THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 183
diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of Ahriman, of the "radical evil in human nature," is exceedingly powerful, yet it con- cerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it.
diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of Ahriman, of the "radical evil in human nature," is exceedingly powerful, yet it con- cerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it.
Weininger - 1903 - Sex and Character
Genius, as I have already shown, would have universal comprehension, and through its
;
? THE " I " PROBLEM AND GENIUS 169
perfect memory would be independent of time. To com- prehend anything one must have within one something similar. <^A man notices, understands, and comprehends onlythosethingswithwhichhehassomekinship. The genius is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious,mostcontinuous,andmostindividualego. The ego is the central point, the unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness. )
(^he ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension, the centre of infinite space ; the great man contains the whole universe within himself genius is the
;
living microcosm/ He is not an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination of an infinite number of elements ; the argu- ment m chap. iv. as to his relation to other men and things must not be taken in that sense ; he is everything. In him and through him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from parts in the fashion of science. Forthegeniustheegoistheall,livesastheall; thegenius sees nature and all existences as whole ; the relations of things flash on him intuitively ; he has not to build bridges ofstonesbetweenthem. Andsothegeniuscannotbean empirical psychologist slowly collecting details and linking them by associations ; he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a compound of atoms and molecules.
L It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the \ genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. And so the man of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his \ genius. Thatiswhyhisviewsaremorevaluablethanthose of all others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe, whilst others never reach a full con- sciousness of this inner self, and so, for him, all things have significance, all thmgs are symbolical. ) For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases through the walls of the capillaries ; the blue of the sky is
? SEX AND CHARACTER
more than the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light ; snakes are not merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single man to have achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been made, if every- thing that has been done by the following : Archimedes and Lagrange, Johannes Mu? ller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace, Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucy- dides and Niebuhr, Friedrich August Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science, could have been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would still not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are ; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and moun- tain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
jJ^And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of hisinnerlife; theuniverseandtheegohavebecomeonein him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. ^ The greatest poly- historian, on the contrary, does nothmg but add branch to branch and yet creates no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist is lower than the great artist, the great philosopher. The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast ; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in him- self. Although these remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of genius, although the occur- ence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic conceptions, religious fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the conditions, not the actual process of a really great achievement has
lyo
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 171
been made clearer, yet this is nevertheless to be the final definition of genius :
A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with the whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really divine spark in mankind.
The great idea oi the soul of man as the microcosm, the most important discovery of the philosophy of the Renaissance--although traces of the idea are to be found in Plato and Aristotle--appears to be quite disregarded by modernthinkerssincethedeathofLeibnitz. Ithashitherto been held as only holding good for genius, as the prerogative of those masters of men.
Buttheincongruityisonlyapparent. Allmankindhave some of the quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to which one man draws close whilst another is further away, which is attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end of life.
The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he who has begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they then can see with their own eyes proves that they were only standing before the door.
Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to everything : his idea of the " whole " is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of following this identification in another, and so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants oranimals. Theyarelimited,theydonotknowthewhole, but only one element ; they do not populate the whole earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the "starry vault" and "the moral law. " For the latter
SEX AND CHARACTER
originates in the soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything because it is universal itself : the starry heavens and the moral law are fundamen- tallyoneandthesame. Theuniversalismofthecategorical imperative is the universalism of the universe.
The infinity of the universe is only the "thought-picture" of the infinity of the moral volition.
This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles, that mighty magician.
Fa/p /Jiv yap yatav OTrwTrajntv, vSari S'uow/o, AlBepi S'aWepa Slov, drap irvpX irvp a? ihrtXov, ^Topyy ^? (TTopyriv, vaixog Se rt i/ti^d Aoy/otj>>.
And Plotinus ;
V Xo. p av TTiiiiroTt nosv otpSaXfibg rjXiov riXiotiSng firj Ytyij/rjjuevo^,
which Goethe imitated in the famous verse
" War' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne ko? nnt' es nie erblicken
Lag' nicht in uns des Gottes eig'ne Kraft,
" Wie ko? nnt uns Go? ttliches entzu? cken ?
Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, that has in himself a relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius.
He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.
The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. Themanofgeniuslivesinastateofcompleteunder- standing, an understanding of the whole ; the whole world
172
:
? ;
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS
is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can become creative. The one Hves in conscious active relation with the whole, the other in an unconscious relation ; the man of genius is the actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. ^J'he genius is the complete man ; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other parts ; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws, but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is unconditionedN The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose conscious- ness of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that it is within him and ail that is outside him. We is the freest and the wisest and the most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him. S
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to other men ? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusa- tions of base ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults ?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philospher may be, the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in contact in cvery-day life ;
173
? SEX AND CHARACTER
174
these cannot follow his higher flights and so try to bind the
eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way many great men have been branded as immoral.
Goethe, fortunately for himself, preserved a silence about himself so complete that modern people who think that they understand him completely as the light-Hving Olympian, only know a few specks of him taken from his marvellous delineation of Faust ; we may be certain, none the less, that he judged himself severely, and suffered in full measure for the guilt he found in himself. And when an envious No? rgler, who never grasped Schopenhauer's doctrine of detachment and the meaning of his Nirwana, throws the reproach at the latter that he got the last value out of his property, such a mean yelping requires no answer.
/The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on sure ground ; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so obscuring the judgment of his own ego ; he will not passively accept the interpretation of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the thoughtwillalwaysbepainfultohim. Aconsciousliethathe has told will harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the memory in Dionysian fashiory ^ut men of genius will suffer most when they become aware afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to spread a lie in their talk or conduct with others. Other men, who do not possess this organic thirst for truth, are always deeply involved in lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great men against the " lies of life. ")
The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride is towards himself ; there is the desire in him to impress his own self by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a higher tribunal. Soft and
? THE **! " PROBLEM AND GENIUS
ascetic natures (Pascal is an example) sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others, but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.
Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself prejudices the sense of duty towards one's neigh- bours ? Do not the two stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself must break it with others ? By no means. As there is only one truth, so there can be only one desire for truth--what Carlyle called smcerity--that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to the world (it is never one of two, a view of
;
the world differing from a view of oneself, a self-study with- out a world-study ; there is only one duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if he is moral towards himself he is moral towards other^
There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as the conception of moral duty towards one's neighbours and how it is to be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines the morality of a man by his "goodness," the degree to which his com- passionatedispositionisdeveloped. Fromthephilosophi- cal point of view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support from Schopen- hauer's sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer's *' Essay on the Foundations of Morality" shows in its motto "It is easy to preach morality, difficult to find a basis for it," the fundamental error of the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently
to listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish
175
? SEX AND CHARACTER
what he ought to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is to be a doctrine of the require- ments which man has invented for himself and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.
All attempts to explain ethics by psychology overlook the fact that every psychic event in man is appraised by man himself, and the appraiser of the psychic event cannot be a psychic event. This standard can only be an idea, or a value which is never fully realised, and which cannot be altered by any experience because it remains constant, even if all experience is in opposition to it. Moral conduct can be only conduct controlled by an idea. And so we can choose only from systems of morality which set up some idea or maxim for the regulation of conduct, and there are only two to choose from, the ethical socialism or social ethics, founded by Bentham and Mill, but imported to the Continent and diligently propagated in Germany and Norway, and ethical individualism such as is taught by Christianity and German idealism.
The second failure of all the systems of ethics founded on sympathy is that they attempt to find a foundation for morality, to explain morality, whilst the very conception of morality is that it should be the ultimate standard of human conduct, and so must be inexplicable and non- derivative, must be its own purpose, and cannot be brought into relation of cause and effect with anything outside itself. This attempted derivation of morality is simply another aspect of the purely descriptive, and therefore necessarily, relative, ethics, and is untenable from the fact that however diligently the search be made, it is impossible to find in the sphere of causes and effects a high aim that would be applicable to every moral action. The inspiring motive of an action cannot come from any nexus of cause and effect ; it is much more in the nature of things for cause and effect to be linked with an inspiring
176
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS
moral aim. Outside the domain of first causes there lies a domain of moral aims, and this latter domain is the inheri- tance of mankind. The complete science of existence is a linking together of first causes until the first cause of all is reached, and a complete science of " oughts " leads to a union of all in one great aim, the culminating moral imperative.
He who rates sympathy as a positive moral factor has treated as moral something that is a feeling, not an act. Sympathy may be an ethical phenomenon, the expres- sion of something ethical, but it is no more an ethical act than are the senses of shame and pride ; we must clearly distinguish between an ethical act and an ethical phenomenon. Nothing must be considered an ethical act that is not a confirmation of the ethical idea by action ; ethical phenomena are unpremeditated, involun- tary signs of a permanent tendency of the disposition towards the moral idea. It is in the struggle between motives that the idea presses in and seeks to make the decision ; the empirical mixture of ethical and unethical feelings, sympathy and malice, self-confidence and presump- tion, gives no help towards a conclusion. Sympathy is, perhaps, the surest sign of a disposition, but it is not the moral purpose inspiring an action. Morality must imply conscious knowledge of the moral purpose and of value as opposedtoworthlessness. Socrateswasrightinthis,and Kant is the only modern philosopher who has followed him. Sympathy is a non-logical sensation, and has no claim to respect.
The question now before us is to consider how far a man can act morally with regard to his fellow men.
It is certainly not by unsolicited help which obtrudes itself on the solitude of another and pierces the limits that he has set for himself ; not by compassion but rather by respect. This respect we owe only to man, as Kant showed ; for man is the only creature in the universe who is a purpose to himself.
But how can I show a man my contempt, and how
177
? 178 SEX AND CHARACTER
prove to him my respect ? The first by ignoring him, the second by being friendly with him.
HowcanI usehimasameansto anend,andhowcan I honour him by regarding him himself as an end ? In the first case, by looking upon him as a link in the chain of circumstances with which I have to deal ; in the second, by endeavouring to understand him. It is only by interesting oneself in a man, without exactly telling him so, by thinking of him, by grasping his work, by sympathising with his fate, and by seeking to understand him, that one can respect one's neighbour. Only he who, through his own afflictions, has become unselfish, who forgets small wranglings with his fellow man, who can repress his im- patience, and who endeavours to understand him, is really disinterested with regard to his neighbour ; and he behaves morally because he triumphs over the strongest enemy to his understanding of his neighbour--selfishness.
How does the famous man stand in this respect ? He who understands the most men, because he is mostuni- versal in disposition, and who lives in the closest relation to the universe at large, who most earnestly desires to understand its purpose, will be most likely to act well towards his neighbour.
As a matter of fact, no one thinks so much or so intently as he about other people (even although he has only seen them for a moment), and no one tries so hard to understand them if he does not feel that he already has them within him in all their significance. Inasmuch as he has a con- tinuous past, a complete ego of his own, he can create the past which he did not know for others. He follows the strongest bent of his inner being if he thinks about them, for he seeks only to come to the truth about them by understanding them. He sees that human beings are all members of an intelligible world, in which there is no narrow egoism or altruism. This is the only explanation of how it is that great men stand in vital, understanding relationship, not only with those round about them, but with all the personalities of history who have preceded them ;
? THE " I " PROBLEM AND GENIUS 179
this is the only reason why great artists have grasped his- torical personalities so much better and more intensively than scientific historians. There has been no great man who has not stood in a personal relationship to Napoleon, Plato, or Mahomet. It is in this way that he shows his respect and true reverence for those who have lived before him. When many of those who have been intimate with artists feel aggrieved when later on they recognise them- selves in their works ; when writers are reproached for treating everything as copy, it is easy enough to understand the feeling. But the artist or author who does not heed the littlenesses of mankind has committed no crime, he has simply employed his creative act of understanding with regard to them, by a single-minded representation and reproduction of the world around him, and there can be no higher relation between men than this. The following
words of Pascal, which have already been mentioned, are specially applicable here : "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes. " It follows from the foregoing that the greater a man is the greater efforts he will make to understand things that are most strange to him, whilst the ordinary man readily thinks that he understands a thing, although it may be something he does not at all understand, so that he fails to perceive the unfamiliar spirit which is appealing to him from some object of art or from a philosophy, and at most attains a super- ficial relation to the subject, but does not rise to the inspira- tion of its creator. The great man who attains to the highest rungs of consciousness does not easily identify himself and his opinion with anything he reads, whilst those with a lesser clarity of mind adopt, and imagine that they absorb, things that in reality are very different. The man of genius ishewhoseegohasacquiredconsciousness. Heisenabled by it to distinguish the fact that others are different, to perceive the " ego " of other men, even when it is not pro- nounced enough for them to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who feels that every other man is also an
? i8o ' SEX AND CHARACTER
ego, a monad, an individual centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and a distinct past, he alone is in a position to avoid making use of his neigh- bours as means to an end, he, according to the ethics of Kant, will trace, anticipate, and therefore respect the per- sonality in his companion (as part of the intelligible universe), and will not merely be scandalised by him. The psychological condition of all practical altruism, therefore, is theoretical individualism.
Here lies the bridge between moral conduct towards oneself and moral conduct towards one's neighbour, the apparent want of which in the Kantian philosophy Schopen- hauer unjustly regarded as a fault, and asserted to arise necessarily out of Kant's first principles.
^
It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men ; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of hisbeingbehavestoasecondmanasif thelatterwerenot amanandhadnopersonalityofhisown. "I"and"thou" arecomplementaryterms. Amansoonestgainsconscious- ness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self- confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in
practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism ;
if there is no " thou," there is certainly no " I," and that would mean there is nothing.
There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it : he who feels his own per- sonality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest indivi-
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS i8i
dualismisthehighestuniversaHsm. ErnestMackisingreat error when he denies the subject, and thinks it is only after the renunciation of the individual " I " that an ethical rela- tion, which excludes neglect of the strange " I " and over- estimation of the individual " I," may be expected. It has already been seen where the want of one's own I leads in relation to one's neighbour. The I is the fundamental ground of all social morality. I should never be able to place myself, as an actual psychological being, in an ethical relation to a mere bundle of elements. It is possible to imagine such a relationship ; but it is entirely opposed to practical conduct ; because it eliminates the psychological condition necessary for making the moral idea an actual reality.
We are preparing for a real ethical relation to our fellow men when we make them conscious that each of them possesses a higher self, a soul, and that they must realise the souls in others.
This relation is, however, manifested in the most curious manner in the man of genius. No one suffers so much as he with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only " by suffering " that a man knows. If compassion is not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius under- stands men. And the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all ; but he suffers most through his understanding.
Although I tried to show in an earlier chapter that genius is the factor which primarily elevates man above the animals, and in connection with that fact that it is man alone who has a history (this being explained by the pre- sence in all men of some degree of the quality of genius). I must return to that earlier side of my argument. Genius involves the living actuality of the intelligible subject. History manifests itself only as a social thing, as the " ob- jective spirit," the individuals as such playing no part in it,
? 1 82 SEX AND CHARACTER
being, in fact, non-historical. Here we see the threads of our argument converging. If it be the case, and I do not think that I am wrong, that the timeless, human personality is the necessary condition of every real ethical relation to our fellow men, and if individuality is the necessary pre- liminary to the collective spirit, then it is clear why the "metaphysical animal" and the "political animal," the possessor of genius and the maker of history, are one and the same, are humanity. And the old controversy is settled ; which comes first, the individual or the community ?
Both must be equal and simultaneous.
I think that I have proved at every point that genius is
simply the higher morality. The great man is not only the truest to himself, the most unforgetful, the one to whom errors and lies are most hateful and intolerable ; he is also the most social, at the same time the most self-contained, and the most open man. The genius is altogether a higher form, not merely intellectually, but also morally. In his own person, the genius reveals the idea of man- kind. He represents what man is ; he is the subject whose object is the whole universe which he makes endure
,for all time.
Let there be no mistake. Consciousness and conscious-
ness alone is in itself moral all unconsciousness is immoral, ;
and all immorality is unconscious. The ** immoral genius," the "great wicked man," is, therefore, a mythical animal, invented by great men in certain moments of their lives as a possibility, in order (very much against the will of the Creator) to serve as a bogey for nervous and timid natures, with which they frighten themselves and other children. No criminal who prided himself in his deed would speak like Hagen in the " Go? tterda? mmerung " over Siegfried's dead body : " Ha, ha, I have slain him ; I, Hagen, gave him his death blow. "
Napoleon and Bacon, who are given as counter-instances, were intellectually much over-rated or wrongly represented. And Nietzsche is the least reliable in these matters, when he begins to discuss the Borgia type. The conception of the
?
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 183
diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of Ahriman, of the "radical evil in human nature," is exceedingly powerful, yet it con- cerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it. It is a fiction, created in the hours in which great men have struggled against the evil in themselves.
Universal comprehension, full consciousness, and perfect
timelessness are an ideal condition, ideal even for gifted
men genius is an innate imperative, which never becomes ;
a fully accomplished fact in human beings. Hence it is that a man of genius will be the last man to feel himself in the position to say of himself: " I am a genius. " Genius is, in its essence, nothing but the full completion of the idea of a man, and, therefore, every man ought to have some quality of it, and it should be regarded as a possible principle for every one.
Genius is the highest morality, and, therefore, it is every one's duty. Genius is to be attained by a supreme act of the will, in which the whole universe is affirmed in the individual. Genms is something which "men of genius" take upon themselves ; it is the greatest exertion and the greatest pride, the greatest misery and the greatest ecstasy to a man. <^ man may become a genius if he wishes to)
But at once it will certainly be said : " Very many men would like very much to be * original geniuses,' " and their wish has no effect. But if these men who " would like very much " had a livelier sense of what is signified by their wish, if they were aware that genius is identical with uni- versal responsibility--and until that is grasped it will only be a wish and not a determination--it is highly probable that a very large number of these men would cease to wish to become geniuses.
The reason why madness overtakes so many men of genius--fools believe it comes from the influence of Venus, or the spinal degeneration of neurasthenics--is that for many the burden becomes too heavy, the task of bearing the whole world on the shoulders, like Atlas, intolerable for the smaller, but never for the really mighty minds.
But the higher a man mounts, the greater may be his
? SEX AND CHARACTER
184
fall ; ^11 genius is a conquering of chaos, mystery, and darkness") and if it degenerates and goes to pieces, the ruin isgreaterinproportiontothesuccess. Thegeniuswhich runs to madness is no longer genius ; it has chosen happi- ness instead of morality. All madness is the outcome of the insupportability of suffering attached to all conscious- ness. Sophocles derived his idea that a man might wish to become mad for this reason, and lets Aias, whose mind finally gives way, give utterance to these words :
ev Tto <ppovaiv \ap firidlv nBiorog sslog.
I shall conclude this chapter with the solemn words, similar to the best moments of Kant's style, of Johann Pico von Mirandola, to whom I may bring some measure of recognition. In his address ** on the dignity of man " the Supreme Being addresses the following words to man :
" Nee certam sedem, nee propriam faciem, nee munus ullum peculiare tibi dedimus, O Adam : ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera tute optaveris, ea pro vote, pro tua sententia, habeas et possideas. Definita caeteris natura intra praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur ; tu nuUis an- gustiis coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illam praefinies. Medium te mundi posui, ut circum- spiceres inde commodius quicquid est in mundo. Nee te caelestem, neque terrenum, neque mortalem, neque im- mortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorari- usque plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora quae sunt divina, ex tui animi sententia regenerari.
O summam Dei Patris liberalitatem, summam et admir- andam hominis felicitatem : cui datum id habere quod optai, id esse quod v^lit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afierunt e bulga matris, quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt tuturi in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omniferaria semina et otnnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater ; quae quisque excoluerit, ilia adolescent et fructus suos
f
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 185
ferent in illo: si vegetalia,planta fiet, si sensualia, obbrutescet, si rationalia, caeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia, angelus erit et Dei filius. Et si nulla creaturarum, sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo Spiritus factus in soUtaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestahit.
? CHAPTER IX
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
It is now time to return to the actual subject of this inves- tigation in order to see how far its explanation has been helped by the lengthy digressions, which must often have seemed wide of the mark.
The consequences of the fundamental principles that have been developed are of such radical importance to the psycho- logy of the sexes that, even if the former deductions have been assented to, the present conclusions may find no acceptance. This is not the place to analyse such a possibility ; but in order to protect the theory I am now going to set up, from all objections, I shall fully substantiate it in the fullest possible manner by convincing arguments.
Shortly speaking the matter stands as follows : I have shown that logical and ethical phenomena come together in the conception of truth as the ultimate good, and posit the existence of an intelligible ego or a soul, as a form of being of the highest super-empirical reality. In such a being as the absolute female there are no logical and ethical pheno- mena, and, therefore, the ground for the assumption of a soul is absent. The absolute female knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and the words law and duty, duty towards herself, are words which are least familiar to her. The inference that she is wanting in super- sensual personality is fully justified. -The absolute female has no egoy
In a certain sense this is an end of the investigation, a final conclusion to which all analysis of the female leads. And although this conclusion, put thus concisely, seems
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 187
harsh and intolerant, paradoxical and too abrupt in its novelty, it must be remembered that the author is not the first who has taken such a view ; he is more in the position of one who has discovered the philosophical grounds for an opinion of long standing.
^he Chinese from time immemorial have denied that women possess a personal soul. If a Chinaman is asked how many children he has, he counts only the boys, and will say none if he has only daughters. Mahomet excluded
women from Paradise for the same reason, and on this view depends the degraded position of women in Oriental countries. N
Amongst the philosophers, the opinions of Aristotle must first be considered. He held that in procreation the male principle was the formative active agent, the "logos," whilst the female was the passive material. When we remember that Aristotle uses the word " soul " for the active, forma- tive, causative principle, it is plain that his idea was akin to mine, although, as he actually expressed it, it related only to the reproductive process ; it is clear, moreover, that he, like all the Greek philosophers except Euripides, paid no heed to women, and did not consider her qualities from any other point of view than that of her share in repro- duction.
Amongst the fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origen certainly had a very low opinion of woman, and St. Augus- tine, except for his relations with his mother, seems to have sharedtheirview. AttheRenaissancetheAristoteliancon- ceptions gained many new adherents, amongst whom Jean Wier (1518-1588) may be cited specially. At that period there was a general, more sensible and intuitive under- standing on the subject, which is now treated as merely curious, contemporary science having bowed the knee to other than Aristotelian gods.
In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the characters of Anitra, Rita, and Irene) and August Strindberg have given utter- ance to this view. But the popularity of the idea of the souUessness of woman has been most attained by the
? 1 88 SEX AND CHARACTER
wonderful fairy tales of Fouque, who obtained the material for them from Paracelsus, after deep study, and which have been set to music by E. T. A. Hoffman, Girschner, and Albert Lorzing.
Undine, the soulless Undine, is the platonic idea of woman. In spite of all bi-sexuality she most really resembles the actuality. The well-known phrase, " Women have no character," really means the same thing. Personality and individuality (intelligible), ego and soul, will and (intel- ligible) character, all these are different expressions of the same actuality, an actuality the male of mankind attains, the female lacks.
But since the soul of man is the microcosm, and great men are those who live entirely in and through their souls, the whole universe thus having its being in them, the female must be described as absolutely without the quality of genius. The male has everything within him, and, as Pico of Mirandola put it, only specialises in this or that part of himself. It is possible for him to attain to the loftiest heights, or to sink to the lowest depths ; he can become like animals, or plants, or even like women, and so there exist woman-like female men.
The woman, on the other hand, can never become a man. In this consists the most important limitation to the asser- tions in the first part of this work. Whilst I know of many men who are practically completely psychically female, not merely half so, and have seen a considerable number of women with masculine traits, I have never yet seen a single woman who was not fundamentally female, even when this femaleness has been concealed by various accessories from the person herself, not to speak of others. One must be {cf. chap. i. part I. ) either man or woman, however many peculiarities of both sexes one may have, and this " being," the problem of this work from the start, is determined by one's relation to ethics and logic ; but whilst there are people who are anatomically men and psychically women, there is no such thing as a person who is physically female and psychically male, notwithstanding the extreme maleness
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 189
of their outward appearance and the unwomanliness of their expression.
We may now give, with certainty, a conclusive answer to the question as to the giftedness of the sexes : there are women with undoubted traits of genius, but there is no female genius, and there never has been one (not even amongst those masculine women of history which were dealt with in the first part), and there never can be one. Those who are in favour of laxity in these matters, and are anxious to extend and enlarge the idea of genius in order to make it possible to include women, would simply by such action destroy the conception of genius. If it is in any way pos- sible to frame a definition of genius that would thoroughly cover the ground, I believe that my definition succeeds. And how, then, could a soulless being possess genius ? The possession of genius is identical with profundity ; and if any one were to try to combine woman and profundity as subject and predicate, he would be contradicted on all
sides. A female genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply mtensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious maleness.
The man of genius possesses, like everything else, the complete female in himself ; but woman herself is only a
part of the Universe, and the part can never be the whole ;
femaleness can never include genius. This lack of genius on the part of woman is inevitable because woman is not a monad, and cannot reflect the Universe. *
The proof of the soullessness of woman is closely con- nected with much of what was contained in the earlier chapters. The third chapter explained that woman has her experiences in the form of henids, whilst those of men are in an organised form, so that the consciousness of the femaleisloweringradethanthatofthemale. Conscious-
* It would be a simple matter to introduce at this point a list of the works of the most famous women, and show by a few examples how little they deserve the title of genius. But it would be a weari- some task, and any one who would make use of such a list can easily procure it for himself, so that I shall not do so.
? 190 SEX AND CHARACTER
ness, however, is psychologically a fundamental part of the theoryofknowledge. Fromthepointofviewofthetheory of knowledge, consciousness and the possession of a con- tinuous ego, of a transcendental subjective soul, are identical conceptions. Everyegoexistsonlysofarasitisself-con- scious, conscious of the contents of its own thoughts all
;
real existence is conscious existence. I can now make an importantadditiontothetheoryofhenids. Theorganised contents of the thoughts of the male are not merely those of the female articulated and formed, they are not what was potential in the female becoming actual ; from the very first there is a qualitative difference. The psychical contents of the male, even whilst they are still in the henid stage that they always try to emerge from, are already partly concep- tual, and it is probable that even perceptions in the male have a direct tendency towards conceptions. In the female, on the other hand, there is no trace of conception either in
recognition or in thinking.
^he logical axioms are the foundation of all formation of
mental conceptions, and women are devoid of these ; the principle of identity is not for them an inevitable standard, nor do they fence off all other possibilities from their con- ceptionbyusingtheprincipleofcontradictories. Thiswant of definiteness in the ideas of women is the source of that "sensitiveness" which gives the widest scope to vague asso- ciations and allows the most radically different things to be grouped together. ^ And even women with the best and least limited memories never free themselves from this kind of association by feelings. For insitance, if they " feel reminded " by a word of some definite colour, or by a human being of some definite thing to eat--forms of association common with women--they rest content with the subjective association, and do not try to find out the source of the comparison, and if there is any relation in it to actual fact. The complacency and selt-satisfaction of women cor-
responds with what has been called their intellectual unscrupulousness, and will be referred to again in connec- tionwiththeirwantofthepowertoformconcepts. This
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 191
subjection to waves of feeling, this want of respect for conceptions, tliis self-appreciation without any attempt to avoid shi. llo'vness, characterise as essentially female the changeable styles of many modern painters and novelists. Male thought is fundamentally different from female thought in its craving for definite form, and all art that consists of moods is essentially a formless art.
The psychical contents of man's thoughts, therefore, are more than the explicit realisation of what women think in henids. Woman'sthoughtisaslidingandglidingthrough subjects, a superficial tasting of things that a man, who studies the depths, would scarcely notice; it is an extravagant and dainty method of skimming which has no grasp of accuracy. (A woman's thought is superficial, and touch is the mosr highly developed of the female senses, the most notable characteristic of the woman which she can bring to a high state by her unaided efforts. ^ Touch necessi- tates a limiting of the interest to superficialities, it is a vague effect of the whole and does not depend on definite details.
^Vhen a woman " understands " a man (of the possibility or impossibility of any real understanding I shall speak later), she is simply, so to speak tasting (however wanting in taste the comparison may be) what he has thought about he^ Since, on her own part, there is no sharp differentia- tion, it is plain that she will often think that she herself has been understood when there is no more present than a vaguesimilarityofperceptions. Theincongruitybetween the man and woman depends, in a special measure, on the fact that the contents of the thoughts of the man are not merely those of the woman in a higher state of differentia- tion, but that the two have totally distinct sequences of thought applied to the same object, conceptual thought in the one and indistinct sensing in the other ; and when what is called " understanding " in the two cases is com- pared, the comparison is not between a fully organised integrated thought and a lower stage of the same process; but in the understanding of man and woman there is on
;
? 192 SEX AND CHARACTER
the one side a conceptual thought, on the other side an unconceptual " feeling," a henid.
The unconceptual nature of the thinking of a woman is simply the result of her less perfect consciousness, of her want of an ego. It is the conception that unites the mere complex of perceptions into an object, and this it does independentlyofthepresenceofanactualperception. The existence of the complex of perceptions is dependent on the will ; the will can shut the eyes and stop the ears so that the person no longer sees nor hears, but may get drunk or go to sleepandforget. Itistheconceptionwhichbringsfreedom from the eternally subjective, eternally psychological rela- tivity of the actual perceptions, and which creates the thingsinthemselves. Byitspowerofformingconceptions the intellect can spontaneously separate itself from the object ; conversely, it is only when there is a comprehending function that subject and object can be separated and so distinguished ; in all other cases there is only a mass of like and unlike images present mingling together v/ithout law andorder. Theconceptioncreatesdefiniterealitiesfromthe floating images, the object from the perception, the object which stands like an enemy opposite the subject that the subject may measure its strength upon it. The conception is thus the creator of reality; it is the "transcendental object " of Kant's " Critique of Reason," but it always involves a transcendental "subject. "
It is impossible to say of a mere complex of perceptions that it is like itself ; in the moment that I have made the judgment of identity, the complex of perceptions has become a concept. And so the conception gives their value to all processes of verification and all syllogisms the conception makes the contents of thought free by bind- ingthem. Itgivesfreedombothtothesubjectandobject for the two freedoms involve each other. All freedom is in reality self-binding, both in logic and in ethics. Man is freeonlywhenhehimselfisthelaw. Andsothefunction of making concepts is the power by which man gives him- self dignity ; he honours himself by giving freedom to the
? MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
objectiveworld,bymakingit partoftheobjectivebodyof knowledge to which recourse may be had when two men differ. The woman cannot in this way set herself over against realities, she and they swing together capriciously
; she cannot give freedom to her objects as she herself is not
free.
The mode in which perceptions acquire independence in
conceptions is the means of getting free from subjectivity. The conception is that about which I think, write, and speak. And in this way there comes the belief that I can make judgments concerning it. Hume, Huxley, and other "immanent" psychologists, tried to identify the concep- tion with a mere generalisation, so making no distinction between logical and psychological thought. In doing this they ignored the power of making judgments. In every judgment there is an act of verification or of contradiction, an approval or rejection, and the standard for these judg- ments, the idea of truth, must be something external to that on what it is acting. If there are nothing but perceptions^ then all perceptions must have an equal validity, and there can be no standard by which to form a real world. Empiricism in this fashion really destroys the reality of experience, and what is called positivism is no more than nihilism. The idea of a standard of truth, the idea of truth, cannot lie in experience. In every judgment this idea of the existence of truth is implicit. The claim to real knowledge depends on this capacity to judge, involves the conception of the possibility of truth in the judgment.
This claim to be able to reach knowledge is no more than to say that the subject can judge of^the object, can say that the object is true. The objects on which we make judgmentsareconceptions; theconceptioniswhatweknow. The conception places a subject and an object against one another, and the judgment then creates a relation between the two. The attainment of truth simply means that the subject can judge rightly of the object, and so the function of making judgments is what places the ego in relation to
193
SEX AND CHARACTER
the all, is what makes a real unity of the ego and the all possible. And thus we reach an answer to the old problem astowhetherconceptionorjudgmenthasprecedence the
;
answer is that the two are necessary to one another. The faculty of making conceptions cleaves subject and object and unites them again.
A being like the female, without the power of making con- cepts,is unable to make judgments. In her "mind" subjective and objective are not separated; there is no possibility of making judgments, and no possibility of reaching, or of desiring, truth. No woman is really interested in science
;
she may deceive herself and many good men, but bad psychologists, by thinking so. It may be taken as certain, that whenever a woman has done something of any little importance in the scientific world (Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, &c. ) it is always because of some man in the background whom they desire to please in this way ; and it is more often justifiable to say "cherchez I'homme" where women are concerned than " cherchez la femme " in the case of men.
But there have never been any great discoveries in the world of science made by women, because the facility for truth only proceeds from a desire for truth, and the former is always in proportion to the latter. Woman's sense of reality is much less than man's, in spite of much repetition ofthecontraryopinion, i^ithwomenthepursuitofknow- ledge is always subordinated to something else, and if this alien impulse is sufficiently strong they can see sharply and unerringly, but woman will never be able to see the value of truth in itself and in relation to her own self. Where there is some check to what she wishes (perhaps uncon- sciously) a woman becomes quite uncritical and loses all
touch with realityj^ This is why women so often believe themselves to have been the victims of sexual overtures this is the reason of extreme frequency of hallucinations of the sense of touch in women, of the intensive reality of which it is almost impossible for a man to form an idea. This also is why the imagination of women is composed of
194
;
? ? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 195
lies and errors, whilst the imagination of the philosopher is the highest form of truth.
The idea of truth is the foundation of everything that deserves the name of judgment. Knowledge is simply the making of judgments, and thought itself is simply another nameforjudgment. Deductionisthenecessaryprocessin making judgments, and involves the propositions of identity and of contradictories, and, as I have shown, these propo- sitions are not axiomatic for women.
/A psychological proof that the power of making judg- ments is a masculine trait lies in the fact that the woman recognises it as such, and that it acts on her as a tertiary sexual character of the male. A woman always expects definite convictions in a man, and appropriates them ; she has no understanding of indecision in a man. She always expects a man to talk, and a man's speech is to her a sign of hismanliness. Itistruethatwomanhasthegiftofspeech, but she has not the art of talking ; she converses (flirts) or chatters, but she does not talk. She is most dangerous, however, when she is dumb, for men are only too inclined to take her quiescence for silencd>
The absolute female, then, is devoid not only of the logical rules, but of the functions of making concepts and judgments which depend on them. As the very nature of the conceptual faculty consists in posing subject against object, and as the subject takes its deepest and fullest mean- ing from its power of forming judgments on its objects, it is clear that women cannot be recognised as possessing even the subject.
I mustaddtotheexpositionofthenon-logicalnatureot the female some statements as to her non-moral nature. The profound falseness of woman, the result of the want in her of a permanent relation to the idea of truth or to the idea of value, would prove a subject of discussion so exhaustive that I must go to work another way. There are such endless imitations of ethics, such confusing copies of morality, that women are often said to be on a moral plane higher than that of man. I have already pointed out the need to
? SEX AND CHARACTER
distinguish between the non-moral and the immoral, and 1 now repeat that with regard to women we can talk only of the non-moral, of the complete absence of a moral sense. It is a well-known fact of criminal statistics and of daily life that there are very few female criminals. The apologists of the morality of women always point to this fact.
But in deciding the question as to the morality of women we have to consider not if a particular person has objectively sinned against the idea, but if the person has or has not a subjective centre of being that can enter into a relation with the idea, a relation the value of which is lowered when a sin is committed. No doubt the male criminal inherits his criminal instincts, but none the less he is conscious--in spite of theories of " moral insanity "--that by his action he has lowered the value of his claim on life. All criminals are cowardly in this matter, and there is none of them that thinks he has raised his value and his self-consciousness by his crime, or that would try to justify it to himself.
The male criminal has from birth a relation to the idea of value just like any other man, but the criminal impulse, when it succeeds in dominating him, destroys this almost completely. Woman, on the contrary, often believes her- self to have acted justly when, as a matter of fact, she has just done the greatest possible act of meanness ; whilst the true criminal remains mute before reproach, a woman can at once give indignant expression to her astonishment and anger that any one should question her perfect right to act in this or that way. l^omen are convinced of their own integrity without ever having sat in judgment on it,' The criminal does not, it is true, reflect on himself, but he never urges his own integrity ; he is much more inclined to get rid of the thought of his integrity,* because it might remind him of his guilt : and in this is the proof that he had a
* A male criminal even feels guilty when he has not actually done wrong. He can always accept the reproaches of others as to deception, thieving, and so on, even if he has never committed such acts, because he knows he is capable of them. So also he always feels himself " caught " when any other offender is arrested.
196
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 197
relation to the idea (of truth), and only objects to be re- minded of his unfaithfulness to his better self. No male criminal has ever believed that his punishment was unjust. A woman, on the contrary, is convinced of the animosity of heraccuser,andif shedoesnotwishtobeconvincedofit, no one can persuade her that she has done wrong.
If any one talks to her it usually happens that she bursts into tears, Jbegs for pardon, and " confesses her fault," and may really believe that she feels her guilt; but only when she desires to do so, and the outbreak of tears has given her a certain sort of satisfaction. The male criminal is callous
;
he does not spin round in a trice, as a woman would do in a similar instance if her accuser knew how to handle her skilfully.
The personal torture which arises from guilt, which cries aloud in its anguish at having brought such a stain upon herself, no woman knows, and an apparent exception (the penitent, who becomes a self-mortifying devotee,) will cer- tainly prove that a woman only feels a vicarious guilt.
I am not arguing that woman is evil and anti-moral ; I state that she cannot be really evil ; she is merely non-moral. Womanly compassion and female modesty are the two other phenomena which are generally urged by the defenders of female virtue. It is especially from womanly kindness, womanly sympathy, that the beautiful descriptions of the soul of woman have gained most support, and the final argument of all belief in the superior morality of woman is the conception of her as the hospital nurse, the tender sister. I am sorry to have to mention this point, and should not have done so, but I have been forced to do so by a
verbal objection made to me, which can be easily foreseen. It is very shortsighted of any one to consider the nurse as a proof of the sympathy of women, because it really implies the opposite. For a man could never stand the sight of the sufferings of the sick ; he would suffer so intensely that he would be completely upset and incapable oflengthyattendanceonthem. Anyonewhohaswatched nursing sisters is astounded at their equanimity and " sweet-
SEX AND CHARACTER
ness " even in the presence of most terrible death throes and it is well that it is so, for man, who cannot stand suffer- inganddeath,wouldmakeaverybadnurse. Amanwould want to assuage the pain and ward off death ; in a word, he would want to help; where there is nothing to be done he is better away; it is only then that nursing is justified and that woman offers herself for it. But it would be quite wrong to regard this capacity of women in an ethical aspect.
olere it may be said that for woman the problem of soli- tude and society does not exist. She is well adapted for social relations (as, for instance, those of a companion or sick-nurse), simply because for her there is no transition from solitude to society. In the case of a man, the choice between solitude and society is serious when it has to be made^ The woman gives up no solitude when she nurses the sick, as she would have to do were she to deserve moral credit for her action ; ^ woman is never in a condition of solitude, and knows neither the love of it nor the fear of it. The woman is always living in a condition of fusion with all the human beings she knows, even when she is alone ; she
is not a " monad," for all monads are sharply marked off from other existences^ Women have no definite individual limits ; they are not unlimited in the sense that geniuses have no limits, being one with the whole world ; they are unlimited only in the sense that they are not marked off from the common stock of mankind.
This sense of continuity with the rest of mankind is a sexual character of the female, and displays itself in the desire to touch, to be in contact with, the object of her pity ; the mode in which her tenderness expresses itself is a kind of animal sense of contact. It shows the absence of the sharp line that separates one real personalty from another. Thewomandoesnotrespectthesorrowofher neighbour by silence ; she tries to raise him from his grief by speech, feeling that she must be in physical, rather than spiritual, contact with hini>
This diffused life, one of the most fundamental qualities of the female nature, is the cause of the impressibility of all
198
;
? --
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 199
women, their unreserved and shameless readiness to shed tears on the most ordinary occasion. It is not without reason that we associate wailing with women, and think little of a man who sheds tears in public. A woman weeps v/ith those that weep and laughs with those that laugh unless she herself is the cause of the laughter--so that the greater part of female sympathy is ready-made.
;
? THE " I " PROBLEM AND GENIUS 169
perfect memory would be independent of time. To com- prehend anything one must have within one something similar. <^A man notices, understands, and comprehends onlythosethingswithwhichhehassomekinship. The genius is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious,mostcontinuous,andmostindividualego. The ego is the central point, the unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness. )
(^he ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension, the centre of infinite space ; the great man contains the whole universe within himself genius is the
;
living microcosm/ He is not an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination of an infinite number of elements ; the argu- ment m chap. iv. as to his relation to other men and things must not be taken in that sense ; he is everything. In him and through him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from parts in the fashion of science. Forthegeniustheegoistheall,livesastheall; thegenius sees nature and all existences as whole ; the relations of things flash on him intuitively ; he has not to build bridges ofstonesbetweenthem. Andsothegeniuscannotbean empirical psychologist slowly collecting details and linking them by associations ; he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a compound of atoms and molecules.
L It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the \ genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. And so the man of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his \ genius. Thatiswhyhisviewsaremorevaluablethanthose of all others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe, whilst others never reach a full con- sciousness of this inner self, and so, for him, all things have significance, all thmgs are symbolical. ) For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases through the walls of the capillaries ; the blue of the sky is
? SEX AND CHARACTER
more than the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light ; snakes are not merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single man to have achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been made, if every- thing that has been done by the following : Archimedes and Lagrange, Johannes Mu? ller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace, Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucy- dides and Niebuhr, Friedrich August Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science, could have been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would still not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are ; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and moun- tain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
jJ^And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of hisinnerlife; theuniverseandtheegohavebecomeonein him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. ^ The greatest poly- historian, on the contrary, does nothmg but add branch to branch and yet creates no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist is lower than the great artist, the great philosopher. The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast ; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in him- self. Although these remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of genius, although the occur- ence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic conceptions, religious fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the conditions, not the actual process of a really great achievement has
lyo
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 171
been made clearer, yet this is nevertheless to be the final definition of genius :
A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with the whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really divine spark in mankind.
The great idea oi the soul of man as the microcosm, the most important discovery of the philosophy of the Renaissance--although traces of the idea are to be found in Plato and Aristotle--appears to be quite disregarded by modernthinkerssincethedeathofLeibnitz. Ithashitherto been held as only holding good for genius, as the prerogative of those masters of men.
Buttheincongruityisonlyapparent. Allmankindhave some of the quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to which one man draws close whilst another is further away, which is attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end of life.
The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he who has begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they then can see with their own eyes proves that they were only standing before the door.
Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to everything : his idea of the " whole " is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of following this identification in another, and so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants oranimals. Theyarelimited,theydonotknowthewhole, but only one element ; they do not populate the whole earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the "starry vault" and "the moral law. " For the latter
SEX AND CHARACTER
originates in the soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything because it is universal itself : the starry heavens and the moral law are fundamen- tallyoneandthesame. Theuniversalismofthecategorical imperative is the universalism of the universe.
The infinity of the universe is only the "thought-picture" of the infinity of the moral volition.
This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles, that mighty magician.
Fa/p /Jiv yap yatav OTrwTrajntv, vSari S'uow/o, AlBepi S'aWepa Slov, drap irvpX irvp a? ihrtXov, ^Topyy ^? (TTopyriv, vaixog Se rt i/ti^d Aoy/otj>>.
And Plotinus ;
V Xo. p av TTiiiiroTt nosv otpSaXfibg rjXiov riXiotiSng firj Ytyij/rjjuevo^,
which Goethe imitated in the famous verse
" War' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne ko? nnt' es nie erblicken
Lag' nicht in uns des Gottes eig'ne Kraft,
" Wie ko? nnt uns Go? ttliches entzu? cken ?
Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, that has in himself a relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius.
He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.
The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. Themanofgeniuslivesinastateofcompleteunder- standing, an understanding of the whole ; the whole world
172
:
? ;
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS
is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can become creative. The one Hves in conscious active relation with the whole, the other in an unconscious relation ; the man of genius is the actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. ^J'he genius is the complete man ; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other parts ; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws, but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is unconditionedN The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose conscious- ness of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that it is within him and ail that is outside him. We is the freest and the wisest and the most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him. S
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to other men ? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusa- tions of base ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults ?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philospher may be, the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in contact in cvery-day life ;
173
? SEX AND CHARACTER
174
these cannot follow his higher flights and so try to bind the
eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way many great men have been branded as immoral.
Goethe, fortunately for himself, preserved a silence about himself so complete that modern people who think that they understand him completely as the light-Hving Olympian, only know a few specks of him taken from his marvellous delineation of Faust ; we may be certain, none the less, that he judged himself severely, and suffered in full measure for the guilt he found in himself. And when an envious No? rgler, who never grasped Schopenhauer's doctrine of detachment and the meaning of his Nirwana, throws the reproach at the latter that he got the last value out of his property, such a mean yelping requires no answer.
/The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on sure ground ; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so obscuring the judgment of his own ego ; he will not passively accept the interpretation of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the thoughtwillalwaysbepainfultohim. Aconsciousliethathe has told will harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the memory in Dionysian fashiory ^ut men of genius will suffer most when they become aware afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to spread a lie in their talk or conduct with others. Other men, who do not possess this organic thirst for truth, are always deeply involved in lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great men against the " lies of life. ")
The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride is towards himself ; there is the desire in him to impress his own self by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a higher tribunal. Soft and
? THE **! " PROBLEM AND GENIUS
ascetic natures (Pascal is an example) sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others, but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.
Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself prejudices the sense of duty towards one's neigh- bours ? Do not the two stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself must break it with others ? By no means. As there is only one truth, so there can be only one desire for truth--what Carlyle called smcerity--that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to the world (it is never one of two, a view of
;
the world differing from a view of oneself, a self-study with- out a world-study ; there is only one duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if he is moral towards himself he is moral towards other^
There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as the conception of moral duty towards one's neighbours and how it is to be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines the morality of a man by his "goodness," the degree to which his com- passionatedispositionisdeveloped. Fromthephilosophi- cal point of view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support from Schopen- hauer's sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer's *' Essay on the Foundations of Morality" shows in its motto "It is easy to preach morality, difficult to find a basis for it," the fundamental error of the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently
to listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish
175
? SEX AND CHARACTER
what he ought to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is to be a doctrine of the require- ments which man has invented for himself and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.
All attempts to explain ethics by psychology overlook the fact that every psychic event in man is appraised by man himself, and the appraiser of the psychic event cannot be a psychic event. This standard can only be an idea, or a value which is never fully realised, and which cannot be altered by any experience because it remains constant, even if all experience is in opposition to it. Moral conduct can be only conduct controlled by an idea. And so we can choose only from systems of morality which set up some idea or maxim for the regulation of conduct, and there are only two to choose from, the ethical socialism or social ethics, founded by Bentham and Mill, but imported to the Continent and diligently propagated in Germany and Norway, and ethical individualism such as is taught by Christianity and German idealism.
The second failure of all the systems of ethics founded on sympathy is that they attempt to find a foundation for morality, to explain morality, whilst the very conception of morality is that it should be the ultimate standard of human conduct, and so must be inexplicable and non- derivative, must be its own purpose, and cannot be brought into relation of cause and effect with anything outside itself. This attempted derivation of morality is simply another aspect of the purely descriptive, and therefore necessarily, relative, ethics, and is untenable from the fact that however diligently the search be made, it is impossible to find in the sphere of causes and effects a high aim that would be applicable to every moral action. The inspiring motive of an action cannot come from any nexus of cause and effect ; it is much more in the nature of things for cause and effect to be linked with an inspiring
176
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS
moral aim. Outside the domain of first causes there lies a domain of moral aims, and this latter domain is the inheri- tance of mankind. The complete science of existence is a linking together of first causes until the first cause of all is reached, and a complete science of " oughts " leads to a union of all in one great aim, the culminating moral imperative.
He who rates sympathy as a positive moral factor has treated as moral something that is a feeling, not an act. Sympathy may be an ethical phenomenon, the expres- sion of something ethical, but it is no more an ethical act than are the senses of shame and pride ; we must clearly distinguish between an ethical act and an ethical phenomenon. Nothing must be considered an ethical act that is not a confirmation of the ethical idea by action ; ethical phenomena are unpremeditated, involun- tary signs of a permanent tendency of the disposition towards the moral idea. It is in the struggle between motives that the idea presses in and seeks to make the decision ; the empirical mixture of ethical and unethical feelings, sympathy and malice, self-confidence and presump- tion, gives no help towards a conclusion. Sympathy is, perhaps, the surest sign of a disposition, but it is not the moral purpose inspiring an action. Morality must imply conscious knowledge of the moral purpose and of value as opposedtoworthlessness. Socrateswasrightinthis,and Kant is the only modern philosopher who has followed him. Sympathy is a non-logical sensation, and has no claim to respect.
The question now before us is to consider how far a man can act morally with regard to his fellow men.
It is certainly not by unsolicited help which obtrudes itself on the solitude of another and pierces the limits that he has set for himself ; not by compassion but rather by respect. This respect we owe only to man, as Kant showed ; for man is the only creature in the universe who is a purpose to himself.
But how can I show a man my contempt, and how
177
? 178 SEX AND CHARACTER
prove to him my respect ? The first by ignoring him, the second by being friendly with him.
HowcanI usehimasameansto anend,andhowcan I honour him by regarding him himself as an end ? In the first case, by looking upon him as a link in the chain of circumstances with which I have to deal ; in the second, by endeavouring to understand him. It is only by interesting oneself in a man, without exactly telling him so, by thinking of him, by grasping his work, by sympathising with his fate, and by seeking to understand him, that one can respect one's neighbour. Only he who, through his own afflictions, has become unselfish, who forgets small wranglings with his fellow man, who can repress his im- patience, and who endeavours to understand him, is really disinterested with regard to his neighbour ; and he behaves morally because he triumphs over the strongest enemy to his understanding of his neighbour--selfishness.
How does the famous man stand in this respect ? He who understands the most men, because he is mostuni- versal in disposition, and who lives in the closest relation to the universe at large, who most earnestly desires to understand its purpose, will be most likely to act well towards his neighbour.
As a matter of fact, no one thinks so much or so intently as he about other people (even although he has only seen them for a moment), and no one tries so hard to understand them if he does not feel that he already has them within him in all their significance. Inasmuch as he has a con- tinuous past, a complete ego of his own, he can create the past which he did not know for others. He follows the strongest bent of his inner being if he thinks about them, for he seeks only to come to the truth about them by understanding them. He sees that human beings are all members of an intelligible world, in which there is no narrow egoism or altruism. This is the only explanation of how it is that great men stand in vital, understanding relationship, not only with those round about them, but with all the personalities of history who have preceded them ;
? THE " I " PROBLEM AND GENIUS 179
this is the only reason why great artists have grasped his- torical personalities so much better and more intensively than scientific historians. There has been no great man who has not stood in a personal relationship to Napoleon, Plato, or Mahomet. It is in this way that he shows his respect and true reverence for those who have lived before him. When many of those who have been intimate with artists feel aggrieved when later on they recognise them- selves in their works ; when writers are reproached for treating everything as copy, it is easy enough to understand the feeling. But the artist or author who does not heed the littlenesses of mankind has committed no crime, he has simply employed his creative act of understanding with regard to them, by a single-minded representation and reproduction of the world around him, and there can be no higher relation between men than this. The following
words of Pascal, which have already been mentioned, are specially applicable here : "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes. " It follows from the foregoing that the greater a man is the greater efforts he will make to understand things that are most strange to him, whilst the ordinary man readily thinks that he understands a thing, although it may be something he does not at all understand, so that he fails to perceive the unfamiliar spirit which is appealing to him from some object of art or from a philosophy, and at most attains a super- ficial relation to the subject, but does not rise to the inspira- tion of its creator. The great man who attains to the highest rungs of consciousness does not easily identify himself and his opinion with anything he reads, whilst those with a lesser clarity of mind adopt, and imagine that they absorb, things that in reality are very different. The man of genius ishewhoseegohasacquiredconsciousness. Heisenabled by it to distinguish the fact that others are different, to perceive the " ego " of other men, even when it is not pro- nounced enough for them to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who feels that every other man is also an
? i8o ' SEX AND CHARACTER
ego, a monad, an individual centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and a distinct past, he alone is in a position to avoid making use of his neigh- bours as means to an end, he, according to the ethics of Kant, will trace, anticipate, and therefore respect the per- sonality in his companion (as part of the intelligible universe), and will not merely be scandalised by him. The psychological condition of all practical altruism, therefore, is theoretical individualism.
Here lies the bridge between moral conduct towards oneself and moral conduct towards one's neighbour, the apparent want of which in the Kantian philosophy Schopen- hauer unjustly regarded as a fault, and asserted to arise necessarily out of Kant's first principles.
^
It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men ; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of hisbeingbehavestoasecondmanasif thelatterwerenot amanandhadnopersonalityofhisown. "I"and"thou" arecomplementaryterms. Amansoonestgainsconscious- ness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self- confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in
practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism ;
if there is no " thou," there is certainly no " I," and that would mean there is nothing.
There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it : he who feels his own per- sonality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest indivi-
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS i8i
dualismisthehighestuniversaHsm. ErnestMackisingreat error when he denies the subject, and thinks it is only after the renunciation of the individual " I " that an ethical rela- tion, which excludes neglect of the strange " I " and over- estimation of the individual " I," may be expected. It has already been seen where the want of one's own I leads in relation to one's neighbour. The I is the fundamental ground of all social morality. I should never be able to place myself, as an actual psychological being, in an ethical relation to a mere bundle of elements. It is possible to imagine such a relationship ; but it is entirely opposed to practical conduct ; because it eliminates the psychological condition necessary for making the moral idea an actual reality.
We are preparing for a real ethical relation to our fellow men when we make them conscious that each of them possesses a higher self, a soul, and that they must realise the souls in others.
This relation is, however, manifested in the most curious manner in the man of genius. No one suffers so much as he with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only " by suffering " that a man knows. If compassion is not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius under- stands men. And the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all ; but he suffers most through his understanding.
Although I tried to show in an earlier chapter that genius is the factor which primarily elevates man above the animals, and in connection with that fact that it is man alone who has a history (this being explained by the pre- sence in all men of some degree of the quality of genius). I must return to that earlier side of my argument. Genius involves the living actuality of the intelligible subject. History manifests itself only as a social thing, as the " ob- jective spirit," the individuals as such playing no part in it,
? 1 82 SEX AND CHARACTER
being, in fact, non-historical. Here we see the threads of our argument converging. If it be the case, and I do not think that I am wrong, that the timeless, human personality is the necessary condition of every real ethical relation to our fellow men, and if individuality is the necessary pre- liminary to the collective spirit, then it is clear why the "metaphysical animal" and the "political animal," the possessor of genius and the maker of history, are one and the same, are humanity. And the old controversy is settled ; which comes first, the individual or the community ?
Both must be equal and simultaneous.
I think that I have proved at every point that genius is
simply the higher morality. The great man is not only the truest to himself, the most unforgetful, the one to whom errors and lies are most hateful and intolerable ; he is also the most social, at the same time the most self-contained, and the most open man. The genius is altogether a higher form, not merely intellectually, but also morally. In his own person, the genius reveals the idea of man- kind. He represents what man is ; he is the subject whose object is the whole universe which he makes endure
,for all time.
Let there be no mistake. Consciousness and conscious-
ness alone is in itself moral all unconsciousness is immoral, ;
and all immorality is unconscious. The ** immoral genius," the "great wicked man," is, therefore, a mythical animal, invented by great men in certain moments of their lives as a possibility, in order (very much against the will of the Creator) to serve as a bogey for nervous and timid natures, with which they frighten themselves and other children. No criminal who prided himself in his deed would speak like Hagen in the " Go? tterda? mmerung " over Siegfried's dead body : " Ha, ha, I have slain him ; I, Hagen, gave him his death blow. "
Napoleon and Bacon, who are given as counter-instances, were intellectually much over-rated or wrongly represented. And Nietzsche is the least reliable in these matters, when he begins to discuss the Borgia type. The conception of the
?
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 183
diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of Ahriman, of the "radical evil in human nature," is exceedingly powerful, yet it con- cerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it. It is a fiction, created in the hours in which great men have struggled against the evil in themselves.
Universal comprehension, full consciousness, and perfect
timelessness are an ideal condition, ideal even for gifted
men genius is an innate imperative, which never becomes ;
a fully accomplished fact in human beings. Hence it is that a man of genius will be the last man to feel himself in the position to say of himself: " I am a genius. " Genius is, in its essence, nothing but the full completion of the idea of a man, and, therefore, every man ought to have some quality of it, and it should be regarded as a possible principle for every one.
Genius is the highest morality, and, therefore, it is every one's duty. Genius is to be attained by a supreme act of the will, in which the whole universe is affirmed in the individual. Genms is something which "men of genius" take upon themselves ; it is the greatest exertion and the greatest pride, the greatest misery and the greatest ecstasy to a man. <^ man may become a genius if he wishes to)
But at once it will certainly be said : " Very many men would like very much to be * original geniuses,' " and their wish has no effect. But if these men who " would like very much " had a livelier sense of what is signified by their wish, if they were aware that genius is identical with uni- versal responsibility--and until that is grasped it will only be a wish and not a determination--it is highly probable that a very large number of these men would cease to wish to become geniuses.
The reason why madness overtakes so many men of genius--fools believe it comes from the influence of Venus, or the spinal degeneration of neurasthenics--is that for many the burden becomes too heavy, the task of bearing the whole world on the shoulders, like Atlas, intolerable for the smaller, but never for the really mighty minds.
But the higher a man mounts, the greater may be his
? SEX AND CHARACTER
184
fall ; ^11 genius is a conquering of chaos, mystery, and darkness") and if it degenerates and goes to pieces, the ruin isgreaterinproportiontothesuccess. Thegeniuswhich runs to madness is no longer genius ; it has chosen happi- ness instead of morality. All madness is the outcome of the insupportability of suffering attached to all conscious- ness. Sophocles derived his idea that a man might wish to become mad for this reason, and lets Aias, whose mind finally gives way, give utterance to these words :
ev Tto <ppovaiv \ap firidlv nBiorog sslog.
I shall conclude this chapter with the solemn words, similar to the best moments of Kant's style, of Johann Pico von Mirandola, to whom I may bring some measure of recognition. In his address ** on the dignity of man " the Supreme Being addresses the following words to man :
" Nee certam sedem, nee propriam faciem, nee munus ullum peculiare tibi dedimus, O Adam : ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera tute optaveris, ea pro vote, pro tua sententia, habeas et possideas. Definita caeteris natura intra praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur ; tu nuUis an- gustiis coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illam praefinies. Medium te mundi posui, ut circum- spiceres inde commodius quicquid est in mundo. Nee te caelestem, neque terrenum, neque mortalem, neque im- mortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorari- usque plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora quae sunt divina, ex tui animi sententia regenerari.
O summam Dei Patris liberalitatem, summam et admir- andam hominis felicitatem : cui datum id habere quod optai, id esse quod v^lit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afierunt e bulga matris, quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt tuturi in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omniferaria semina et otnnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater ; quae quisque excoluerit, ilia adolescent et fructus suos
f
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 185
ferent in illo: si vegetalia,planta fiet, si sensualia, obbrutescet, si rationalia, caeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia, angelus erit et Dei filius. Et si nulla creaturarum, sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo Spiritus factus in soUtaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestahit.
? CHAPTER IX
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
It is now time to return to the actual subject of this inves- tigation in order to see how far its explanation has been helped by the lengthy digressions, which must often have seemed wide of the mark.
The consequences of the fundamental principles that have been developed are of such radical importance to the psycho- logy of the sexes that, even if the former deductions have been assented to, the present conclusions may find no acceptance. This is not the place to analyse such a possibility ; but in order to protect the theory I am now going to set up, from all objections, I shall fully substantiate it in the fullest possible manner by convincing arguments.
Shortly speaking the matter stands as follows : I have shown that logical and ethical phenomena come together in the conception of truth as the ultimate good, and posit the existence of an intelligible ego or a soul, as a form of being of the highest super-empirical reality. In such a being as the absolute female there are no logical and ethical pheno- mena, and, therefore, the ground for the assumption of a soul is absent. The absolute female knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and the words law and duty, duty towards herself, are words which are least familiar to her. The inference that she is wanting in super- sensual personality is fully justified. -The absolute female has no egoy
In a certain sense this is an end of the investigation, a final conclusion to which all analysis of the female leads. And although this conclusion, put thus concisely, seems
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 187
harsh and intolerant, paradoxical and too abrupt in its novelty, it must be remembered that the author is not the first who has taken such a view ; he is more in the position of one who has discovered the philosophical grounds for an opinion of long standing.
^he Chinese from time immemorial have denied that women possess a personal soul. If a Chinaman is asked how many children he has, he counts only the boys, and will say none if he has only daughters. Mahomet excluded
women from Paradise for the same reason, and on this view depends the degraded position of women in Oriental countries. N
Amongst the philosophers, the opinions of Aristotle must first be considered. He held that in procreation the male principle was the formative active agent, the "logos," whilst the female was the passive material. When we remember that Aristotle uses the word " soul " for the active, forma- tive, causative principle, it is plain that his idea was akin to mine, although, as he actually expressed it, it related only to the reproductive process ; it is clear, moreover, that he, like all the Greek philosophers except Euripides, paid no heed to women, and did not consider her qualities from any other point of view than that of her share in repro- duction.
Amongst the fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origen certainly had a very low opinion of woman, and St. Augus- tine, except for his relations with his mother, seems to have sharedtheirview. AttheRenaissancetheAristoteliancon- ceptions gained many new adherents, amongst whom Jean Wier (1518-1588) may be cited specially. At that period there was a general, more sensible and intuitive under- standing on the subject, which is now treated as merely curious, contemporary science having bowed the knee to other than Aristotelian gods.
In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the characters of Anitra, Rita, and Irene) and August Strindberg have given utter- ance to this view. But the popularity of the idea of the souUessness of woman has been most attained by the
? 1 88 SEX AND CHARACTER
wonderful fairy tales of Fouque, who obtained the material for them from Paracelsus, after deep study, and which have been set to music by E. T. A. Hoffman, Girschner, and Albert Lorzing.
Undine, the soulless Undine, is the platonic idea of woman. In spite of all bi-sexuality she most really resembles the actuality. The well-known phrase, " Women have no character," really means the same thing. Personality and individuality (intelligible), ego and soul, will and (intel- ligible) character, all these are different expressions of the same actuality, an actuality the male of mankind attains, the female lacks.
But since the soul of man is the microcosm, and great men are those who live entirely in and through their souls, the whole universe thus having its being in them, the female must be described as absolutely without the quality of genius. The male has everything within him, and, as Pico of Mirandola put it, only specialises in this or that part of himself. It is possible for him to attain to the loftiest heights, or to sink to the lowest depths ; he can become like animals, or plants, or even like women, and so there exist woman-like female men.
The woman, on the other hand, can never become a man. In this consists the most important limitation to the asser- tions in the first part of this work. Whilst I know of many men who are practically completely psychically female, not merely half so, and have seen a considerable number of women with masculine traits, I have never yet seen a single woman who was not fundamentally female, even when this femaleness has been concealed by various accessories from the person herself, not to speak of others. One must be {cf. chap. i. part I. ) either man or woman, however many peculiarities of both sexes one may have, and this " being," the problem of this work from the start, is determined by one's relation to ethics and logic ; but whilst there are people who are anatomically men and psychically women, there is no such thing as a person who is physically female and psychically male, notwithstanding the extreme maleness
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 189
of their outward appearance and the unwomanliness of their expression.
We may now give, with certainty, a conclusive answer to the question as to the giftedness of the sexes : there are women with undoubted traits of genius, but there is no female genius, and there never has been one (not even amongst those masculine women of history which were dealt with in the first part), and there never can be one. Those who are in favour of laxity in these matters, and are anxious to extend and enlarge the idea of genius in order to make it possible to include women, would simply by such action destroy the conception of genius. If it is in any way pos- sible to frame a definition of genius that would thoroughly cover the ground, I believe that my definition succeeds. And how, then, could a soulless being possess genius ? The possession of genius is identical with profundity ; and if any one were to try to combine woman and profundity as subject and predicate, he would be contradicted on all
sides. A female genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply mtensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious maleness.
The man of genius possesses, like everything else, the complete female in himself ; but woman herself is only a
part of the Universe, and the part can never be the whole ;
femaleness can never include genius. This lack of genius on the part of woman is inevitable because woman is not a monad, and cannot reflect the Universe. *
The proof of the soullessness of woman is closely con- nected with much of what was contained in the earlier chapters. The third chapter explained that woman has her experiences in the form of henids, whilst those of men are in an organised form, so that the consciousness of the femaleisloweringradethanthatofthemale. Conscious-
* It would be a simple matter to introduce at this point a list of the works of the most famous women, and show by a few examples how little they deserve the title of genius. But it would be a weari- some task, and any one who would make use of such a list can easily procure it for himself, so that I shall not do so.
? 190 SEX AND CHARACTER
ness, however, is psychologically a fundamental part of the theoryofknowledge. Fromthepointofviewofthetheory of knowledge, consciousness and the possession of a con- tinuous ego, of a transcendental subjective soul, are identical conceptions. Everyegoexistsonlysofarasitisself-con- scious, conscious of the contents of its own thoughts all
;
real existence is conscious existence. I can now make an importantadditiontothetheoryofhenids. Theorganised contents of the thoughts of the male are not merely those of the female articulated and formed, they are not what was potential in the female becoming actual ; from the very first there is a qualitative difference. The psychical contents of the male, even whilst they are still in the henid stage that they always try to emerge from, are already partly concep- tual, and it is probable that even perceptions in the male have a direct tendency towards conceptions. In the female, on the other hand, there is no trace of conception either in
recognition or in thinking.
^he logical axioms are the foundation of all formation of
mental conceptions, and women are devoid of these ; the principle of identity is not for them an inevitable standard, nor do they fence off all other possibilities from their con- ceptionbyusingtheprincipleofcontradictories. Thiswant of definiteness in the ideas of women is the source of that "sensitiveness" which gives the widest scope to vague asso- ciations and allows the most radically different things to be grouped together. ^ And even women with the best and least limited memories never free themselves from this kind of association by feelings. For insitance, if they " feel reminded " by a word of some definite colour, or by a human being of some definite thing to eat--forms of association common with women--they rest content with the subjective association, and do not try to find out the source of the comparison, and if there is any relation in it to actual fact. The complacency and selt-satisfaction of women cor-
responds with what has been called their intellectual unscrupulousness, and will be referred to again in connec- tionwiththeirwantofthepowertoformconcepts. This
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 191
subjection to waves of feeling, this want of respect for conceptions, tliis self-appreciation without any attempt to avoid shi. llo'vness, characterise as essentially female the changeable styles of many modern painters and novelists. Male thought is fundamentally different from female thought in its craving for definite form, and all art that consists of moods is essentially a formless art.
The psychical contents of man's thoughts, therefore, are more than the explicit realisation of what women think in henids. Woman'sthoughtisaslidingandglidingthrough subjects, a superficial tasting of things that a man, who studies the depths, would scarcely notice; it is an extravagant and dainty method of skimming which has no grasp of accuracy. (A woman's thought is superficial, and touch is the mosr highly developed of the female senses, the most notable characteristic of the woman which she can bring to a high state by her unaided efforts. ^ Touch necessi- tates a limiting of the interest to superficialities, it is a vague effect of the whole and does not depend on definite details.
^Vhen a woman " understands " a man (of the possibility or impossibility of any real understanding I shall speak later), she is simply, so to speak tasting (however wanting in taste the comparison may be) what he has thought about he^ Since, on her own part, there is no sharp differentia- tion, it is plain that she will often think that she herself has been understood when there is no more present than a vaguesimilarityofperceptions. Theincongruitybetween the man and woman depends, in a special measure, on the fact that the contents of the thoughts of the man are not merely those of the woman in a higher state of differentia- tion, but that the two have totally distinct sequences of thought applied to the same object, conceptual thought in the one and indistinct sensing in the other ; and when what is called " understanding " in the two cases is com- pared, the comparison is not between a fully organised integrated thought and a lower stage of the same process; but in the understanding of man and woman there is on
;
? 192 SEX AND CHARACTER
the one side a conceptual thought, on the other side an unconceptual " feeling," a henid.
The unconceptual nature of the thinking of a woman is simply the result of her less perfect consciousness, of her want of an ego. It is the conception that unites the mere complex of perceptions into an object, and this it does independentlyofthepresenceofanactualperception. The existence of the complex of perceptions is dependent on the will ; the will can shut the eyes and stop the ears so that the person no longer sees nor hears, but may get drunk or go to sleepandforget. Itistheconceptionwhichbringsfreedom from the eternally subjective, eternally psychological rela- tivity of the actual perceptions, and which creates the thingsinthemselves. Byitspowerofformingconceptions the intellect can spontaneously separate itself from the object ; conversely, it is only when there is a comprehending function that subject and object can be separated and so distinguished ; in all other cases there is only a mass of like and unlike images present mingling together v/ithout law andorder. Theconceptioncreatesdefiniterealitiesfromthe floating images, the object from the perception, the object which stands like an enemy opposite the subject that the subject may measure its strength upon it. The conception is thus the creator of reality; it is the "transcendental object " of Kant's " Critique of Reason," but it always involves a transcendental "subject. "
It is impossible to say of a mere complex of perceptions that it is like itself ; in the moment that I have made the judgment of identity, the complex of perceptions has become a concept. And so the conception gives their value to all processes of verification and all syllogisms the conception makes the contents of thought free by bind- ingthem. Itgivesfreedombothtothesubjectandobject for the two freedoms involve each other. All freedom is in reality self-binding, both in logic and in ethics. Man is freeonlywhenhehimselfisthelaw. Andsothefunction of making concepts is the power by which man gives him- self dignity ; he honours himself by giving freedom to the
? MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
objectiveworld,bymakingit partoftheobjectivebodyof knowledge to which recourse may be had when two men differ. The woman cannot in this way set herself over against realities, she and they swing together capriciously
; she cannot give freedom to her objects as she herself is not
free.
The mode in which perceptions acquire independence in
conceptions is the means of getting free from subjectivity. The conception is that about which I think, write, and speak. And in this way there comes the belief that I can make judgments concerning it. Hume, Huxley, and other "immanent" psychologists, tried to identify the concep- tion with a mere generalisation, so making no distinction between logical and psychological thought. In doing this they ignored the power of making judgments. In every judgment there is an act of verification or of contradiction, an approval or rejection, and the standard for these judg- ments, the idea of truth, must be something external to that on what it is acting. If there are nothing but perceptions^ then all perceptions must have an equal validity, and there can be no standard by which to form a real world. Empiricism in this fashion really destroys the reality of experience, and what is called positivism is no more than nihilism. The idea of a standard of truth, the idea of truth, cannot lie in experience. In every judgment this idea of the existence of truth is implicit. The claim to real knowledge depends on this capacity to judge, involves the conception of the possibility of truth in the judgment.
This claim to be able to reach knowledge is no more than to say that the subject can judge of^the object, can say that the object is true. The objects on which we make judgmentsareconceptions; theconceptioniswhatweknow. The conception places a subject and an object against one another, and the judgment then creates a relation between the two. The attainment of truth simply means that the subject can judge rightly of the object, and so the function of making judgments is what places the ego in relation to
193
SEX AND CHARACTER
the all, is what makes a real unity of the ego and the all possible. And thus we reach an answer to the old problem astowhetherconceptionorjudgmenthasprecedence the
;
answer is that the two are necessary to one another. The faculty of making conceptions cleaves subject and object and unites them again.
A being like the female, without the power of making con- cepts,is unable to make judgments. In her "mind" subjective and objective are not separated; there is no possibility of making judgments, and no possibility of reaching, or of desiring, truth. No woman is really interested in science
;
she may deceive herself and many good men, but bad psychologists, by thinking so. It may be taken as certain, that whenever a woman has done something of any little importance in the scientific world (Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, &c. ) it is always because of some man in the background whom they desire to please in this way ; and it is more often justifiable to say "cherchez I'homme" where women are concerned than " cherchez la femme " in the case of men.
But there have never been any great discoveries in the world of science made by women, because the facility for truth only proceeds from a desire for truth, and the former is always in proportion to the latter. Woman's sense of reality is much less than man's, in spite of much repetition ofthecontraryopinion, i^ithwomenthepursuitofknow- ledge is always subordinated to something else, and if this alien impulse is sufficiently strong they can see sharply and unerringly, but woman will never be able to see the value of truth in itself and in relation to her own self. Where there is some check to what she wishes (perhaps uncon- sciously) a woman becomes quite uncritical and loses all
touch with realityj^ This is why women so often believe themselves to have been the victims of sexual overtures this is the reason of extreme frequency of hallucinations of the sense of touch in women, of the intensive reality of which it is almost impossible for a man to form an idea. This also is why the imagination of women is composed of
194
;
? ? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 195
lies and errors, whilst the imagination of the philosopher is the highest form of truth.
The idea of truth is the foundation of everything that deserves the name of judgment. Knowledge is simply the making of judgments, and thought itself is simply another nameforjudgment. Deductionisthenecessaryprocessin making judgments, and involves the propositions of identity and of contradictories, and, as I have shown, these propo- sitions are not axiomatic for women.
/A psychological proof that the power of making judg- ments is a masculine trait lies in the fact that the woman recognises it as such, and that it acts on her as a tertiary sexual character of the male. A woman always expects definite convictions in a man, and appropriates them ; she has no understanding of indecision in a man. She always expects a man to talk, and a man's speech is to her a sign of hismanliness. Itistruethatwomanhasthegiftofspeech, but she has not the art of talking ; she converses (flirts) or chatters, but she does not talk. She is most dangerous, however, when she is dumb, for men are only too inclined to take her quiescence for silencd>
The absolute female, then, is devoid not only of the logical rules, but of the functions of making concepts and judgments which depend on them. As the very nature of the conceptual faculty consists in posing subject against object, and as the subject takes its deepest and fullest mean- ing from its power of forming judgments on its objects, it is clear that women cannot be recognised as possessing even the subject.
I mustaddtotheexpositionofthenon-logicalnatureot the female some statements as to her non-moral nature. The profound falseness of woman, the result of the want in her of a permanent relation to the idea of truth or to the idea of value, would prove a subject of discussion so exhaustive that I must go to work another way. There are such endless imitations of ethics, such confusing copies of morality, that women are often said to be on a moral plane higher than that of man. I have already pointed out the need to
? SEX AND CHARACTER
distinguish between the non-moral and the immoral, and 1 now repeat that with regard to women we can talk only of the non-moral, of the complete absence of a moral sense. It is a well-known fact of criminal statistics and of daily life that there are very few female criminals. The apologists of the morality of women always point to this fact.
But in deciding the question as to the morality of women we have to consider not if a particular person has objectively sinned against the idea, but if the person has or has not a subjective centre of being that can enter into a relation with the idea, a relation the value of which is lowered when a sin is committed. No doubt the male criminal inherits his criminal instincts, but none the less he is conscious--in spite of theories of " moral insanity "--that by his action he has lowered the value of his claim on life. All criminals are cowardly in this matter, and there is none of them that thinks he has raised his value and his self-consciousness by his crime, or that would try to justify it to himself.
The male criminal has from birth a relation to the idea of value just like any other man, but the criminal impulse, when it succeeds in dominating him, destroys this almost completely. Woman, on the contrary, often believes her- self to have acted justly when, as a matter of fact, she has just done the greatest possible act of meanness ; whilst the true criminal remains mute before reproach, a woman can at once give indignant expression to her astonishment and anger that any one should question her perfect right to act in this or that way. l^omen are convinced of their own integrity without ever having sat in judgment on it,' The criminal does not, it is true, reflect on himself, but he never urges his own integrity ; he is much more inclined to get rid of the thought of his integrity,* because it might remind him of his guilt : and in this is the proof that he had a
* A male criminal even feels guilty when he has not actually done wrong. He can always accept the reproaches of others as to deception, thieving, and so on, even if he has never committed such acts, because he knows he is capable of them. So also he always feels himself " caught " when any other offender is arrested.
196
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 197
relation to the idea (of truth), and only objects to be re- minded of his unfaithfulness to his better self. No male criminal has ever believed that his punishment was unjust. A woman, on the contrary, is convinced of the animosity of heraccuser,andif shedoesnotwishtobeconvincedofit, no one can persuade her that she has done wrong.
If any one talks to her it usually happens that she bursts into tears, Jbegs for pardon, and " confesses her fault," and may really believe that she feels her guilt; but only when she desires to do so, and the outbreak of tears has given her a certain sort of satisfaction. The male criminal is callous
;
he does not spin round in a trice, as a woman would do in a similar instance if her accuser knew how to handle her skilfully.
The personal torture which arises from guilt, which cries aloud in its anguish at having brought such a stain upon herself, no woman knows, and an apparent exception (the penitent, who becomes a self-mortifying devotee,) will cer- tainly prove that a woman only feels a vicarious guilt.
I am not arguing that woman is evil and anti-moral ; I state that she cannot be really evil ; she is merely non-moral. Womanly compassion and female modesty are the two other phenomena which are generally urged by the defenders of female virtue. It is especially from womanly kindness, womanly sympathy, that the beautiful descriptions of the soul of woman have gained most support, and the final argument of all belief in the superior morality of woman is the conception of her as the hospital nurse, the tender sister. I am sorry to have to mention this point, and should not have done so, but I have been forced to do so by a
verbal objection made to me, which can be easily foreseen. It is very shortsighted of any one to consider the nurse as a proof of the sympathy of women, because it really implies the opposite. For a man could never stand the sight of the sufferings of the sick ; he would suffer so intensely that he would be completely upset and incapable oflengthyattendanceonthem. Anyonewhohaswatched nursing sisters is astounded at their equanimity and " sweet-
SEX AND CHARACTER
ness " even in the presence of most terrible death throes and it is well that it is so, for man, who cannot stand suffer- inganddeath,wouldmakeaverybadnurse. Amanwould want to assuage the pain and ward off death ; in a word, he would want to help; where there is nothing to be done he is better away; it is only then that nursing is justified and that woman offers herself for it. But it would be quite wrong to regard this capacity of women in an ethical aspect.
olere it may be said that for woman the problem of soli- tude and society does not exist. She is well adapted for social relations (as, for instance, those of a companion or sick-nurse), simply because for her there is no transition from solitude to society. In the case of a man, the choice between solitude and society is serious when it has to be made^ The woman gives up no solitude when she nurses the sick, as she would have to do were she to deserve moral credit for her action ; ^ woman is never in a condition of solitude, and knows neither the love of it nor the fear of it. The woman is always living in a condition of fusion with all the human beings she knows, even when she is alone ; she
is not a " monad," for all monads are sharply marked off from other existences^ Women have no definite individual limits ; they are not unlimited in the sense that geniuses have no limits, being one with the whole world ; they are unlimited only in the sense that they are not marked off from the common stock of mankind.
This sense of continuity with the rest of mankind is a sexual character of the female, and displays itself in the desire to touch, to be in contact with, the object of her pity ; the mode in which her tenderness expresses itself is a kind of animal sense of contact. It shows the absence of the sharp line that separates one real personalty from another. Thewomandoesnotrespectthesorrowofher neighbour by silence ; she tries to raise him from his grief by speech, feeling that she must be in physical, rather than spiritual, contact with hini>
This diffused life, one of the most fundamental qualities of the female nature, is the cause of the impressibility of all
198
;
? --
? MALEANDFEMALEPSYCHOLOGY 199
women, their unreserved and shameless readiness to shed tears on the most ordinary occasion. It is not without reason that we associate wailing with women, and think little of a man who sheds tears in public. A woman weeps v/ith those that weep and laughs with those that laugh unless she herself is the cause of the laughter--so that the greater part of female sympathy is ready-made.
