No More Learning

The existence of modesty in women has been discussed already to a certain extent ; I shall have more to say about it in relation with hysteria. But it is difficult to see how it can be maintained that this is a female virtue, if one reflect on the readiness with which women accept the habit of wearing low-necked dresses wherever custom prescribes it. A person is either modest or immodest, and modesty is not a quality which can be assumed or discarded from hour to hour.
Strong evidence of the want of modesty in woman is to be derived from the fact that women dress and undress in the presence of one another with the greatest freedom, whilst men try to avoid similar circumstances. Moreover, when women are alone together, they are very ready to discuss their physical qualities, especially with regard to their attractiveness for men ; whilst men, practically with- out exception, avoid all notice of one another's sexual characters.
I shall return to this subject again. In the meantime I wish to refer to the argument of the second chapter in this connection. Onemustbefullyconsciousofathingbefore one can have a feeling of shame about it, and so differentia- tion is as necessary for the sense of shame as for conscious- ness. The female, who is only sexual, can appear to be asexual because she is sexuality itself, and so her sexuality does not stand out separately from the rest of her being, either in space or in time, as in the case of the male. Woman can give an impression of being modest because there is nothing in her to contrast with her sexuality. And so the woman is always naked or never naked--we may express it either way--never naked, because the true feeling of nakedness is impossible to her ; always naked, because there is not in her the material for the sense of relativity by which she could become aware of her nakedness and so make possible the desire to cover it.
^What I have been discussing depends on the actual
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meaning of the word " ego " to a woman. If a woman were asked what she meant by her " ego " she would cer- tainly think of her body. Her superficies, that is the woman's ego. The ego of the female is quite correctly described by Mach in his " Anti-metaphysical Remarks. "
The ego of a woman is the cause of the vanity which is specific of women. The analogue of this in the male is an emanation of the set of his will towards his conception of the good, and its objective expression is a sensitiveness, a desire that no one shall call in question the possibility of attaining this supreme good. It is his personality that gives to man his value and his freedom from the conditions of time. This supreme good, which is beyond price, because, in the words of Kant, there can be found no equivalent for it, is the dignity of man. Women, in spite of what Schiller has said, have no dignity, and the word " lady " was invented to supply this defect,^nd her pride will find its expression in what she regards as the supreme good, that is to say, in the preservation, improvement, and display of her personal beautyi The pride of the female is something quite peculiar to herself, something foreign even to the most handsome man, an obsession by her own body ; a pleasure which displays itself, even in the least handsome girl, by admiring herself in the mirror, by stroking herself and playing with her own hair, but which comes to its fu^ll
measure only in the effect that her body has on man. \A woman has no true solitude, because she is always conscious ofherselfonlyinrelationtoothers. Theothersideofthe vanity of women is the desire to feel that her body is admired, or, rather, sexually coveted, by a man. y
This desire is so strong that the're are many women to whom it is sufficient merely to know that they are coveted. The vanity of women is, then, always in relation to others
a woman lives only in the thoughts of others about her. The sensibility of women is directed to this. A woman never forgets that some one thought her ugly ; a woman never considers herself ugly ; the successes of others at the most only make her think of herself as perhaps less attrac-
? 202 SEX AND CHARACTER
tive. But no woman ever believes herself to be anything but beautiful and desirable when she looks at herself in the glass ; she never accepts her own ugliness as a painful reality as a man would, and never ceases to try to persuade others of the contrary.
What is the source of this form of vanity, peculiar to the female ? It comes from the absence of an intelligible ego,
the only begetter of a constant and positive sense of value it is, in fact, that she is devoid of a sense of personal value. ^s she sets no store by herself or on herself, she endeavours to attain to a value in the eyes of others by exciting their desire and admiratioru The only thing which has any absolute and ultimate value in the world is the soul. " Ye are better than many sparrows " were Christ's words to mankind. ? (A woman does not value herself by the constancy and freedom of her personality; but this is the only possible method for every creature possessing an ego. But if a real woman, and this is certainly the case, can only value herself attherateofthemanwhohasfixedhischoiceonher; ifit is only through her husband or lover that she can attain to a value not only in social and material things, but also in her innermost nature, it follows that she possesses no per- sonal value, she is devoid of man's sense of the value of his own personality for itself. And so women always get their sense of value from something outside themselves, from their money or estates, the number and richness of their garments, the position of their box at the opera, their children, and, above all, their husbands or lovers. When a
woman is quarrelling with another woman, her final weapon, and the weapon she finds most effective and discomfiting, is to proclaim her superior social position, her wealth or title, and, above all, her youthfulness and the devotion of her husband or lover ; whereas a man in similar case would lay himself open to contempt if he relied on anything except his own personal individuality^
The absence of the soul in woman may also be mrerred from the following : ^Whilst a woman is stimulated to try to impress a man from the mere fact that he has paid no
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attention to her (Goethe gave this as a practical receipt), the whole life of a woman, in fact, being an expression of this side of her nature, a man, if a woman treats him rudely or indifferently, feels repelled by her. Nothing makes a man sohappyastheloveofagirl; evenif hedidnotatfirst return her love, there is a great probability of love being arousedinhim. Theloveofamanforwhomshedoesnot care is only a gratification of the vanity of a woman, or an awakening and rousing of slumbering desires. A woman extends her claims equally to all men on earth. >
The shamelessness and heartlessness of women are shown in the way in which they talk of being loved. A man feels ashamed of being loved, because he is always in the position of being the active, free agent, and because he knows that he can never give himself entirely to love, and there is nothing about which he is so silent, even when there is no special reason for him to fear that he might compromise the lady by talking. A woman boasts about her love affairs, and parades them before other women in order to make them envious of her. Woman does not look upon a man's inclination for her so much as a tribute to her actual worth, or a deep insight into her nature, as the bestowing a value on her which she otherwise would not have, as the gift to her of an existence and essence with which she justifies herself before others.
The remark in an earlier chapter about the unfailing memory of woman for all the compliments she has ever received since childhood is explained by the foregoing facts.
^t is from compliments, first of all, that woman gets a sense of her "value," and that is why women expect men to be " polite. " Politeness is the easiest form of pleasing a woman, and however little it costs a man it is dear to a woman, who never forgets an attention, and lives upon the most insipid flattery, even in her old age. ' One only remembers what possesses a value in one's eyes ; it may safely be said that it is for compliments women have the most developed
memory. The woman can attain a sense of value by these external aids, because she does not possess within her an
SEX AND CHARACTER
inner standard of value which diminishes everything outside her. ^he phenomena of courtesy and chivalry are simply additional proofs that women have no souls, and that when a man is being " polite " to a woman he is simply ascribing to her the minimum sense of personal value, a form of deference to which importance is attached precisely in the measure that it is misunderstood. N
The non-moral nature of woman reveals itself in the mode in which she can so easily forget an immoral action she has committed. Itisalmostcharacteristicofawomanthatshe cannot believe that she has done wrong, and so is able to deceivebothherselfandherhusband. Men,ontheother hand, remember nothing so well as the guilty episodes of their lives. Here memory reveals itself as eminently a moralphenomenon. Forgivingandforgetting,notforgiving and understanding, go together. When one remembers a lie, one reproaches oneself afresh about it. A woman forgets, because she does not blame herself for an act of meanness, because she does not understand it, having no relation to the moral idea. It is not surprismg that she is ready to lie. Women have been regarded as virtuous, simply because the problem of morality has not presented itselftothem; theyhavebeenheldtobeevenmoremoral than man ; this is simply because they do not understand
immorality. The innocence of a child is not meritorious if a patriarch could be innocent he might be praised for it.
Introspection is an attribute confined to males, if we leave out of account the hysterical self-reproaches of certain women--and consciousness of guilt and repentance are equallymale. Thepenancesthatwomenlayonthemselves, remarkable imitations of the sense of guilt, will be discussed when I come to deal with what passes for introspection in the female sex. The " subject " of introspection is the moral agent ; it has a relation to psychical phenomena only in so far as it sits in judgment on them.
It is quite in the nature of positivism that Comte denies the possibility of introspection, and throws ridicule on it. For certainly it is absurd that a psychical event and a
204
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judgment of it could coincide if the interpretations of the positivists be accepted. It is only on the assumption that there exists an ego unconditioned by time and intrinsically capable of moral judgments, endowed with memory and with the power of making comparisons, that we can justify the belief in the possibility of introspection.
If woman had a sense of her personal value and the will to defend it against all external attacks she could not be jealous. Apparently all women are jealous, and jealousy depends on the failure to recognise the rights of others. Even the jealousy of a mother when she sees another woman's daughters married before her own depends simply on her want of the sense of justice.
Without justice there can be no society, so that jealousy isanabsolutelyunsocialquality. Theformationofsocieties in reality presupposes the existence of true individuality. Woman has no faculty for the affairs of State or politics, as she has no social inclinations ; and women's societies, from which men are excluded, are certain to break up after a shorttime. Thefamilyitselfisnotreallyasocialstructure
; it is essentially unsocial, and men who give up their clubs
and societies after marriage soon rejoin them. I had written this before the appearance of Heinrich Schurtz' valuable ethnological work, in which he shows that asso- ciations of men, and not the family, form the beginnings of society.
'^Pascal made the wonderful remark that human beings seek society only because they cannot bear solitude and wish to forget themselves. / It is the fact expressed in these words which puts in harmony my earlier statement that women had not the faculty of solitude and my present statement that she is essentially unsociable.
If a woman possessed an "ego" she would have the sense of property both in her own case and that of others. The thieving instinct, however, is much more developed in men than in women. So-called " kleptomaniacs " (those who steal without necessity) are almost exclusively women. Women understand power and riches but not personal
? SEX AND CHARACTER
property. When the thefts of female kleptomaniacs are discovered, the women defend themselves by saying that it appeared to them as if everything belonged to them. It is chiefly women who use circulating libraries, especially those who could quite well afford to buy quantities of books ; but, as matter of fact, they are not more strongly attracted by what they have bought than by what they have borrowed. In all these matters the relation between individuality and society comes into view just as a man must have per-
;
sonality himself to appreciate the personalities of others, so also he must acquire a sense of personal right in his own property to respect the rights of others.
One's name and a strong devotion to it are even more dependent on personality than is the sense of property. The facts that confront us with reference to this are so salient that it is extraordinary to find so little notice taken of them. Women are not bound to their names with any strong bond. When they marry they give up their own name and assume that of their husband without any sense of loss. They allow their husbands and lovers to call them by new names, delighting in them ; and even when a woman marries a man that she does not love, she has never been known to suffer any psychical shock at the change of name. The name is a symbol of individualty ; it is only amongst the lowest races on the face of the earth, such as the bushmen of South Africa, that there are no personal
names, because amongst such as these the desire for distin- guishingindividualsfromthegeneralstockisnotfelt. The fundamental namelessness of the woman is simply a sign of her undifferentiated personality.
An important observation may be mentioned here and maybeconfirmedbyeveryone. Wheneveramanenters a place where a woman is, and she observes him, or hears his step, or even only guesses he is near, she becomes another person. Her expression and her pose change with incredible swiftness; she "arranges her fringe" and her bodice, and rises, or pretends to be engrossed in her work. She is full of a half shameless, half-nervous expectation.
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In many cases one is only in doubt as to whether she is blushing for her shameless laugh, or laughing over her shameless blushing.
\rhe soul, personality, character--as Schopenhauer with marvellous sight recognised--are identical with free-will. And as the female has no ego, she has no free-will. Only a creature with no will of its own, no character in the highest sense, could be so easily influenced by the mere proximity to a man as woman is, who remains in functional dependence on him instead of in free relationship to him\ Woman is the best medium, the male her best hypnotiser. For this reason alone it is inconceivable why women can be considered good as doctors ; for many doctors admit that their principal work up to the present--and it will always be the same--lies in the suggestive influence on their patients.
The female is uniformly more easily hypnotised than the male throughout the animal world, and it may be seen from the following how closely hypnotic phenomena are related to the most ordinary events. I have already described, in discussing female sympathy, how easy it is for laughter or tears to be induced in females. How impressed she is by everything in the newspapers ! What a martyr she is to the siUiest superstitions ! How eagerly she tries every remedy recommended by her friends !
Whoever is lacking in character is lacking in convictions. The female, therefore, is credulous, uncritical, and quite un- abletounderstandProtestantism. ChristiansareCatholics or Protestants before they are baptized, but, none the less, it would be unfair to describe Catholicism as feminine simply because it suits women better. The distinction between the Catholic and Protestant dispositions is a side of characterology that would require separate treatment.
It has been exhaustively proved that the female is soulless and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will. This conclusion is of the highest significance in psychology. It implies that the psychology of the male and of the female must be treated
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? 2o8 SEX AND CHARACTER
separately. Apurelyempiricalrepresentationofthepsychic life of the female is possible ; in the case of the male, all the psychic life must be considered with reference to the ego, as Kant foresaw.
The view of Hume (and Mach), which only admits that there are " impressions " and " thoughts " (ABC and a ss y . . . ), and which has almost driven the psyche out of present day psychology, declares that the whole world is
to be considered exclusively as a picture in a reflector, a sort of kaleidoscope ; it merely reduces everything to a dance of the " elements," without thought or order ; it denies the possibility of obtaining a secure standpoint for thought it not only destroys the idea of truth, and accordingly of reality, the only claims on which philosophy rests, but it also is to blame for the wretched plight of modern psychology.
This modern psychology proudly styles itself the " psy-
chology without the soul," in imitation of its much over-
rated founder, Friedrich Albert Lange. I think I have
proved in this work that without the acknowledgment of a
soul there would be no way of dealing with psychic pheno-
mena just as much in the case of the male who has a soul ;
as in the case of the female who is soulless.
Modern psychology is eminently womanish, and that is
why this comparative investigation of the sexes is so specially instructive, and it is not without reason that I have delayed pointing out this radical difference ; it is only now that it can be seen what the acceptation of the ego implies, and how the confusing of masculine and feminine spiritual life (in the broadest and deepest sense) has been at the root of all the difficulties and errors into which those who have sought to establish a universal psychology have fallen.
I must now raise the question--is a psychology of the male possible as a science ? The answer must be that it is not possible. I must be understood to reject all the investi- gations of the experimenters, and those who z^e still sick with the experimental fever may ask in wonder if all these have no value ? Experimental psychology has not given a
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single explanation as to the deeper laws of masculine life
;
it can be regarded only as a series of sporadic empirical efforts, and its method is wrong inasmuch as it seeks to reach the kernel of things by surface examination, and as it cannot possibly give an explanation of the deep-seated source of all psychical phenomena. When it has attempted to discover the real nature of psychical phenomena by measurements of the physical phenomema that accompany them, it has succeeded in showing that even in the most favourable cases there is an inconstancy and variation. -^The fundamental possibility of reaching the mathematical idea of knowledge is that the data should be constant. As the mind itself is the creator of time and space, it is impossible to expect that geometry and arithmetic should explain the mind, that the creature should explain the creator^
There can be no scientific psychology of man, for the aim of psychology is to derive what is not derivative, to prove to every man what his real nature and essence are, to deduce these. But the possibility of deducing them would imply that they were not free. As soon as it has been admitted that the conduct, action, nature, of an individual man can be determined scientifically, it will be proved that man has no free-will. Kant and Schopenhauer understood this fully, and, on the other hand, Hume and Herbart, the founders of modern psychology, did not believe in free-will. It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an empirical factor. The will, like the power of judgment, is associated inevitably with the existence of an ego, or soul. It is not a matter of experience, it tran- scends experience, and until psychology recognises this extra-
neous factor, it will remain no more than a methodical annex of physiology and biology. If the soul is only a complex of experiences it cannot be the factor that makes experiences possible. Modern psychology in reality denies the existence of the soul, but the soul rejects modern psychology.
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? 2IO SEX AND CHARACTER
^fhis work has decided in favour of the soul against the absurd and pitiable psychology without a soul. In fact, it may be doubted if, on the assumption that the soul exists and has free thought and free-will, there can be a science of causal laws and self-imposed rules of willing and thinking. I have no intention of trying to inaugurate a new era of rational psychology. I wish to follow Kant in positing the existence of a soul as the unifying and central conception, without which any explanation or description of psychic life, however faithful in its details, however sympathetically undertaken,mustbewhollyunsatisfying. ). Itisextraordinary how inquirers who have made no attehipt to analyse such phenomena as shame and the sense of guilt, faith and hope, fear and repentance, love and hate, yearning and solitude, vanity and sensitiveness, ambition and the desire for immor- tality, have yet the courage simply to deny the ego because it does not flaunt itself like the colour of an orange or the tasteofapeach. HowcanMachandHumeaccountfor such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist ? Or again, consider this : no animal is made afraid by seeing its
reflection in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend hislifeinaroomsurroundedwithmirrors. Canthisfear, the fear of the doppelganger,* be explained on Darwinian principles. The word doppelganger has only to be men- tionedtoraiseadeepdreadinthemindofanyman. Em- piricalpsychologycannotexplainthis; itreachesthedepths. It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of little children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less secure stage of society. I have taken this example only to remind the empirical psychologists that there are many things inexplicable on their hypotheses.
Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a Wagnerite, a Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth ? He objectstobethoughtamereecho. EvenErnstMachis angry in anticipation at the thought that some friend will
*Itisnotablethatwomenaredevoidofthisfear; femaledop- pelgangers are not heard of.
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describe him as a Positivist, Idealist, or any other non- individual term. This feeling must not be confused with the results of the fact that a man may describe himself as a Wagnerite, and so forth. The latter is simply a deep ap- proval of Wagnerism, because the approver is himself a Wagnerite. Themanisconsciousthathisagreementisin reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a man will say much about himself that he would not permit anothertosayofhun. AsCyranodeBergeracputit
" Je me les sers moi-meme, avec assez de verve, Mais je ne permets pas qu'un autre me les serve. "
It cannot be right to consider such men as Pascal and Newton, on the one hand, as men of the highest genius, on the other, as limited by a mass of prejudices which we of thepresentgenerationhavelongovercome. Isthepresent generation with its electrical railways and empirical psy- chology so much higher than these earlier times ? Is culture, if culture has any real value, to be compared with science, which is always social and never individual, and to be measured by the number of public libraries and laboratories ? Is culture outside human beings and not always in human beings ?
It is in striking harmony with the ascription to men alone of an ineffable, inexplicable personality, that in all the authenticated cases of double or multiple personality the subjects have been women. The absolute female is capable of sub-division ; the male, even to the most complete char- acterology and the most acute experiment, is always an indivisible unit. The male has a central nucleus of his being which has no parts, and cannot be divided ; the female is composite, and so can be dissociated and cleft.
And so it is most amusing to hear writers talking of the soul of the woman, of her heart and its mysteries, of the psyche of the modern woman. It seems almost as if even an accoucheur would have to prove his capacity by the strength of his belief in the soul of women. Most women, at least, delight to hear discussions on their souls, although
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212
they know, so far as they can be said to know anything, that the whole thing is a swindle. The woman as the Sphinx 1 Never was a more ridiculous, a more audacious fraud per- petrated. Man is infinitely more mysterious, incomparably more complicated.
If is only necessary to look at the faces of women one passes in the streets. There is scarcely one whose expres- sion could not at once be summed up. The register of woman's feelings and disposition is so terribly poor, whereas men's countenances can scarcely be read after long and earnest scrutiny.
Finally, I come to the question as to whether there exists a complete parallelism or a condition of reciprocal inter- actionbetweenmindandbody. Inthecaseofthefemale, psycho-physical parallelism exists in the form of a complete co-ordination between the mental and the physical ; in women the capacity for mental exertion ceases with senile involution, just as it developed in connection with and in subservience to the sexual instincts. The intelligence of man never grows as old as that of the woman, and it is only in isolated cases that degeneration of the mind is linked with degeneration of the body. Least of all does mental degeneration accompany the bodily weakness of old age in those who have genius, the highest development of mental masculinity.
It is only to be expected that the philosophers who most strongly argued in favour of parallelism, such as Spinoza and Fechner, were also determinists. In the case of the male, the free intelligible agent who by his own will can distinguish between good and evil, the existence of parallelism between mind and body must be rejected.
The question, then, as to the proper view of the psy- chology of the sexes may be taken as settled. There has to be faced, however, an extraordinarily difficult problem that, so far as I know, has not even been stated yet, but the answer to which, none the less, strongly supports my view of the soullessness of women.
In the earlier pages of my volume I corrtrasted the clarity
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if-^ale thinking processes with their vagueness in woman, nd later on showed that the power of orderly speech, in /hich logical judgments are expressed, acts on women as a
'iiale sexual character. Whatever is sexually attractive to hefemalemustbecharacteristicofthemale. Firmnessin man's character makes a sexual impression on a woman, /hilst she is repelled by the pliant man. People often peak of the moral influence exerted on men by women, when no more is meant than that women are striving to attain their sexual complements. Women demand manli- ness from men, and feel deeply disappointed and full of ontempt if men fail them in this respect. However un- ? Tuthful or great a flirt a woman may be, she is bitterly indignant if she discover traces of coquetry or untruthful- aess in a man. She may be as cowardly as she likes, but I he man must be brave.
It has been almost completely )verlooked that this is only a sexual egotism seeking to ecure the most satisfactory sexual complement. ^ From the
ide of empirical observation, no stronger proof of the soul- essness of woman could be drawn than that she demands a ioul in man, that she who is not good in herself demands
goodness from him. The soul is a masculine character, oleasing to women in the same way and for the same pur- poseasamasculinebodyorawell-trimmedmoustache. I
nay be accused of stating the case coarsely, but it is none he less true. <It is the man's will that in the last resort nfluences a woman most powerfully, and she has a strong racultyforperceivingwhetheraman's"I will"meansmere bombast or actual decision. In the latter case the effect on
her is prodigious^
How is it that woman, who is soulless herself, can discern
the soul in man ? How can she judge about his morality who is herself non-moral ? How can she grasp his character when she has no character herself ? How appreciate his will when she is herself without will ?
These difficult problems lie before us, and their solutions must be placed on strong foundations, for there will be many attempts to destroy them.
? CHAPTER X MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
The chief objection that will be urged against my views is that they cannot possibly be valid for all women. For some, or even for the majority, they will be accepted as true, but for the rest
It was not my original intention to deal with the different kinds of women. Women may be regarded from many different points of view, and, of course, care must be taken not to press too hardly what is true for one extreme type.
If the word character be accepted in its common, empirical
signification, then there are differences in women's char-
acters. All the properties of the male character find re-
markable analogies in the female sex (an interesting case
will be dealt with later on in this chapter) ; but in the male
the character is always deeply rooted in the sphere of the
intelligible, from which there has come about the lament-
able confusion between the doctrine of the soul and charac-
terology. Thecharacterologicaldifferencesamongstwomen
are not rooted so deeply that they can develop into indi-
viduality ^nd probably there is no female quality that in ;
the course of the life of a woman cannot be modified, repressed, or annihilated by the will of a man. ^
How far such differences in character may exist in cases that have the same degree of masculinity or of femininity I have not yet been at the pains to inquire. I have refrained deliberately from this task, because in my desire to prepare the way for a true orientation of all the difficult problems connected with my subject I have been anxious not to raise side issues or to burden the argument with collateral details.
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
The detailed characterology of women must wait for a detailed treatment, but even this work has not totally neglected the differences that exist amongst women ; I shall hope to be acquitted of false generalisations if it be remem- bered that what I have been saying relates to the female element, and is true in the same proportion that women possess that element. However, as it is quite certain that a particular type of woman will be brought forward in oppo-
sition to my conclusions, it is necessary to consider carefully that type and its contrasting type.
To all the bad and defamatory things that I have said about women, the conception of woman as a mother will certainly be opposed. But those who adduce this argu- ment will admit the justice of a simultaneous consideration of the type that is at the opposite pole from motherhood, as only in this way is it possible to define clearly in what motherhood consists and to delimit it from other types.
The type standing at the pole opposite to motherhood is theprostitute. Thecontrastisnotanymoremevitablethan the contrast between man and woman, and certain limits and restrictions will have to be made. But allowing for these, women will now be treated as falling into two types, sometimes having in them more of the one type, sometimes more of the other.
This dichotomy may be misunderstood if I do not distm- guish it from a contrast that is popularly made. It is often said that a woman should be both mother and mistress. I do not see the sense or the utility of the distinction involved
in the phrase. Is no more meant by "mistress" than the condition which of necessity must precede motherhood? If that is so, then no lasting characterological property is involved. For the word " mistress " tells us nothing about
a woman except that she is in a certain relation to a man. It has nothing to do with her real being ; it is something imposed on her from without. The conception of being loved tells us nothing about the nature of the person who is loved. Theconditionofbeingloved,whetherasmotheror mistress, is a merely accidental, external designation of the
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individual, whereas the quality of motherhood is something born in a woman, something deep-seated in her nature. It is this something that we must investigate.
That motherhood and prostitution are at extreme poles appears probable simply from the fact that motherly women bear far more children, whilst the frivolous have few child- dren, and prostitutes are practically sterile. It must be remembered, of course, that it is not only prostitutes who belong to the prostitute type ; very many so-called respect- able girls and married women belong to it. Accurate Analysis of the type will show that it reaches far beyond the mere women of the streets. The street-walker differs from the respectable coquette and the celebrated hetaira only through her incapacity for differentiation, her complete want of memory, and her habit of living from moment to moment. If there were but one man and one woman on the earth, the prostitute type would reveal itself in the rela- tions of the woman to the man.
This fact of limited fertility ought by itself to relieve me from the necessity of comparing my view of prostitution with the popular view that would derive what is really deep- seated in the nature of women from mere social conditions, from the poverty of women and the economic stress of a society arranged by males, from the difficulty ot women succeeding in a respectable career, or from the existence of a large bachelor class with the consequent demand for a system of prostitution. To these suggestions it may well be replied that prostitution is by no means confined to the poorer classes ; that women without any economic necessity have frequently given way to its appeal ; that there are many situations in shops, offices, post-offices, the telegraph and telephone services, wherever mere mechanical ability is required, where women are preferred because, from their iower degree of differentiation, their demands are smaller
;
and business men having discovered this in anticipation of science, readily employ them at a lower rate of wages. Young prostitutes have often quite as hard an economic battle to fight, as they must wear expensive clothes, and as
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 217
they are always charged excessively high rates for food and lodging. Prostitution is not a result of social conditions, but of some cause deep in the nature of women prostitutes
;
who have been "reclaimed" frequently, even if provided for, return to their old way of life. It is a curious circum- stance that prostitutes appear to be relatively immune to certain diseases which readily affect other types of women. I may note finally, that prostitution is not a modern growth
;
it has been known from the earliest times, and even was a part of some ancient religions, as, for instance, among the Phoenicians.
Prostitution cannot be considered as a state into which menhaveseducedwomen. Themanmayoccasionallybe to blame, as, for instance, when a servant is discharged and finds herself deserted. But where there is no inclination foracertaincourse,thecoursewillnotbeadopted. Pros- titution is foreign to the male element, although the lives of men are often more laborious and unpleasant than those of women, and male prostitutes (such as are found amongst waiters, barbers, and so on) are always advanced sexually intermediate forms. The disposition for and inclination to prostitution is as organic in a woman as is the capacity for motherhood.
Of course, I do not mean to suggest that, when any woman becomes a prostitute, it is because of an irresistible, inborn craving. Probably most women have both possi- bilities in them, the mother and the prostitute. What is to happen in cases of doubt depends on the man who is able to make the woman a mother, not merely by the physical act but by a single look at her. Schopenhauer said that a man's existence dates from the moment when his father and mother fell in love. That is not true. The birth of a human being, ideally considered, dates from the moment when the mother first saw or heard the voice of the father of her child. Biological and medical
science, under the influence of Johannes Mu? ller, Th. Bischof, and Darwin have been completely opposed, for the last sixty years, to the theory of " impression. " I may later attempt to develop
8
? 21 SEX AND CHARACTER
such a theory. For the present I shall remark only that it
is not fatal to the theory of impression that it does not agree with the view which regards the union of an ovum and spermatazoon as the only beginning of a new individual ? and science will have to deal with it instead of regarding
it l^ an a priori science such as mathematics, I may take it for
granted that even on the planet Jupiter 2 and 2 could not make 5, but biology deals only with propositions of relative universality. Although I support the theory of the existence of such a power of impression, it must not be supposed that I think that all malformations and abnormalities, or even any large number of them, are due to it. I go no further than to say that it is possible for the progeny to be influenced by a man, although physical relations between him and the mother have not taken place. And just as Schopenhauer and Goethe were correct in their theory of colour, although
they were in opposition to all the physicists of the past, present, and future, so Ibsen (in "The Lady from the Sea") and Goethe (in " Elective Affinities ") may be right against all the scientific men who deal with the problems of inheri- tance on a purely physical basis.
If a man has an influence on a woman so great that her children of whom he is not the father resemble him, he must be the absolute sexual complement of the woman in question. If such cases are very rare, il is only because there is not much chance of the absolute sexual com- plements meeting, and this is no argument against the truth of the views of Goethe and Ibsen to which I have just
referred.
It is a rare chance if a woman meets a man so completely
her sexual complement that his mere presence makes him the father of her children. And so it is conceivable in the case of many mothers and prostitutes that their fates have been reversed by accident. On the other hand, there must be many cases in which the woman remains true to. the maternal type without meeting the necessary man, and also cases where a woman, even although she meets the man,
as being opposed to all experience and so rejecting it.
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lay be driven none the less into the prostitute type by her atural instincts.
We have not to face the general occurrence of women as ne or other of two distinct inborn types, the maternal ype and the prostitute. The reality is found between the wo. There are certainly no women absolutely devoid of he prostitute instinct to covet being sexually excited by uiy stranger. And there are equally certainly no women ibsolutely devoid of all maternal instincts, although I con- ess that I have found more cases approaching the absolute
prostitute than the absolute mother.
/The essence of motherhood consists, as the most super-
ficial investigation will reveal, in that the getting of the child is the chief object of life, whereas in the prostitute sexual relations in themselves are the end. The investigation of the subject must be pursued by considering the relation of each type to the child and to sexual congress. X
Consider the relation to the child first. ^The absolute prostitute thinks only of the man ; the absolute mother thinks only of the child. The best test case is the relation tothedaughter. Itisonlywhenthereisnojealousyabout her youth or greater beauty, no grudging about the admira- tion she wins, but an identification of herself with her daughter so complete that she is as pleased about her child'sadmirersasif theywereherown,thatawomanhas a claim to the title of perfect mother.
The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only about the child, would become a mother by any man. It will be found that women who were devoted to dolls when they were children, and were kind and attentive to children in their own childhood, are least particular about their husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match who takes any notice of them and who satisfies their parents and relatives. When such a maiden has become a mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to pay any attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on the other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children ; later on, she may pretend to care for them as
;
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a means of attracting men through the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please all men ; and since there is no such thing as an ideally perfect type of mother, there are traces of this desire to please in every woman, as every man of the world will admit.
Here we can trace at least a formal resemblance between the two types. Both are careless as to the individuality of their sexual complement. The one accepts any possible man who can make her a mother, and once that has been achieved asks nothing more ; on this ground only is she to be described as monogamous. The other is ready to yield herself to any man who stimulates her erotic desires ; that is her only object. From this description of the two extreme types we may hope to gain some knowledge of the nature of actual women.
I have to admit that the popular opinion as to the mono- gamous nature of women as opposed to the essential polygamy of the male, an opinion I long held, is erroneous. The contrary is the case. One must not be misled by the fact that a woman will wait very long for a particular man, and where possible will choose him who can bestow most value on her, the most noble, the most famous, the ideal prince. Woman is distinguished by this desire for value from the animals, who have no regard for value either for themselves and through themselves, as in the case of a man, or for another and through another, as in the case of a woman^'' But this could be brought forward only by fools as in ariy way to the credit of woman, since, indeed, it shows most strongly that she is devoid of a feeling of personal value. Thedesireforthisdemandstobesatisfied,butdoes not find satisfaction in the moral idea of monogamy, /yhe man is able to pour forth value, to confer it on the woman he can give it, he wishes to give it, but he cannot receive it. The woman seeks to create as much personal value as pos-
sible for herself, and so adheres to the man who can give her most of it ; faithfulness of the man, however, rests on other grounds. He regards it as the completion of
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 221
ideal love, as a fulfilment, even although it is questionable if that could be attained. His faithfulness springs from the purely masculine conception of truth, the continuity demanded by the intelligible ego. ) One often hears it said that women are more faithful than men ; but man's faithful- ness is a coercion which he exercises on himself, of his own free will, and with full consciousness. He may not adhere to this self-imposed contract, but his falling away from it will seem as a wrong to himself. When he breaks his faith he has suppressed the promptings of his real nature. For the woman unfaithfulness is an exciting game, in which the thought of morality plays no part, but which is controlled only by the desire for safety and reputation. There is no wife who has not been untrue to her husband in thought, and yet no woman reproaches herself with this. For a woman pledges her faith lightly and without any full con- sciousness of what she does, and breaks it just as lightly and thoughtlessly as she pledged it. The motive for honouring a pledge can be found only in man ; for a woman does not understand the binding force of a given word. The examples of female faithfulness that can be adduced against this are of little value. They are either the slow result of the habit of sexual acquiescence, or a condition of actual slavery, dog-like, attentive, full of instinctive tenacious attachment, comparable with that necessity for actual contact which marks female sympathy.
The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of theCatholicChurch. I amnotgoingtodiscussthequestion of marriage or free-love. Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the world with marriage.
None the less marriage could have been invented only by
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man. No proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man's desire for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.
The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute element is strong will perceive her son's manhood and always stand in a sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother, there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her children and of a wife to her husband.
Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and unjust in the event of a quarrel.
\The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards that man who will afterwards become the father of her child ; in fact, in a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the mother- type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving wife; themothersformtheenduringroot-stockofourrace from which the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his own impermanence. '\^It is this idea which enables the man to see in the mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence. /'
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 223
In such minutes there may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, under- stands him, and takes care of him (Siegfried and Bru? nn- hilde, Act III. ). But this does not last long. (Siegfried tearshimselffromBru? nnhilde). Foramanonlycomesto his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him. The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books that have been written, the chapter on " Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Nature," in Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Idea," is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species is set down as the only real permanence.
(it IS the permanence of the race that gives the mother her courage and fearlessness in contrast with the coward- liness and fear of the prostitute. It is not the courage of individuality, the moral courage arising from an inner sense of freedom and personal value, but rather the desire that the race should be maintained which, acting through the mother, protects the husband and child. \ As courage and cowardice belong respectively to the mother and the prostitute, so is it with that other pair of contrasting ideas, hope and fear. The absolute mother stands in a persisting relationtohope; asshelivesonthroughtherace,shedoes not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting fear of it.
The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man ;
she knows herself to be his anchor ; as she is in a secure place, linked in the chain of the generations, she may be likened to a harbour trom which each new individual sails forth to wander on the high seas. From the moment of conception onwards the mother is psychically and physi- callyreadytofeedandprotectherchild. Andthisprotective
? SEX AND CHARACTER
superiority extends itself to her lover ; she understands all that is simple and naive and childlike in him, whilst the prostitute understands best his caprices and refinements, ^he mother has the craving to teach her child, to give him everything, even when the child is represented by the lover; the prostitute strives to impose herself on the man, to receiveeverythingfromhim. Themotherastheupholder of the race is friendly to all its members ; it is only when there is an exclusive choice to be made between her child and others that she becomes hard and relentless ; and so she can be both more full of love and more bitter than the prostitute. '>
The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of the race ; the prostitute is completely outside it. ^The motheristhesoleadvocateandpriestessoftherace^ The will of the race to live is embodied in her, whilst the exist- ence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was pushing a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality hadrelationonlytothefuturegeneration. Thatthemother cares only for the life of her own race is plain from the absence of consideration for animals shown by the best of mothers. A good mother, with the greatest peace of mind and content, willslaughterfowlafterfowlforherfamily. Themotherof children is a cruel step-mother to all other living things.
Another striking aspect of the mother's relation to the preservation of the race reveals itself in the matter of food. She cannot bear to see food wasted, however little may be left over ; whilst the prostitute wilfully squanders the quan- tities of food and drink she demands. The mother is stingy and mean ; the prostitute open-handed and lavish, (^he mother's object in life is to preserve the race, and her delight is to see her children eat and to encourage their appetites. Andsoshebecomesthegoodhousekeeper. Cereswasa good mother, a fact expressed in her Greek name, Demeter. The mother takes care of the body, but does not trouble about the mind. * The relation between mother and child
224
(*^^ Compare the conversation in Ibsen*s "Peer Gynt," Act ii. ,
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
225
remains material from the kissing and hugging of childhood to the protective care of maturity. All her devotion is for the success and prosperity of her child in material things. )
Maternal love, then, cannot be truly represented as resting on moral grounds. Let any one ask himself if he does not believe that his mother's love would not be just as great for him if he were a totally different person. The indi- viduality of the child has no part in the maternal love
; the mere fact of its being her own child is sufficient, and so
the love cannot be regarded as moral. In the love of a man for a woman, or between persons of the same sex, there is always some reference to the personal qualities of theindividual; amother'sloveextendsitselfindifferentlyto anything that she has borne. It destroys tlje moral con- ception if we realise that the love of a mother for her child remains the same whether the child becomes a saint or a sinner, a king or a beggar, an angel or a fiend. Precisely the same conclusion will be reached from reflecting how children think that they have a claim on their mother's love simply because she is their mother, "paternal love is non- moral because it has no relation to the individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an ethical relation only between two individualities^ The relation of motherandchildisalwaysakindofphysicalreflex. Ifthe little one suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in the next room, she will at once rush to it as if she herself had been hurt ; and, as the children grow up, every wish or trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared by the mother as if they were her own. There is an unbreakable link between the mother and child, physical, like the cord
that united the two before childbirth. This is the real nature of the maternal relation ; and, for my part, I protest
between the father of Solveig and Aase (perhaps the best-drawn mother in all literature) when they were discussing the search for their son :
Aase. " We shall find him. "
Her Husband. " And save his soul. " Aase, " And his body. "
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against the fashion in which it is praised, its very indis- criminate character being made a merit. I believe myself that many great artists have recognised this, but have chosen to be silent about it. The extraordinary over-praising of Raphael is losing ground, and the singers of maternal love are no higher than Fischart or Richepin.
Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin ; for all morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having no free will, do not possess, ^he ethical imperative can be heard only by a rational creature ; there is no such thing as natural morality, for all morality must be self-conscious>
Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain of beings that passes through her, place the prostitute in a sense above the mother, so far at least as it is possible to speak of higher or lower from the ethical point of view when women are being discussed.
The matron whose whole time is taken up in looking after her husband and children, who is working in, or superin- tending the work of, the house, garden, or other forms of labour, ranks intellectually very low. The most highly- developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in poetry, belong to the prostitute category ; to these, the Aspasia-type, must be added the women of the romantic
school, foremost among whom must be placed Karoline Michaelis-Bo? hmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling.
It coincides with what has been said that only those men are sexually attracted by the mother-type who have no desire formentalproductivity. Themanwhosefatherhoodiscon- fined to the children of his loins is he whom we should expect to choose the motherly productive woman. Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.