the two poles of thought. In Napoleon’s life, also, there was a
moment when a conversion took place; but this was not a turning away
from earthly life, but the deliberate decision for the treasure and
power and splendour of the earthly life. Napoleon was great in the
colossal intensity with which he flung from him all the ideal, all
relation to the absolute, in the magnitude of his guilt. The founder of
religion, on the other hand, cannot and will not bring to man anything
except that which was most difficult for himself to attain, the
reconciliation with God. He knows that he himself was the man most laden
with guilt, and he atones for the guilt by his death on the cross.

There were two possibilities in Judaism. Before the birth of Christ,
these two, negation and affirmation, were together awaiting choice.
Christ was the man who conquered in Himself Judaism, the greatest
negation, and created Christianity, the strongest affirmation and the
most direct opposite of Judaism. Now the choice has been made; the old
Israel has divided into Jews and Christians, and Judaism has lost the
possibility of producing greatness. The new Judaism has been unable to
produce men like Samson and Joshua, the least Jewish of the old Jews. In
the history of the world, Christendom and Jewry represent negation and
affirmation. In old Israel there was the highest possibility of mankind,
the possibility of Christ. The other possibility is the Jew.

I must guard against misconception; I do not mean that there was any
approach to Christianity in Judaism; the one is the absolute negation of
the other; the relation between the two is only that which exists
between all pairs of direct opposites. Even more than in the case of
piety and Judaism, Judaism and Christianity can best be contrasted by
what each respectively excludes. Nothing is easier than to be Jewish,
nothing so difficult as to be Christian. Judaism is the abyss over which
Christianity is erected, and for that reason the Aryan dreads nothing so
deeply as the Jew.

I am not disposed to believe, with Chamberlain, that the birth of the
Saviour in Palestine was an accident. Christ was a Jew, precisely that
He might overcome the Judaism within Him, for he who triumphs over the
deepest doubt reaches the highest faith; he who has raised himself above
the most desolate negation is most sure in his position of affirmation.
Judaism was the peculiar, original sin of Christ; it was His victory
over Judaism that made Him greater than Buddha or Confucius. Christ was
the greatest man because He conquered the greatest enemy. Perhaps He
was, and will remain, the only Jew to conquer Judaism. The first of the
Jews to become wholly the Christ was also the last who made the
transition. It may be, however, that there still lies in Judaism the
possibility of producing a Christ, and that the founder of the next
religion will pass through Jewry.

On no other supposition can we account for the long persistence of the
Jewish race which has outlived so many other peoples. Without at least
some vague hope, the Jews could not have survived, and the hope is that
there must be something in Judaism for Judaism; it is the idea of a
Messiah, of one who shall save them from Judaism. Every other race has
had some special watchword, and, on realising their watchword, they have
perished. The Jews have failed to realise their watchword, and so their
vitality persists. The Jewish nature has no other metaphysical meaning
than to be the spring from which the founders of religion will come.
Their tradition to increase and multiply is connected with this vague
hope, that out of them shall come the Messiah. The possibility of
begetting Christs is the meaning of Judaism.

As in the Jew there are the greatest possibilities, so also in him are
the meanest actualities; he is adapted to most things and realises
fewest.

Judaism, at the present day, has reached its highest point since the
time of Herod. Judaism is the spirit of modern life. Sexuality is
accepted, and contemporary ethics sing the praises of pairing. Unhappy
Nietzsche must not be made responsible for the shameful doctrines of
Wilhelm Bölsche. Nietzsche himself understood asceticism, and perhaps it
was only as a revulsion from the evils of his own asceticism that he
attached value to the opposite conception. It is the Jew and the woman
who are the apostles of pairing to bring guilt on humanity.

Our age is not only the most Jewish but the most feminine. It is a time
when art is content with daubs and seeks its inspiration in the sports
of animals; the time of a superficial anarchy, with no feeling for
Justice and the State; a time of communistic ethics, of the most foolish
of historical views, the materialistic interpretation of history; a time
of capitalism and of Marxism; a time when history, life, and science are
no more than political economy and technical instruction; a time when
genius is supposed to be a form of madness; a time with no great artists
and no great philosophers; a time without originality and yet with the
most foolish craving for originality; a time when the cult of the Virgin
has been replaced by that of the Demi-vierge. It is the time when
pairing has not only been approved but has been enjoined as a duty.

But from the new Judaism the new Christianity may be pressing forth;
mankind waits for the new founder of religion, and, as in the year one,
the age presses for a decision. The decision must be made between
Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and
female, between the race and the individual, between unworthiness and
worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and the
God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and
there is no middle way.


CHAPTER XIV

WOMAN AND MANKIND

At last we are ready, clear-eyed and well armed, to deal with the
question of the emancipation of women. Our eyes are clear, for we have
freed them from the thronging specks of dubiety that had hitherto
obscured the question, and we are armed with a well-founded grasp of
theory, and a secure ethical basis. We are far from the maze in which
this controversy usually lies, and our investigation has got beyond the
mere statement of different natural capacity for men and women, to a
point whence the part of women in the world-whole and the meaning of her
relation to humanity can be estimated. I am not going to deal with any
practical applications of my results; the latter are not nearly
optimistic enough for me to hope that they could have any effect on the
progress of political movements. I refrain from working out laws of
social hygiene, and content myself with facing the problem from the
standpoint of that conception of humanity which pervades the philosophy
of Immanuel Kant.

This conception is in great danger from woman. Woman is able, in a quite
extraordinary way, to produce the impression that she herself is really
non-sexual, and that her sexuality is only a concession to man. But be
that as it may, at the present time men have almost allowed themselves
to be persuaded by woman that their strongest and most markedly
characteristic desire lies in sexuality, that it is only through woman
that they can hope to satisfy their truest and best ambitions, and that
chastity is an unnatural and impossible state for them. How often it
happens that young men who are wrapped up in their work are told by
women to whom they appeal and who would prefer to have them paying them
attention, or even as sons-in-law, that “they ought not to work too
hard,” that they ought to “enjoy life.” At the bottom of this sort of
advice there lies a feeling on the woman’s part, which is none the less
real because it is unconscious, that her whole significance and
existence depend on her mission as a procreating agent, and that she
goes to the wall if man is allowed to occupy himself altogether with
other than sexual matters.

That women will ever change in this respect is doubtful. There is
nothing to show that she ever was different. It may be that to-day the
physical side of the question is more to the fore than formerly, since a
great deal of the “woman movement” of the times is merely a desire to be
“free,” to shake off the trammels of motherhood; as a whole the
practical results show that it is revolt from motherhood towards
prostitution, a prostitute emancipation rather than the emancipation of
woman that is aimed at: a bold bid for the success of the courtesan. The
only real change is man’s behaviour towards the movement. Under the
influence of modern Judaism, men seem inclined to accept woman’s
estimate of them and to bow before it.

Masculine chastity is laughed at, and the feeling that woman is the evil
influence in man’s life is no longer understood, and men are not ashamed
of their own lust.

It is now apparent from where this demand for “seeing life,” the
Dionysian view of the music-hall, the cult of Goethe in so far as he
follows Ovid, and this quite modern “coitus-cult” comes. There is no
doubt that the movement is so widespread that very few men have the
courage to acknowledge their chastity, preferring to pretend that they
are regular Don Juans. Sexual excess is held to be the most desirable
characteristic of a man of the world, and sexuality has attained such
pre-eminence that a man is doubted unless he can, as it were, show
proofs of his prowess. Chastity, on the other hand, is so despised that
many a really pure lad attempts to appear a _blasé roué_. It is even
true that those who are modest are ashamed of the feeling; but there is
another, the modern form of shame--not the eroticist’s shame, but the
shame of the woman who has no lover, who has not received appraisement
from the opposite sex. Hence it comes that men make it their business to
tell each other what a right and proper pleasure they take in “doing
their duty” by the opposite sex. And women are careful to let it be
known that only what is “manly” in man can appeal to them: and man takes
their measure of his manliness and makes it his own. Man’s
qualifications as a male have, in fact, become identical with his value
with women, in women’s eyes.

But God forbid that it should be so; that would mean that there are no
longer any _men_.

Contrast with this the fact that the high value set on women’s virtue
originated with man, and will always come from men worthy of the name;
it is the projection of man’s own ideal of spotless purity on the object
of his love.

But there should be no mistaking this true chastity for the shivering
and shaking before contact, which is soon changed for delighted
acquiescence, nor for the hysterical suppression of sexual desires. The
outward endeavour to correspond to man’s demand for physical purity must
not be taken for anything but a fear lest the buyer will fight shy of
the bargain; least of all the care which women so often take to choose
only the man who can give them most value must not deceive any one (it
has been called the “high value” or “self-respect” a girl has for
herself)! If one remembers the view women take of virginity, there can
be very little doubt that woman’s one end is the bringing about of
universal pairing as the only means by which they acquire a real
existence; that women desire pairing, and nothing else, even if they
personally appear to be as uninterested as possible in sensual matters.
All this can be fully proved from the generality of the match-making
instinct.

In order to be fully persuaded of this, woman’s attitude towards the
virginity of those of her own sex must be considered.

It is certain that women have a very low opinion of the unmarried. It
is, in fact, the one female condition which has a negative value for
woman. Women only respect a woman when she is married; even if she is
unhappily married to a hideous, weak, poor, common, tyrannical,
“impossible” man, she is, nevertheless, married, has received value,
existence. Even if a woman has had a short experience of the freedom of
a courtesan’s life, even if she has been on the streets, she still
stands higher in a woman’s estimation than the old maid, who works and
toils alone in her room, without ever having known lawful or unlawful
union with a man, the enduring or fleeting ecstasy of love.

Even a young and beautiful girl is never valued by a woman for her
attractions as such (the sense of the beautiful is wanting in woman
since they have no standard in themselves to measure it by), but merely
because she has more prospect of enslaving a man. The more beautiful a
young girl is, the more promising she appears to other women, the
greater her value to woman as the match-maker in her mission as guardian
of the race; it is only this unconscious feeling which makes it possible
for a woman to take pleasure in the beauty of a young girl. It goes
without saying that this can only happen when the woman in question has
already achieved her own end (because, otherwise, envy of a
contemporary, and the fear of having her own chances jeopardised by
others, would overcome other considerations). She must first of all
attain her own union, and then she is ready to help others.

Women are altogether to blame for the unpleasant associations which are
so unfortunately connected with “old maids.” One often hears men talking
respectfully of an elderly woman; but every woman and girl, whether
married or single, has nothing but contempt for such a one, even when,
as is often the case, they are unconscious that it is so with them. I
once heard a married woman, whose talents and beauty put jealousy quite
out of the question, making fun of her plain and elderly Italian
governess for repeatedly saying that: “Io sono ancora una virgine” (that
she was still a virgin). The interpretation put on the words was that
the speaker wished to admit she had made a virtue of necessity, and
would have been very glad to get rid of her virginity if she could have
done so without detriment to her position in life.

This is the most important point of all: women not only disparage and
despise the virginity of other women, but they set no value on their own
state of virginity (except that men prize it so highly). This is why
they look upon every married woman as a sort of superior being. The deep
impression made on women by the sexual act can be most plainly seen by
the respect which girls pay to a married woman, of however short a
standing; which points to their idea of their existence being the
attainment of the same zenith themselves. They look upon other young
girls, on the contrary, as being, like themselves, still imperfect
beings awaiting consummation.

I think I have said enough to show that experience confirms the
deduction I made from the importance of the pairing instinct in women,
the deduction that virgin worship is of male, not female origin.

A man demands chastity in himself and others, most of all from the being
he loves; a woman wants the man with most experience and sensuality, not
virtue. Woman has no comprehension of paragons. On the contrary, it is
well known that a woman is most ready to fly to the arms of the man with
the widest reputation for being a Don Juan.

Woman requires man to be sexual, because she only gains existence
through his sexuality. Women have no sense of a man’s love, as a
superior phenomenon, they only perceive that side of him which
unceasingly desires and appropriates the object of his affections, and
men who have none or very little of the instinct of brutality developed
in them have no influence on them.

As for the higher, platonic love of man, they do not want it; it
flatters and pleases them, but it has no significance for them, and if
the homage on bended knees lasts too long, Beatrice becomes just as
impatient as Messalina.

In coitus lies woman’s greatest humiliation, in love her supremest
exaltation. Since woman desires coitus and not love, she proves that she
wishes to be humiliated and not worshipped. The ultimate opponent of the
emancipation of women is woman.

It is not because sexual union is voluptuous, not because it is the
typical example of all the pleasures of the lower life, that it is
immoral. Asceticism, which would regard pleasure in itself as immoral,
is itself immoral, inasmuch it attributes immorality to an action
because of the external consequences of it, not because of immorality in
the thing itself; it is the imposition of an alien, not an inherent law.
A man may seek pleasure, he may strive to make his life easier and more
pleasant; but he must not sacrifice a moral law. Asceticism attempts to
make man moral by self-repression and will give him credit and praise
for morality simply because he has denied himself certain things.
Asceticism must be rejected from the point of view of ethics and of
psychology inasmuch as it makes virtue the effect of a cause, and not
the thing itself. Asceticism is a dangerous although attractive guide;
since pleasure is one of the chief things that beguile men from the
higher path, it is easy to suppose that its mere abandonment is
meritorious.

In itself, however, pleasure is neither moral nor immoral. It is only
when the desire for pleasure conquers the desire for worthiness that a
human being has fallen.

Coitus is immoral because there is no man who does not use woman at such
times as a means to an end; for whom pleasure does not, in his own as
well as her being, during that time represent the value of mankind.

During coitus a man forgets all about everything, he forgets the woman;
she has no longer a psychic but only a physical existence for him. He
either desires a child by her or the satisfaction of his own passion; in
neither case does he use her as an end in herself, but for an outside
cause. This and this alone makes coitus immoral.

There is no doubt that woman is the missionary of sexual union, and that
she looks upon herself, as on everything else, merely as a means to its
ends. She wants a man to satisfy her passion or to obtain children; she
is willing to be used by man as a tool, as a thing, as an object, to be
treated as his property, to be changed and modelled according to his
good pleasure. But we should not allow ourselves to be used by others as
means to an end.

Kundry appealed often to Parsifal’s compassion for her yearnings: but
here we see the weakness of sympathetic morality, which attempts to
grant every desire of those around, however wrong such wishes may be.
Ethics and morality based on sympathy are equally absurd, since they
make the “ought” dependent on the “will,” (whether it be the will of
oneself, or of others, or of society, it is all the same,) instead of
making the “will” dependent on the “ought”; they take as a standard of
morality concrete cases of human history, concrete cases of human
happiness, concrete moments in life instead of the idea.

But the question is: how ought man to treat woman? As she herself
desires to be treated or as the moral idea would dictate?

If he is going to treat her as she wishes, he must have intercourse with
her, for she desires it; he must beat her, for she likes to be hurt; he
must hypnotise her, since she wishes to be hypnotised; he must prove to
her by his attentions how little he thinks of himself, for she likes
compliments, and has no desire to be respected for herself.

If he is going to treat her as the moral idea demands, he must try to
see in her the concept of mankind and endeavour to respect her. Even
although woman is only a function of man, a function he can degrade or
raise at will, and women do not wish to be more or anything else than
what man makes them, it is no more a moral arrangement than the suttee
of Indian widows, which, even though it be voluntary and insisted upon
by them, is none the less terrible barbarity.

The emancipation of woman is analogous to the emancipation of Jews and
negroes. Undoubtedly the principal reason why these people have been
treated as slaves and inferiors is to be found in their servile
dispositions; their desire for freedom is not nearly so strong as that
of the Indo-Germans. And even although the whites in America at the
present day find it necessary to keep themselves quite aloof from the
negro population because they make such a bad use of their freedom, yet
in the war of the Northern States against the Federals, which resulted
in the freedom of the slaves, right was entirely on the side of the
emancipators.

Although the humanity of Jews, negroes, and still more of women, is
weighed down by many immoral impulses; although in these cases there is
so much more to fight against than in the case of Aryan men, still we
must try to respect mankind, and to venerate the idea of humanity (by
which I do not mean the human community, but the being, man, the soul as
part of the spiritual world). No matter how degraded a criminal may be,
no one ought to arrogate to himself the functions of the law; no man has
the right to lynch such an offender.

The problem of woman and the problem of the Jews are absolutely
identical with the problem of slavery, and they must be solved in the
same way. No one should be oppressed, even if the oppression is of such
a kind as to be unfelt as such. The animals about a house are not
“slaves,” because they have no freedom in the proper sense of the word
which could be taken away.

But woman has a faint idea of her incapacity, a last remnant, however
weak, of the free intelligible ego, simply because there is no such
thing as an absolute woman. Women are human beings, and must be treated
as such, even if they themselves do not wish it. Woman and man have the
same rights. That is not to say that women ought to have an equal share
in political affairs. From the utilitarian standpoint such a concession,
certainly at present and probably always, would be most undesirable; in
New Zealand, where, on ethical principles, women have been enfranchised,
the worst results have followed. As children, imbeciles and criminals
would be justly prevented from taking any part in public affairs even if
they were numerically equal or in the majority; woman must in the same
way be kept from having a share in anything which concerns the public
welfare, as it is much to be feared that the mere effect of female
influence would be harmful. Just as the results of science do not depend
on whether all men accept them or not, so justice and injustice can be
dealt out to the woman, although she is unable to distinguish between
them, and she need not be afraid that injury will be done her, as
justice and not might will be the deciding factor in her treatment. But
justice is always the same whether for man or woman. No one has a right
to forbid things to a woman because they are “unwomanly”; neither should
any man be so mean as to talk of his unfaithful wife’s doings as if they
were his affair. Woman must be looked upon as an individual and as if
she were a free individual, not as one of a species, not as a sort of
creation from the various wants of man’s nature; even though woman
herself may never prove worthy of such a lofty view.

Thus this book may be considered as the greatest honour ever paid to
women. Nothing but the most moral relation towards women should be
possible for men; there should be neither sexuality nor love, for both
make woman the means to an end, but only the attempt to understand her.
Most men theoretically respect women, but practically they thoroughly
despise them; according to my ideas this method should be reversed. It
is impossible to think highly of women, but it does not follow that we
are to despise them for ever. It is unfortunate that so many great and
famous men have had mean views on this point. The views of Schopenhauer
and Demosthenes as to the emancipation of women are good instances. So
also Goethe’s

  Immer is so das Mädchen beschäftigt und reifet im stillen
  Häuslicher Tugend entgegen, den klugen Mann zu beglücken.
  Wünscht sie dann endlich zu lesen, so wählt sie gewisslich ein
    Kochbuch,

is scarcely better than Molière’s

            ... Une femme en sait toujours assez,
  Quand la capacité de son esprit se hausse
  A connaître un pourpoint d’avec un haut de chausse.

Men will have to overcome their dislike for masculine women, for that is
no more than a mean egoism. If women ever become masculine by becoming
logical and ethical, they would no longer be such good material for
man’s projection; but that is not a sufficient reason for the present
method of tying woman down to the needs of her husband and children and
forbidding her certain things because they are masculine.

For even if the possibility of morality is incompatible with the idea of
the absolute woman, it does not follow that man is to make no effort to
save the average woman from further deterioration; much less is he to
help to keep woman as she is. In every living woman the presence of what
Kant calls “the germ of good” must be assumed; it is the remnant of a
free state which makes it possible for woman to have a dim notion of her
destiny. The theoretical possibility of grafting much more on this “germ
of good” should never be lost sight of, even although nothing has ever
been done, or even if nothing could ever be done in that respect.

The basis and the purpose of the universe is the good, and the whole
world exists under a moral law; even to the animals, which are mere
phenomena, we assign moral values, holding the elephant, for instance,
to be higher than the snake, notwithstanding the fact that we do not
make an animal accountable when it kills another. In the case of woman,
however, we regard her as responsible if she commits murder, and in this
alone is a proof that women are above the animals. If it be the case
that womanliness is simply immorality, then woman must cease to be
womanly and try to be manly.

I must give warning against the danger of woman trying merely to liken
herself outwardly to man, for such a course would simply plunge her more
deeply into womanliness. It is only too likely that the efforts to
emancipate women will result not in giving her real freedom, in letting
her reach free-will, but merely in enlarging the range of her caprices.

It seems to me that if we look the facts of the case in the face there
are only two possible courses open for women: either to pretend to
accept man’s ideas, and to think that they believe what is really
opposed to their whole, unchanged nature, to assume a horror of
immorality (as if they were moral themselves), of sexuality (as if they
desired platonic love); or to openly admit that they are wrapped up in
husband and children, without being conscious of all that such an
admission implies, of the shamelessness and self-immolation of it.

Unconscious hypocrisy, or cynical identification with their natural
instincts; nothing else seems possible for woman.

But it is neither agreement nor disagreement with, but rather the denial
and overcoming of her womanishness that a woman should aim at. If a
woman really were to wish, for instance, for man’s chastity, it would
mean that she had conquered the woman in her, it would mean that pairing
was no longer of supreme importance to her and that her aim was no
longer to further it. But here is the trouble: such pretensions must not
be accepted as genuine, even although here and there they are actually
put forward. For a woman who longed for man’s purity is, apart from her
hysteria, so stupid and so incapable of truthfulness that she is unable
to perceive that she is in this way negating herself, making herself
absolutely worthless, without existence!

It is difficult to decide which is preferable: the unlimited hypocrisy
which can appropriate the thing that is most foreign to it, _i.e._, the
ascetic ideal, or the ingenuous admiration for the reformed rake, the
complacent devotion to him. The principal problem of the woman question
lies in the fact that in each case woman’s one desire is to put all
responsibility on man, and in this it is identical with the problem of
mankind.

Friedrich Nietzsche says in one of his books: “To underestimate the real
difficulties of the man and woman problem, to fail to admit the abysmal
antagonism and the inevitable nature of the constant strain between the
two, to dream of equal rights, education, responsibilities and duties,
is the mark of the superficial observer, and any thinker who has been
found shallow in these difficult places--shallow by nature--should be
looked upon as untrustworthy, as a useless and treacherous guide; he
will, no doubt, be one of those who ‘briefly deal with’ all the real
problems of life, death and eternity--who never gets to the bottom of
things. But the man who is not superficial, who has depth of thought as
well as of purpose, the depth which not only makes him desire right but
endows him with determination and strength to do right, must always look
on woman from the oriental standpoint:--as a possession, as private
property, as something born to serve and be dependent on him--he must
see the marvellous reasonableness of the Asiatic instinct of superiority
over women, as the Greeks of old saw it, those worthy successors and
disciples of the Eastern school. It was an attitude towards woman which,
as is well known, from Homer’s time till that of Pericles, grew with the
growth of culture, and increased in strength step by step, and gradually
became quite oriental. What a necessary, logical, desirable growth for
mankind! if we could only attain to it ourselves!”

The great individualist is here thinking in the terms of social ethics,
and the autonomy of his moral doctrine is overshadowed by the ideas of
caste, groups, and divisions. And so, for the benefit of society, to
preserve the place of men, he would place woman in subjection, so that
the voice of the wish for emancipation could no longer be heard, and so
that we might be freed from the false and foolish cry of the existing
advocates of women’s rights, advocates who have no suspicion of the real
source of woman bondage. But I quoted Nietzsche, not to convict him of
want of logic, but to lead to the point that the solution of the problem
of humanity is bound up with the solution of the woman problem. If any
one should think it a high-flown idea that man should respect woman as
an entity, a real existence, and not use her merely as a means to an
end, that he should recognise in her the same rights and the same duties
(those of building up one’s own moral personality) as his own, then he
must reflect that man cannot solve the ethical problem in his own case,
if he continues to lower the idea of humanity in the women by using her
simply for his own purposes.

Coitus is the price man has to pay to women, under the Asiatic system,
for their oppression. And although it is true that women may be more
than content with such recompence for the worst form of slavery, man has
no right to take part in such conduct, simply because he also is morally
damaged by it.

Even technically the problem of humanity is not soluble for man alone;
he has to consider woman even if he only wishes to redeem himself; he
must endeavour to get her to abandon her immoral designs on him. Women
must really and truly and spontaneously relinquish coitus. That
undoubtedly means that woman, as woman, must disappear, and until that
has come to pass there is no possibility of establishing the kingdom of
God on earth. Pythagoras, Plato, Christianity (as opposed to Judaism),
Tertullian, Swift, Wagner, Ibsen, all these have urged the freedom of
woman, not the emancipation of woman from man, but rather the
emancipation of woman from herself.

It is easy to bear Nietzsche’s anathema in such company! But it is very
hard for woman to reach such a goal by her own strength. The spark in
her is so flickering that it always needs the fire of man to relight it;
she must have an example to go by. Christ is an example; He freed the
fallen Magdalen, He swept away her past and expiated it for her. Wagner,
the greatest man since Christ’s time, understood to the full the real
significance of that act: until woman ceases to exist as woman for man
she cannot cease being woman. Kundry could only be released from
Klingsor’s curse by the help of a sinless, immaculate man--Parsifal.
This shows the complete harmony between the psychological and
philosophical deduction which is dealt with in Wagner’s “Parsifal,” the
greatest work in the world’s literature. It is man’s sexuality which
first gives woman existence as woman. Woman will exist as long as man’s
guilt is inexpiated, until he has really vanquished his own sexuality.

It is only in this way that the eternal opposition to all
anti-feministic tendencies can be avoided; the view that says, since
woman is there, being what she is, and not to be altered, man must
endeavour to make terms with her; it is useless to fight, because there
is nothing which can be exterminated. But it has been shown that woman
is negative and ceases to exist the moment man determines to be nothing
but true existence.

That which must be fought against is not an affair of ever unchangeable
existence and essence: it is something which can be put an end to, and
which ought to be put an end to.

       *       *       *       *       *

This is the way, and no other, to solve the woman question, and this
comes from comprehending it. The solution may appear impossible, its
tone exaggerated, its claims overstated, its requirements too exacting.
Undoubtedly there has been little said about the woman question, as
women talk of it; we have been dealing with a subject on which women
are silent, and must always remain silent--the bondage which sexuality
implies.

This woman question is as old as sex itself, and as young as mankind.
And the answer to it? Man must free himself of sex, for in that way, and
that way alone, can he free woman. In his purity, not, as she believes,
in his impurity, lies her salvation. She must certainly be destroyed, as
woman; but only to be raised again from the ashes--new, restored to
youth--as a real human being.

So long as there are two sexes there will always be a woman question,
just as there will be the problem of mankind. Christ was mindful of this
when, according to the account of one of the Fathers of the
Church--Clemens--He talked with Salome, without the optimistic
palliation of the sex which St. Paul and Luther invented later: death
will last so long as women bring forth, and truth will not prevail until
the two become one, until from man and woman a third self, neither man
nor woman, is evolved.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now for the first time, looking at the woman question as the most
important problem of mankind, the demand for the sexual abstinence on
the part of both sexes is put forward with good reason. To seek to
ground this claim on the prejudicial effects on the health following
sexual intercourse would be absurd, for any one with knowledge of the
physical frame could upset such a theory at all points; to found it on
the immorality of passion would also be wrong, because that would
introduce a heteronomous motive into ethics. St. Augustine, however,
must certainly have been aware, when he advocated chastity for all
mankind, that the objection raised to it would be that in such a case
the whole human race would quickly disappear from the face of the earth.

This extraordinary apprehension, the worst part of which appears to be
the thought that the race would be exterminated, shows not only the
greatest unbelief in individual immortality and eternal life for moral
well-doers; it is not only most irreligious, but it proves at the same
time the cowardice of man and his incapacity to live an individual life.
To any one who thinks thus, the earth can only mean the turmoil and
press of those on it; death must seem less terrible to such a man than
isolation. If the immortal, moral part of his personality were really
vigorous, he would have courage to look this result in the face; he
would not fear the death of the body, nor attempt to substitute the
miserable certainty of the continuation of the race for his lack of
faith in the eternal life of the soul. The rejection of sexuality is
merely the death of the physical life, to put in its place the full
development of the spiritual life.

Hence it follows that it cannot be a moral duty to provide for the
continuance of the race. This common argument appears to me to be so
extraordinarily false that I am almost ashamed to meet it. Yet at the
risk of making myself ridiculous I must ask if any one ever consummated
coitus to avoid the great danger of letting the human race die out, if
he failed in his duty? And would it not follow that any man who prefers
chastity would be open to the charge of immoral conduct? Every form of
fecundity is loathsome, and no one who is honest with himself feels
bound to provide for the continuity of the human race. And what we do
not realise to be a duty, is not a duty.

On the contrary, it is immoral to procreate a human being for any
secondary reason, to bring a being into the limitations of humanity, the
conditions made for him by his parentage; the fundamental reason why the
possible freedom and spontaneity of a human being is limited is that he
was begotten in such an immoral fashion. That the human race should
persist is of no interest whatever to reason; he who would perpetuate
humanity would perpetuate the problem and the guilt, the only problem
and the only guilt. The only true goal is divinity and the union of
humanity with the Godhead; that is the real choice between good and
evil, between existence and negation. The moral sanction that has been
invented for coitus, in supposing that there is an ideal attitude to
the act in which only the propagation of the race is thought of, is no
sufficient defence. There is no such imperative in the mind of man; it
is merely an ingenious defence of a desire, and there is the fundamental
immorality in it, that the being to be created has no power of choice
with regard to his parents. As for the sexual union in which the
production of children is prevented, there is no possible justification.

Sexual union has no place in the idea of mankind, not because ascetism
is a duty, but because in it woman becomes the object, the cause, and
man does what he will with her, looks upon her merely as a “thing,” not
as a living human being with an inner, psychic, existence. And so man
despises woman the moment coitus is over, and the woman knows that she
is despised, even although a few minutes before she thought herself
adored.

The only thing to be respected in man is the idea of mankind; this
disparagement of woman (and himself), induced by coitus, is the surest
proof that it is opposed to that idea of mankind. Any one who is
ignorant of what this Kantian “idea of mankind” means, may perhaps
understand it when he thinks of his sisters, his mother, his female
relatives; it concerns them all: for our own sakes, then, woman ought to
treated as human, respected and not degraded, all sexuality implying
degradation.

But man can only respect woman when she herself ceases to wish to be
object and material for man; if there is any question of emancipation it
should be the emancipation from the prostitute element. It has never
until now been made clear where the bondage of woman lies; it is in the
sovereign, all too welcome power wielded on them by the Phallus. There
can be no doubt that the men who have really desired the emancipation of
women are the men who are not very sexual, who have no great craving for
love, who are not very profound, but who are men of noble and spiritual
minds. I am not going to try to palliate the erotic motives of man, nor
to represent his antipathy to the “emancipated woman” as being in any
sense less than it is; it is much easier to go with the majority, than,
as Kant did, to climb, painfully and slowly, to the heights of
isolation.

But a great deal of what is taken for enmity to emancipation is due to
the want of confidence in its possibility. Man does not really want
woman as a slave: he is usually only too anxious for a companion. The
education which the woman of the present day receives is not calculated
to fit her for the battle against her real bondage. The last resource of
her “womanly” teacher, if she declines to do this or that, is to say
that no man will have her unless she does it. Women’s education is
directed solely to preparing them for their marriage, the happy state in
which they are to find their crown. Such training would have little
effect on man, but it serves to accentuate woman’s womanishness, her
dependence, and her servile condition. The education of woman must be
taken out of the hands of woman; the education of mankind must be taken
out of the hands of the mother. This is the first step towards placing
woman in a relation to the idea of mankind, which since the beginning
she has done more than anything else to hinder.

       *       *       *       *       *

A woman who had really given up her sexual self, who wished to be at
peace would be no longer “woman.” She would have ceased to be “woman,”
she would have received the inward and spiritual sign as well as the
outward form of regeneration.

Can such a thing be?

There is no absolute woman, but even so to say “yes” to the above
question is like giving one’s assent to a miracle. Emancipation will not
make woman happier; it will not ensure her salvation, and it is a long
road which leads to God. No being in the transition stage between
freedom and slavery can be happy. But will woman choose to abandon
slavery in order to become unhappy? The question is not merely if it be
possible for woman to become moral. It is this: is it possible for
woman really to wish to realise the problem of existence, the conception
of guilt? Can she really desire freedom? This can happen only by her
being penetrated by an ideal, brought to the guiding star. It can happen
only if the categorical imperative were to become active in woman; only
if woman can place herself in relation to the moral idea, the idea of
humanity.

In that way only can there be an emancipation of woman.




INDEX


  Æsthetics and Erotics, Chap. XI., 236-251

  Affinity, sexual, compared with chemical, 41

  Ahriman, 183

  Alcmæon, of Kroton, 81

  Alexander the Great, 229

  Amphibia, hermaphroditism, 22

  Anæsthesia, sexual, 274

  Anatomical distinctions of the sexes, 3

  Anatomy, as guide to sexuality, 3, 4

  Animals, women and the sexual union of, 257

  Angelo, M., 105

  Anti-Christ, 183

  Antisemitism, 303, 304, 312

  Apprehension, 116

  Architecture, 119

  Aristotle, 18, 140, 187, 293

  Arrhenoplasm, Chap. II., 11-25

  Aryans, 302

  Asceticism, 329, 336, 347

  Attraction, between the sexes, 26, 27

  Autobiography, 122

  Avenarius, 31, 82, 94, 100, 128, 144, 322


  Bach, 103, 323

  Bachelors, and women, 258

  Bacon, 182

  Bashkirtseff, Marie, 69

  Bateson, on dimorphic earwigs, 34

  Beatrice, 240, 336

  Beauty, analysis of, 240, 242

  Beethoven, 96, 112, 317

  Bentham, 176, 317

  Berkeley, 141, 317

  Bisexuality, oscillations in, 55

  Bischoff, 12, 217

  Björnson, 108

  Blavatsky, Mdme., 68

  Blindness, colour, 110

  Blood, transfusion of, 20

  Bölsche, 329

  Bonheur, Rosa, 68

  Bonnet, 143

  Boys and girls, education of, 58

  Breeding, application of laws of sexual attraction to, 43

  Breuer, on hysteria, 265, 269, 270

  Bridgman, Laura, 66

  Brünnhilde, 223

  Bruno, 141, 240, 316

  Buchner, 315

  Buddha, 325, 328

  Burckhardt, 72

  Burns, Robert, 317

  Byron, Lord, 236


  Cæsar, 134, 229, 230, 326

  Carlyle, 113, 136, 140, 175, 229, 307, 317

  Castration, effect of, 18

  Catharsis, 269

  Catherine II. of Russia, 66

  Catholic view of marriage, 221

  Catholicism and women, 207

  Cattle, homosexuality in, 49

  Causality, invented by man, 279

  Cells, sexuality of, 15, 17, 22, 23

  Ceres, 224

  Chamberlain on Jews, 312, 321, 323, 328
    on origin of Christianity, 328

  “Character” of Avenarius, 94, 95, 96

  Characterology, Chap. V., 52-63

  Characters, classification of, 14
    secondary sexual, 43

  Chastity, 331, 332, 334, 335, 341, 346

  Chemistry, Kepler’s estimate of, 315

  Chemotropism, 39, 41

  Child, relation of mother and prostitute to, 219

  Chinese, 187, 302

  Chivalry, 204

  Chopin, 67

  Christ, 313, 325, 329

  Christianity and Judaism, 325, 327, 328

  Clairvoyance, 277

  Classification, 97

  Clemens, 345

  Cleopatra, 230

  Coitus, 332, 337, 343

  Colour blindness, 110

  Commerce, and Jews, 325

  Communism, 307

  Comparisons, in poetry, 118

  Compassion, womanly, 197

  Compliments, and women, 203

  Comprehension, power of by genius, 105

  Comte, A., 141, 204, 244

  Confucius, 328

  Consciousness, male and female, Chap. III., 93-102

  Conventions, women and, 262, 263

  Conversion, Jews and, 323

  Copernicus, 140, 315

  Coquetry, and sexuality, 232

  Correlations, importance of, 61

  Cromwell, 229

  Crustacea, hermaphroditism in, 19

  Cuvier, 61, 62, 315

  Cyrano de Bergerac, 211


  Danäe, 231

  Dante, 249, 299

  Darwin, 97, 130, 140, 217
    on correlation, 61
    on female talent, 71
    on heterostylism, 33, 34
    on sexual tastes of animals, 27
    on union of those akin, 44

  Da Vinci, 97

  Death, 346

  Death, consciousness at, 128, 129

  De Bergerac, 211

  Decalogue, 313

  Demeter, 224

  Demosthenes, 340

  Descartes, 149

  Determinants, in psychology, 81

  Determination of sex, 23

  De Vries, on cell characters, 16

  Dilthey, 82

  Dimorphism, sexual, 6

  Divorce, 221

  Don Juan, 90, 233, 299, 332, 335

  Doppelganger, 210

  Drawing, and women, 120

  Dualism of the world, 166

  Dürer, 322


  Eckhard, 313

  Education, 57
    of the race, 348
    of women, 348

  Ego, awakening of, 164

  Ego, conception of, Chap. VII., 153-162

  “Elective Affinities,” 69, 218

  “Element” of Avenarius, 94

  Eliot, George, 67

  Emancipation of Women, Chap. VI., 64-75, 338

  Embryoes, sexual differentiation of, 5

  Emerson, 141, 230

  Empedocles, 172

  Emperors and genius, 139

  Empiricism, and English philosophy, 317

  English philosophy, 153

  English and Jew compared, 317, 319

  Erotics, and æsthetics, Chap. XI., 236-251

  Eroticism and humour, 318

  Ethics and Logic, Chap. VI., 142-152, Chap. VII., 153-162

  Euler, 315

  Euripides, 105, 187

  Exner, 98


  Faithfulness, sexual, 220

  Falkenberg, on fertilisation in seaweeds, 40

  Fall, meaning of, 283

  Familiarity, quality of, 144

  Family, origin of, 205
    amongst the Jews, 310

  Faraday, 315

  Fechner, 82, 292, 313, 322

  Female, contrasted with male, Chap. I., 79-84

  Féré, on sexual inversion, 45

  Ferns, sexual attraction caused by malic acid, 39

  Fertility, limited in prostitutes, 216

  Feuerbach, 141, 305

  Fichte, 140, 150, 307

  Fischart, 226

  Flowers, heterostylous, 33, 34

  Forgetting, analysis of process, 97

  Form, matter and form, 293

  Formula, of sexual attraction, 29, 37, 38
    of sexual constitution, 8

  Fouqué, 188

  Free love, 221

  Free will, 209

  Freud, on hysteria, 265-277

  Friendship, 49, 288


  Galileo, 140, 315

  Gall, on physiognomy, 59

  Gauss, 140

  Gaule, 12

  Genesis, Book of, 295

  Genital, glands, effect of transplantation, 21

  Genius, compared with talent, Chap. IV., 103-113
    and the Ego, Chap. VIII., 163-185
    in evolution of race, 137
    and language, 137
    and maleness, 113
    and memory, Chap. V., 114-141
    and morality, 183
    and time, 136
    summary of, 169, 182, 183

  Germain, Sophie, 194

  Girls and boys, education of, 58

  God, Schopenhauer’s definition, 313

  Goethe, 40, 41, 43, 69, 97, 106, 107, 120, 126, 174, 203, 218, 228,
  313, 316, 332, 340

  Gonochorism, 6, 73

  Grafting, of sexual organs, 20

  Greeks and religion, 323

  Guilt, hysterical consciousness of, 275


  Hæckel’s “gonochorism,” 6

  “Hakon,” King, 328

  Hamilton, 317

  Handel, 322

  Happiness, impossibility of, 285

  Hartley, 143, 317

  Hatred, 236

  Hauptmann, 276

  Havelock Ellis, 11, 12

  Hebbel, 279

  Hegel, 155

  Heine, 316, 323

  Hellenbach, 287

  Helmholtz, 82, 97

  Henids, 99

  Herbart, 93, 94, 141, 246

  Hering, 143

  Hermaphroditism, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 45

  “Hero-worship,” 113

  Hertwig, 16

  Heterostylism, 33, 34

  Hildebrand, on heterostylism, 33

  Hobbes, 316, 317

  Homosexuality, Chap. IV., 45-52
    of famous women, 66

  Horwicz, 93, 94

  Hume, 81, 141, 153, 164, 175, 193, 208, 218, 317

  Humour, analysis of, 318

  Hunter, John, 14

  Hutcheson, 175

  Huxley, 193, 317

  Hydrocele, 25

  Hypnotism, 50

  Hypnotism and hysteria, 277

  Hysteria, analysis of, 265


  Ibsen, 160, 187, 218, 224, 231, 258, 290, 325, 343

  Idealism, 176

  Idioplasm, 16, 21, 155

  Imagination, of women, 119

  Immortality, 127, 135, 314, 346

  “Impressions,” maternal, 217

  Impulse, sexual, 87, 88, 282

  Individualism, 176

  Individuality, 282

  Individuation, 282

  Infants, sex of, 23, 24

  Innocence, 243

  Intermediate sexual forms, 7

  Inversion, sexual, 45

  Irony, 323

  Israels, 316


  James, W., 82, 144

  Janet, on hysteria, 265, 267, 268

  Jealousy, and women, 205, 289

  Jewish race, 303

  Jews and English compared, 319
    and women compared, 320

  Joshua, 328

  Judaism, Chap. XIII., 301-330
    and Christianity, 325
    and the Messiah, 329


  Kant, 42, 85, 105, 138, 150, 153, 158, 159, 161, 164, 192, 208, 237,
  246, 270, 313, 320, 331, 340

  Karneades, 141

  Karsch, 49

  Kaufmann, 119

  Kepler, 315

  Kleptomania, 205

  Kowalevsky, Sonia, 67

  Kraepelin, 45

  Kundry, 270, 319, 337, 344


  “Lady from the Sea,” 218

  Lamarck, 97, 143, 315

  Lange, 129, 208

  Language, origin of, 137

  Latin, women and, 89

  Lavater, 174

  Laws against homosexuality, 51
    of sexual attraction, 29

  Leda, 231, 291

  Leibnitz, 140, 171, 172, 316

  Lepage, Bastien, 69

  Lewes, 317

  Liars, and memory, 145

  Libraries, and women, 206

  Lichtenberg, 153

  Linnæus, 140, 315

  Locke, 141, 317

  Logic and the Ego, Chap. VII., 153, 162

  Logic and ethic, Chap. VII., 153-162
    and memory, Chap. VI., 142-152

  Lohengrin, 324

  Lombroso, 138

  Lotze, 125

  Love, analysis of, 236, 251
    maternal, 225
    and sexuality, 239

  Luther, 325

  Luxemburg, 69


  Mach, 143, 154, 201, 208, 210, 322

  Madness, and genius, 183

  Madonna worship, 249

  Maeterlinck, 108

  Mahomet, 187, 325

  Male and Female, Chap. I., 79-84
    minds, 284
    plasmas, 11

  Malic acid in ferns, 39

  Marriage, effect on progeny of loveless, 44
    ideas of boys and girls on, 90
    religious, 221

  Marx, 307

  Marxism, 329

  Masculine women, 2, 8, 17

  Match-making, and women, 252-300
    amongst Jews, 311

  Materialism, and Jews, 314

  Matriarchy, 222

  Matter, and form, 293
    and woman, 292

  Maupas, on rotifers, 24

  Maupassant, 276

  Mayer, 97

  Medicine, Jewish influence on, 315

  Medical view of hysteria, 271

  “Meistersingers,” 305

  Memory, 282
    and genius, Chap. V., 114-141
    in boys and girls, 294
    in relation to logic, Chap. VI., 142-152

  Messalina, 336

  Messiah, 325, 329

  Meta-organisms, 287

  Metaphysics, Jews and, 322

  Microcosm, 171

  Mill, J. S., 176, 317

  Milne-Edwards, 291

  Mirandola, 188

  Modesty, 261, 274
    womanly, 200

  Molière, 340

  Moll, 52, 88

  Monads, 198, 287, 294, 297

  Monogamy, 43, 220

  Morality, 176

  Morality of women, 196, 278, 340

  More, 73

  Morphology, in relation to character, Chap. V., 52-63

  Motherhood, analysis of, Chap. X., 214-235

  Mozart, 323

  Müller, Joh., 217

  Murder, 109

  Music, and women, 118

  Myxodema, 25


  Naegeli, 16

  Names, and women, 206

  “Nana,” 231

  Napoleon, 182, 228, 326, 327

  Newton, 140, 315

  New Testament, 325

  New Zealand, 339

  Nietzsche, 104, 108, 140, 167, 329, 342, 344

  Nirwana, 174

  Nobility, Jews and, 308

  Nörgler, 174

  Novalis, 103, 165, 258

  Nudity, 240, 241


  Organotherapy, 21

  Oriental view of women, 342

  Origen, 187

  Oscillations, in sexuality, 54

  Ostwald, 31, 315

  Ovid, 332

  Owen, 307


  Painting, and women, 120

  Pairing, woman’s chief instinct, 252-300
    and Jews, 311

  “Parsifal,” 305, 337, 344

  Pascal, 179, 205

  Pasiphäe, 291

  Pasteur, 315

  Paternity, 232, 346

  Pathology, 25

  Paul, Jean, 103, 164, 318

  Pederasty, Chap. IV., 45-52

  “Peer Gynt,” 224, _foot note_

  Periodicity, of genius, 107

  Personality, multiple, 211, 267

  Persoon, 33

  Petzoldt, 96, 100

  Pfeffer, 39

  Phallus, relation of, to women, 298, 347

  Philosophy, English, 153

  Philosophers, and genius, 141

  Physiognomy, 59, 60

  Piety, 322

  Pity, 199

  Plasmas, male and female, 11

  Plato, 149, 150, 240, 246, 293, 313, 343

  Platonic love, 239

  Pleasure, 282

  Politeness, and women, 203

  Politician, character of, 230

  Politicians and genius, 139
    and value, 134

  Pollen, in heterostylous flowers, 35

  Polyandry, 222

  Polygamy, 220

  Pregnancy, 86, 222

  Pre-Raphaelites, 73

  Prévost, 256

  Preyer, 315

  Pride, of women, 201

  Property, Jewish relation to, 306

  Prostitution, analysis of, Chap. X., 214-235

  Protestantism, and women, 207

  Psychology, 142
    male and female, Chap. IX., 186-213

  Puberty, effect of, 90

  Pythagoras, 343


  Rabbis, Jewish, 311

  Race, persistence of human, 224, 346

  Raphael, 226

  Recognition, 282

  Red Sea, crossing of, 323

  Regeneration, of lost parts, 16
    moral, 283

  Religion, founders of, 326, 327
    importance of, 323
    Jews and, 321
    women and, 261

  Revenge, 289

  Reverence, 322

  Richepin, 226

  Rousseau, 307

  Rudiments, of embryonic sexual organs, 3

  Ruskin, 307


  St. Augustine, 345

  Salome, 345

  Samson, 328

  Sand, George, 66

  Sappho, 65, 66

  Schelling, 81, 105, 138, 165, 246

  Schiller, 230, 246

  Schleiermacher, 140

  Schoolmasters, and types, 57

  Schopenhauer, 95, 167, 174, 199, 218, 223, 236, 237, 238, 281, 295,
  305, 313, 318, 340

  Schrenk-Notzing, 45

  Schurtz, 205

  Schwammerdam, 315

  Science, and genius, 140
    Judaism, in, 314

  Secretion, internal, and sexual characters, 15

  Sellheim and Foges, experiments on castration, 18

  Servant, type of woman, 272

  Sex, appearance of, in embryos, 5
    assignment of, to infants, 22, 23, 24

  Sexual attraction, laws of, Chap. III., 26-44
    characters, secondary, 14, 43
    impulses, 88

  Sexuality, of male and female compared, 85, 92
    opposed to love, 239
    of women, 260, 331, 332, 334, 335

  Shaftesbury, 246

  Shakespeare, 105, 109, 110, 317

  Shelley, 168, 317

  Shrew, type of woman, 272

  “Siegfried,” 223, 305

  Sigwart, 156

  Simmel, George, 148

  Slavery, compared with Jewish problem, 338

  Smith, Adam, 175, 317

  Socialism, 307

  Society, origin of, 205

  Socrates, 150, 246, 326

  Solidarity, of the Jews, 310

  Solitude, and women, 205

  Solliers, on sexual anæsthesia, 274

  Somerville, Mary, 194

  Sophocles, 184

  Soul, 313
    denied by modern science, 315
    and great men, 168
    and modern psychology, 209
    and women, 187

  Spencer, Herbert, 128, 130, 263, 317

  Spinoza, 316, 317

  Sprengel, 315

  State, 307

  Steenstrup, 12, 13

  Sterility, 216

  Stern, L. W., 82

  Sterne, 317

  “Stockman, Dr.,” 325

  Strauss, 112

  Strindberg, 187

  Sudermann, 256

  Suggestibility, of women, 294

  Suicide, of women, 286

  Sulpicia, 319

  Superstition, of women, 127

  Swift, 317, 343

  Sympathy, 177, 197


  “Tannhäuser,” 240, 305

  Telegony, 233

  Teresa, St., 277

  Tertullian, 187, 314, 343

  “Tesman,” in Hedda Gabler, 258

  Thelyplasm, Chap. II., 11-25

  Time, relation to value, 133

  Tolstoy, 231

  Touch, sense of, in women, 191

  Tragedy, 319

  Transcendentalism, 314

  Transfusion, of blood, 20

  Travel, desire of, 237, _note_

  Truth, 150

  Türck, 138

  Tylor, 128

  Types, male and female, mental, 53


  Undine, 188

  Universality, of genius, 112

  Untruthfulness, of women, 266


  Value, theory of, 133

  Vanity, of women, 202

  Variation in sexual characters, 18

  Virginity, a male idea, 333
    woman’s attitude to, 334

  Virtue of women, 333

  Vogt, on hysteria, 265, 274, 277

  Von Eschenbach, 264

  Von Höffding, 144

  Von Humboldt, 140

  Von Kleist, 105

  Von Möbius, 59


  Wagner, 67, 109, 211, 240, 279, 305, 319, 343

  Weill, 36

  Weismann, 81

  Wier, 81

  Will, 282

  Wit and humour, 318

  Woman and animals, 290, 291
    character of, 280
    emancipated, 64
    famous, 69
    future of, Chap. XIV., 331-340
    compared with Jews, 320
    and matter, 292
    sexuality of, 260
    summary of her nature, Chap. XII., 252-300

  Wundt, 94, 131, 140


  “Zarathustra,” 108, 167

  Zionism, 307, 312

  Zola, 105, 231, 304


  Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED
  Tavistock Street, London




  Transcriber’s Notes


  The language of the source document (including inconsistencies in
  spelling, hyphenation, etc.) has been retained, unless listed below.
  Many of the proper names mentioned in the book are spelled differently
  from what is usual. These have been left as printed as well, unless
  listed below.

  Page xviii, Continuous and discontinuance memory: as printed in the
  source document.

  Page 36, so many other actors: possibly an error for so many other
  factors.

  Page 141, Prospera: possibly an error for Prospero.

  Page 205, much more developed in men than in women: probably an error
  for much more developed in women than in men (cf. remainder of
  paragraph).

  Page 282, The terms in the left-hand row: as printed in the source
  document.

  Page 307, in the left row: as printed in the source document.


  Changes made

  Some minor obvious typographical and punctuation errors and misprints
  have been corrected silently.

  Footnotes have been moved to directly underneath the paragraph where
  they are referenced.

  Page 7: Boyle-Guy-Lussac changed to Boyle-Gay-Lussac

  Page 25: thelyplastic changed to thelyplasmic

  Page 29: closing quote mark added after ... in different proportions.

  Page 38: Postwangen changed to Postwagen

  Page 69: Jeanna de la Mothe Guyon changed to Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon;
  Footnote 6: Hysterias if ... changed to Hysteria is ...

  Page 97: Helmholz changed to Helmholtz as elsewhere

  Page 118: Kloppstock changed to Klopstock

  Page 160: Nebbel’s epigram changed to Hebbel’s epigram

  Page 181: Ernest Mack changed to Ernest Mach

  Page 185: closing quote mark added after Latin text

  Page 217: Th. Bischof changed to Th. Bischoff

  Page 305: Tannhaüser changed to Tannhäuser

  Index: some minor spelling changes made to conform to the text.