No More Learning

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
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
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 ot 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 finai 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, every- thing 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 ot it ail and makes it seem so equivocal arises from the very nature of woman whicti 1 have been trying to explain all along.
In order to understand these fallacious contradictions one must first of all remember the tremendous " accessi-
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bility," to use another word, the " impressionability," of women, -^heir extraordinary aptitude for anything new, and their easy acceptance of other people's views have not yet been sufficiently emphasised in this bool^
/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 prefer^ man to mould her mentally. She rejoices in being dependent, and her expectatioiis-fr? )m. m. an resolve themselves i nto the moment when she may_bg_p? if? cily43assi-ve.
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 ac- quaintances, 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 everj'thing, 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 onthemgladly,andadheretoit withthegreatestfirmness. That is why woman is so intolerant when there has been a breach of conventional laws. I must guote an amusing
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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 theirwives. TheDakotanwomenaresoimbuedwiththe 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
b^ external agencies is similar in its nature to her suggesti- bility, 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. *. \
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 morahty, which cannot be called hypocrisy because it does not conceal anything anti-moral, her assumption and prac- tise 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
* The quiescent, inactive, large egg-cells are sought out by the mobile, active, and slender spermatozoa.
? 264 SEX AND CHARACTER
individuality she has nothing to contrast with oairing ; 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 under- stand 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 miposture 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 con- vinced 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 Ko? nigin,
Dass kein Genu? gen fand' darin
So manches Weib beim lieben Mann. Dass doch so manche in Gedanken Zur U? ppigkeit will u? berschwanken, Die sonst sich spro? de zeigen kann ! Vor Fremden zu? chtig sie erscheinen. Doch ist des Herzens tiefstes Meinen Das Widerspiel vom a? ussern Schein. "
Wolfram indicates clearly enough what is at the bottom
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
265
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 some- thing 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 interest- ing study than those observed in melancholia or in simple paranoia.
The majority of psychiatrists have a distrust of psycho- logical 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 inves- tigations carried out by Pierre Janet, Oskar Vogt, and particularly by Breuer and S. Freud, show what I mean.
J.
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 psycho- logical 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
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what she has always accepted as true and beUeved 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 conscious- ness," a sensation which she thinks she detests, but which inrealityhasitsorigininherownnature. Thetremendous 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,hecanbehysterical. Thereareundoubtedly 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 mto 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 aetiology of hysteria present.
Hysteria shows that untruthfulness, however far it may reach,cannotsuppresseverything. Byeducationorenviron- ment 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.
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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 con- tinual changes of mood, none of which are subject to the control of a dominant, central, controlling nucleus of indi- viduality. 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 every- thing 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
268 SEX AND CHARACTER
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
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 fromwithout. Thisapparent"secondarypersonality,"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 com- plications that must ensue from the ebbings and fiowings 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 con- sequent on her lack of free will with regard to the truth, in accordance with Kant's " Indetermmism "--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 momen- tary 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 reahty 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.
Janet.
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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 distingishing character of the unconscious un- truthfulness 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 hope- lessly abandoned sort of people. No one who really feels remorse could talk in such a way. The fallacy of repre- senting the hysterical as being eminently moral is one which evenBreuerandFreudhaveshared. Theh^^stericalsimply 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 prac- tically as they appear to act most readily from altruistic
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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 them- selves--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 immoralthingpossible. Itisyieldingtocompleteslavery
;
it is a renunciation of the will and consciousness ; it means allowing another person to do what he likes with the sub- ject. 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 sugges- tion 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. Inthehystericalparoxysmwhathappensisthat 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.
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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 incli- nations. But, later on, the suppressed, although not wholly vanquished, nature lays hold of these old experiences, rein- terprets them in the light of the new contents of conscious-
ness, 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,andonlypowerfulonetheyhave. Eventhedesire itself has no real identity, for it is not seated in a real indi- vidual, and, as it is suppressed, leaps, so to speak, from one
part of the body to the other. It may be that my attempt
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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 hei, 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 andaboveherownexperiences. Thefranticrageofhys- terical women at what they say is imposed on them by some strange will, whilst it in reality is their own will, shows that theyare just as much under the domination of sexuality as are non-hysterical women, are just as subject to their destiny and incapable of avertmg 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 ofallowingherownmentalcharacteritsproperplay. 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 tospecialfemalecharacterology. Thehystericalwomanis hysterical because she is servile ; mentally she is identical with the maid-servant. Her opposite (who does not really exist)istheshrewishdame. Sothatwomenmaybesub- divided into the maid who serves, and the woman who commands. *
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
* 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.
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The servant and the mistress are a sort of " com- plete woman " when considered as a "whole. "*
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 sus- ceptibility 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. f
Untruthfulness, organic untruthfulness, characterises both types, and accordingly all women. It is quite wrong to say
* 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 hysteri- cal woman, on the contrary, is always lacking in ideas, and wants suggestions from others. This is a rough way of indicating the two types.
f 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 parti- cular 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.
the test !
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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 religiousfervourareloudlyacclaimed. Womanlymodesty, 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 re- proaches 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 anaethesia or frigidity are always hysterical, as Paul Solliers, with whom I entirely agree, discovered. Sexual anaesthesia is merely one of the many hysterical, that is to say, unreal, simulated forms of anaesthesia. Oskar Vogt, in particular (and general obser- vation has confirmed him), proved that such anaesthesia
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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 anaesthetised 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, althoughotherwisehewouldnothaveperceivedthem. So also with sexual frigidity ; it is an order given by the con- trolling force of the super-imposed asexual ideas; but this, like all other forms of anaesthesia, 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 inter- course 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 " conscious- ness 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
? SEX AND CHARACTER
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 over- come 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 rightconductcomesfrommoralcharacter. Thevowre- models 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
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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 hys- terical ; 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 him- self, woman's in a supreme belief in other people.
There is left to consider the self-respect which is often describedasbeingsohighlydevelopedinthehysterical. 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 un- hypnotised 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
? 278 SEX AND CHARACTER
this I saw happen at Mu? nchen 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 oppositioninhimself. Themasculinewillcanobtainsuch 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 domg 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 unreaUty, 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 me 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 irre- trievably 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--mani- festly only a flickering spark of the free, intelligible subject,
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 279
the scanty remains of inherited maleness in her, which, by
contrast, gives her even this shght 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 tlieyaresimplytheembodimentofthem. Itisonlyaman whocantalkofthe"diranecessitas"withinhim; itisonly 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 1 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 themeasureofitshopelessness. Themostnotableexamples
of the sex (I have in mind Hebbel's Judith and Wagner's Kundryj 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 womanwereunderacurse. Attimesshefeelstheweight 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
? 2 8o SEX AND CHARACTER
by such current terms as " womanly love," " womanly virtue," " womanly devoutness," " womanly modesty," has failedtoinvalidatemyconclusions. Ihavemaintainedmy 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 conscious- ness 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 con- nection with the other positive and negative characteristics of woman.
What has the match-making instinct m 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 ^tumili, was curiously like and unlike humany memory ; both signify an equally lasting influence of an impression which was limited to a
WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 281
definite period; bui memory is differentiated from mere passive recognition by its power of actively reproducing the past.
Later on, it was seen that mere individuation, the charac- terestic of all organic differentation, 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 char- acter, absent in the animals where there is only a desire for satisfaction. The two are analagous, and yet funda- mentally different. Pleasure is craved ; worth is what we feel we ought to crave. The two have been con- fused, 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 bee^ 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
';
? ? 282
SEX AND CHARACrrER
^
J
?
Individuation. Recognition.
Pleasure.
Sexual desire. Limitation of the field of
consciousness. Impulse.
Limited to mankind, and in
? 1 Common to men and animals,
.
rJ . 11 ^
,,,<< particular to the males of
? fundamentally organic.
^ mankind.
The series shows that man possesses not only each character which is found in all living things, but also an analagous and higher character peculiar to himself. The old tendency at once to identify the two series and to con- trast 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 thecharactersoflowerexistences. Itisasifmanpossessed 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 charac- teristics 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 ccelo 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 ^wi? alwWc of the New Dispensation. Just as all earthly life is sustained by earthly food, this other life
,. ,
Individuality.
Memory.
Sense of vi^orth or value. Love.
Faculty of " taking
notice. " Will.
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 283
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 " re- generation "--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 earlief 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 some- thing 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.
SEX AND CHARACTER
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 impos- sible 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, hyper- empirical existence of the male transcends matter, space, and time. He is certainly mortal, but he is immortal as well. Andsohehasthepowertochoosebetweenthetwo, 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 com- pactofthedesireforimmortality. Thatthewomanhasno 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 abso- lute, 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.
284
;
? ? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 285
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 pro- blems 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 inde- pendent 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 per- ceptions ; 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 free- dom 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 ? s 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.
;
? 286 SEX AND CHARACTER
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.