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.
Weininger - 1903 - Sex and Character
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.
270
WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 271
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
;
? --
? SEX AND CHARACTER
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.
272
? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 273
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 !
SEX AND CHARACTER
274
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
;
? ;
? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 275
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
276
;
? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 277
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.
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 un- happiness as personal when she possesses no idea of a destiny? Themostappallinglydecisiveproofoftheempti- ness 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 worthofexistence,inwhichcaseheisaphilosopher orit
;
is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of abso- lute beauty, and then he is an artist. But both views mean thesame. Womanhasnorelationtotheidea,sheneither affirms nor denies it ; she is neither moral nor anti-moral mathematicallyspeaking,shehasnosign; sheispurposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil, never egoisti- cal {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 AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
Womanisuntruthful. Ananimalhasjustaslittlemeta- physical 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 some- thing. The cognition-impulse is in the end identical with thedesireforimmortality. Anyonewhoobjectstoastate- ment 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, objec- tively, 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 individuahty, that is, as having genius, has<< in addition differentiation and distinction, individuation and discrimina- tion ; 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 undiffer- entiated one ; this makes it possible for woman to bring
;
287
? 288 SEX AND CHARACTER
peopletogether,tomatch-make. Theobjectofherloveis that of her sympathy--the community, the blending of everything. *
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 friend- ship is referable to this fact. Man's friendship is an attempt to see eye to eye with those who individually and collec- tively 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. f
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 partici- pates 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
*Allindividualityisanenemyofthecommunity. Thisisseen most markedly in men of genius, but it is just the same with regard to the sexes.
? f Men'sfriendshipsavoidbreakingdowntheirfriends'personal reserve. Women expect intimacy from their friends.
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
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 jealousofanyman. Ifaman,evenifhewerethemanshe 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 hysteri-
cal 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 spell- bound 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 casewouldhaveresultedinthesameconclusions. ButI 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 opposedtothespiritualidea. Whetherasamotherseeking
289
? SEX AND CHARACTER
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 wholeofwhichsheis aninseparablepart,andshefollows 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 appo- site 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 areincloserelationshipwiththeanimals. Manyoftheir
290
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
sexual perversities and affections for animals (Pasipha? e 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 import- ancetothewomanproblem. Animalsaremereindividuals
;
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 de- fendersofwomanlinessaresofondofquoting. Theresult 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 con- sideration ; 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 nothmg more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than an arrangement for physiological division of labour--an idea tor which, I believe, the zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is responsible--appears, according to this work, quite unten- able ; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a superficial and mtellectually complacent view.
291
SEX AND CHARACTER
Darwinism, indeed, is responsible for making popular the view that sexually differentiated organisms have been de- rived 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 placingthemsidebysideandcontrastingthem. Thekey to their natures must be found in their relations to each other. In attempting to discover the nature of erotics I wentaItttlewayintothissubject. Therelationofmanto 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 con- trast between form and matter. It is no more than a translation of this distinction from the theory of experience tometaphysics. Matter,whichinitselfisabsolutelyunindi- vidualised and so can assume any form, of itself has no
292
;
? ? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
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 Pinto, the negation of existence is no otherthanmatTcr. Formistheonlyrealexistence. Aristotle carried the Piatomc 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,itgivesthingsacoherentform. Woman'ssexual 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 require- ments 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 txperiences.
The summing up of the connected nature of man's mental life, as opposed to the inarticulate and chaotic con- dition 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 benid ideas. Women are matter, which
293
? SEX AND CHARACTER
canassumeanyshape. Thoseexperimentswhichascribe 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 submis- siveness, 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 everythmg, 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 sexuaUty.
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 under- standing--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. Manisthemicrocosm; hecontainsallkindsofpossibilities.
294
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 295
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 httle, 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 ta pieces as a whole, so that he may build her up again.
270
WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 271
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
;
? --
? SEX AND CHARACTER
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.
272
? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 273
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 !
SEX AND CHARACTER
274
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
;
? ;
? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 275
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
276
;
? WOMANANDHERSIGNIFICANCE 277
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.
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 un- happiness as personal when she possesses no idea of a destiny? Themostappallinglydecisiveproofoftheempti- ness 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 worthofexistence,inwhichcaseheisaphilosopher orit
;
is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of abso- lute beauty, and then he is an artist. But both views mean thesame. Womanhasnorelationtotheidea,sheneither affirms nor denies it ; she is neither moral nor anti-moral mathematicallyspeaking,shehasnosign; sheispurposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil, never egoisti- cal {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 AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
Womanisuntruthful. Ananimalhasjustaslittlemeta- physical 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 some- thing. The cognition-impulse is in the end identical with thedesireforimmortality. Anyonewhoobjectstoastate- ment 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, objec- tively, 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 individuahty, that is, as having genius, has<< in addition differentiation and distinction, individuation and discrimina- tion ; 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 undiffer- entiated one ; this makes it possible for woman to bring
;
287
? 288 SEX AND CHARACTER
peopletogether,tomatch-make. Theobjectofherloveis that of her sympathy--the community, the blending of everything. *
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 friend- ship is referable to this fact. Man's friendship is an attempt to see eye to eye with those who individually and collec- tively 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. f
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 partici- pates 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
*Allindividualityisanenemyofthecommunity. Thisisseen most markedly in men of genius, but it is just the same with regard to the sexes.
? f Men'sfriendshipsavoidbreakingdowntheirfriends'personal reserve. Women expect intimacy from their friends.
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
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 jealousofanyman. Ifaman,evenifhewerethemanshe 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 hysteri-
cal 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 spell- bound 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 casewouldhaveresultedinthesameconclusions. ButI 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 opposedtothespiritualidea. Whetherasamotherseeking
289
? SEX AND CHARACTER
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 wholeofwhichsheis aninseparablepart,andshefollows 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 appo- site 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 areincloserelationshipwiththeanimals. Manyoftheir
290
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
sexual perversities and affections for animals (Pasipha? e 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 import- ancetothewomanproblem. Animalsaremereindividuals
;
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 de- fendersofwomanlinessaresofondofquoting. Theresult 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 con- sideration ; 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 nothmg more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than an arrangement for physiological division of labour--an idea tor which, I believe, the zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is responsible--appears, according to this work, quite unten- able ; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a superficial and mtellectually complacent view.
291
SEX AND CHARACTER
Darwinism, indeed, is responsible for making popular the view that sexually differentiated organisms have been de- rived 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 placingthemsidebysideandcontrastingthem. Thekey to their natures must be found in their relations to each other. In attempting to discover the nature of erotics I wentaItttlewayintothissubject. Therelationofmanto 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 con- trast between form and matter. It is no more than a translation of this distinction from the theory of experience tometaphysics. Matter,whichinitselfisabsolutelyunindi- vidualised and so can assume any form, of itself has no
292
;
? ? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE
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 Pinto, the negation of existence is no otherthanmatTcr. Formistheonlyrealexistence. Aristotle carried the Piatomc 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,itgivesthingsacoherentform. Woman'ssexual 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 require- ments 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 txperiences.
The summing up of the connected nature of man's mental life, as opposed to the inarticulate and chaotic con- dition 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 benid ideas. Women are matter, which
293
? SEX AND CHARACTER
canassumeanyshape. Thoseexperimentswhichascribe 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 submis- siveness, 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 everythmg, 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 sexuaUty.
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 under- standing--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. Manisthemicrocosm; hecontainsallkindsofpossibilities.
294
? WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 295
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 httle, 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 ta pieces as a whole, so that he may build her up again.
