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SEX ^ CHARACTER 
 
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SEX &• CHARACTER 
 
SEX 
 
 AND 
 
 CHARACTER 
 
 By Otto Weininger 
 
 Authorised Translation 
 FROM THE Sixth German Edition 
 
 A. L. BURT COMPANY, Publishers 
 New York Chicago 
 
 rUBLISBED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH C. P. rUTNAlt't lOMt 
 rRINTED IN V. S. A. 
 
Made in the United States of America 
 
NOTE TO THE SIXTH GERMAN EDITION 
 (By the German Publisher) 
 
 There are few instances in the history of literature in which 
 a work so mature in its scientific purpose and so original in its 
 philosophic aspect as " Sex and Character " has been produced 
 by a student who was at the time of its completion less than 
 thirty years of age. " Sex and Character " was at once accepted 
 by scientific authorities, who had direct knowledge of its sub- 
 ject matter, as a book that demanded respectful consideration, 
 whether or not its conclusions might be accepted. It may at 
 once be admitted that the book is by no means in harmony with 
 contemporary thought. If the conclusions of Weininger should 
 be accepted, discu^^sions concerning the emancipation of women, 
 the relation of women to culture, and the results of sexuality 
 would be deprived of their foundation. In this treatise, we 
 have presented, with all the penetrating acumen of the trained 
 logician, a characterisation of sexual types, " M " (the ideal 
 man), and " W " (the ideal woman). The psychological phe- 
 nomena are traced back to a final source and the author under- 
 takes to present what he believes to be a definitive solution 
 altogether alien to the field of inquiry wherein the answer has 
 hitherto been sought. 
 
 In the science of characterology, here formuliited for the 
 first time, we have a strenuous scientific achievement of the 
 first importance. All former psychologies have been the psy- 
 chology of the male, written by men, and more or less 
 consciously applicable only to man as distinguished from 
 humanity. " Woman does not betray her secret," said Kant, 
 and this has been true till now. But now she has revealed it 
 — ^by the voice of a man. The things women say about them- 
 selves have been suggested by men ; they repeat the discoveries, 
 more or less real, which men have made about them. By a 
 
VI PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 highly original method of analysis, a man has succeeded for 
 the first time in giving scientific and abstract utterance to that 
 which only some few great artists have suggested by concrete 
 images hitherto. Weininger, working out an original system 
 of characterology (psychological typology) rich in prospective 
 possibilities, undertook the construction of a universal psy- 
 chology of woman which penetrates to the nethermost depths, 
 and is based not only on a vast systematic mastery of scientific 
 knowledge, but on what can only be described as an appalling 
 comprehension of the feminine soul in its most secret recesses. 
 This newly created method embraces the whole domain of 
 human consciousness ; research must be carried out on the lines 
 laid down by Nature — in three stages, and from three distinct 
 points of view : the biologico-physiological, the psychologically 
 descriptive, and the philosophically appreciative. I will not 
 dwell here on the equipment essential for such a task, the neces- 
 sary combination of a comprehensive knowledge of natural 
 history with a minute and exhaustive mastery of psychological 
 and philosophical science — a combination destined, perhaps, to 
 prove unique. 
 
 The general characterisation of the ideal woman, " W," is 
 followed by the construction of individual types, which are 
 finally resolved into two elemental figures (Platonic concep- 
 tions to some extent), the Courtesan and the Mother. These 
 are differentiated by their pre-occupation with the sexual act 
 (the main, and ir^the ultimate sense, sole interest of " W"), 
 in the first case, as an end in itself, in the second as the process 
 which results in the possession of a child. The abnormal type, 
 the hysterical woman, leads up to a psychological (not physio- 
 logical) theory of hysteria, which is acutely and convincingly 
 defined as " the organic mendacity of woman." 
 
 Weininger himself attached the highest importance to the 
 ethico-philosophical chapters that conclude his work, in which 
 he passes from the special problem of sexuality to the problems 
 of individual talent, genius, aesthetics, memory, the ego, the 
 Jewish race, and many others, nsing finally to the ultimate 
 logical and moral principles of judgment. From his most 
 universal standpoint he succeeds in estimating woman as a part 
 of humanity, and, above all, subjectively. Here he deliberately 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE vü 
 
 comes into sharp conflict with the fashionable tendencies 
 towards an unscientific monism and its accompanying phe- 
 nomena, pan-sexuality and the ethics of species, and charac- 
 terises very aptly the customary superficialities of the many 
 non-philosophical modern apostles, of whom Wilhelm Bölsche 
 and Ellen Key are perhaps the most representative types. 
 Weininger, in defiance of all reigning fashions, represents a 
 consolidated dualism, closely related to the eternal systems of 
 Plato, of Christianity, and of Kant, which finds an original 
 issue in a bitterly tragic conception of the universe. Richard 
 Wagner gives artistic expression in his Parsifal to the con- 
 ception Weininger sets forth scientifically. It is, in fact, 
 the old doctrine of the divine life and of redemption to which 
 the whole book, with its array of detail, is consecrated. In 
 Kundry, Weininger recognises the most profound conception 
 of woman in all literature. In her redemption by the spotless 
 Parsifal, the young philosopher sees the way of mankind 
 marked out; he contrasts with this the programme of the 
 modern feminist movement, with its superficialities and its lies ; 
 and so, in conclusion, the book returns to the problem, which, 
 in spite of all its wealth of thought, remains its governing idea : 
 the problem of the sexes and the possibility of a moral relation 
 between them — a moral relation fundamentally different from 
 what is commonly understood by the term, of course. In this 
 volume is revealed the mind of one who was, it may be believed, 
 a conscientious student, and to whom life brought only unhap- 
 piness and tragedy. No thoughtful man can lay down the book 
 without being impressed by the earnestness and the honesty 
 of the author's investigations. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 This book is an attempt to place the relations of Sex in a 
 new and decisive light. It is an attempt not to collect the 
 greatest possible number of distinguishing characters, or 
 to arrange into a system all the results of scientific measur- 
 ing and experiment, but to refer to a single principle the 
 whole contrast between man and woman. In this respect 
 the book differs from all other works on the same subject. 
 It does not linger over this or that detail, but presses on to 
 its ultimate goal ; it does not heap investigation on investi- 
 gation, but combmes the psychical differences between the 
 sexes into a system ; it deals not with women, but with 
 woman. It sets out, mdeed, from the most common and 
 obvious facts, but intends to reach a smgle, concrete prin- 
 ciple. This is not " inductive metaphysics " ; it is a gradual 
 approach to the heart of psychology. 
 
 The investigation is not of details, but of principles ; it 
 does not despise the laboratory, although the help of the 
 laboratory, with regard to the deeper problems, is limited 
 as compared with the results of introspective analysis. An 
 artist who wishes to represent the female form can construct 
 a type without actually giving formal proof by a series of 
 measurements. The artist does not despise experimental 
 results ; on the contrary, he regards it as a duty to gain 
 experience ; but for him the collection of experimental 
 knowledge is merely a starting-point for self-exploration, 
 and in art self-exploration is exploration of the world. 
 
 The psychology used in this exposition is purely philo- 
 sophical, although its characteristic method, justified by the 
 subject, is to set out from the most trivial details of ex- 
 perience. The task of the philosopher differs from that of 
 
X AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 the artist in one important respect. The one deals in sym- 
 bols, the other in ideas. Art and philosophy stand to one 
 another as expression and meaning. The artist has breathed 
 in the world to breathe it out again ; the philosopher has 
 the world outside him and he has to absorb it. 
 
 There is always something pretentious in theory ; and the 
 real meaning — which in a work of art is Nature herself and 
 in a philosophical system is a much condensed generalisa- 
 tion, a thesis going to the root of the matter and proving 
 itself — appears to strike against us harshly, almostoffensively. 
 Where my exposition is anti-feminine, and that is nearly 
 everywhere, men themselves will receive it with little hearti- 
 ness or conviction ; their sexual egoism makes them prefer 
 to see woman as they would like to have her, as they would 
 like her to be. 
 
 I need not say that I am prepared for the answer women 
 will have to the judgment I have passed on their sex. My 
 investigation, indeed, turns against man in the end, and 
 although in a deeper sense than the advocates of women's 
 rights could anticipate, assigns to man the heaviest and 
 most real blame. But this will help me little and is of such 
 a nature that it cannot in the smallest way rehabilitate me 
 in the minds of women. 
 
 The analysis, however, goes further than the assignment 
 of blame ; it rises beyond simple and superficial phenomena 
 to heights from which there opens not only a view into the 
 nature of woman and its meaning in the universe, but also 
 the relation to mankind and to the ultimate and most lofty 
 problems. A definite relation to the problem of Culture is 
 attained, and we reach the part to be played by woman in 
 the sphere of ideal aims. There, also, where the problems 
 of Culture and of Mankind coincide, I try not merely to 
 explain but to assign values, for, indeed, in that region 
 explanation and valuation are identical. 
 
 To such a wide outlook my investigation was as it were 
 driven, not deliberately steered, from the outset. The inade- 
 quacy of all empirical psychological philosophy follows 
 directly from empirical psychology itself. The respect for 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE xi 
 
 empirical knowledge will not be injured, but rather will the 
 meaning of such knowledge be deepened, if man recognises 
 in phenomena, and it is from phenomena that he sets out, 
 any elements assuring him that there is something behind 
 phenomena, if he espies the signs that prove the existence of 
 something higher than phenomena, something that supports 
 phenomena. We may be assured of such a first principle, 
 although no living man can reach it. Towards such a 
 principle this book presses and will not flag. 
 
 (Within the narrow limits to which as yet the problem of 
 woman and of woman's rights has been confined, there 
 has been no place for the venture to reach so high a goal. 
 None the less the problem is bound intimately with the 
 deepest riddles of existence. It can be solved, practically 
 or theoretically, morally or metaphysically, only in relation 
 to an interpretation of the cosmos. 
 
 Comprehension of the universe, or what passes for such, 
 stands in no opposition to knowledge of details ; on the 
 other hand all special knowledge acquires a deeper meaning 
 because of it. Comprehension of the universe is self- 
 creative ; it cannot arise, although the empirical knowledge 
 of every age expects it, as a synthesis of however great a 
 sum of empirical knowledge. 
 
 In this book there lie only the germs of a world-scheme, 
 and these are allied most closely with the conceptions of 
 Plato, Kant and Christianity. I have been compelled for 
 the most part to fashion for myself the scientific, psycho- 
 logical, philosophical, logical, ethical groundwork. I think 
 that at the least I have laid the foundations of many things 
 into which I could not go fully. I call special attention to 
 the defects of this part of my work because I attach more 
 importance to appreciation of what I have tried to say 
 about the deepest and most general problems than to the 
 interest which will certainly be aroused by my special 
 investigation of the problem of woman. 
 
 The philosophical reader may take it amiss to find a 
 treatment of the loftiest and ultimate problems coinciding 
 with the investigation of a special problem of no great 
 
xii AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 dignity ; I share with him this distaste. I may say, how- 
 ever, that I have treated throughout the contrast between 
 the sexes as the starting-point rather than the goal of my 
 research. The investigation has yielded a harvest rich in 
 its bearing on the fundamental problems of logic and their 
 relations to the axioms of thought, on the theory of aesthetics, 
 of love, and of the beautiful and the good, and on problems 
 such as individuality and morality and their relations, on 
 the phenomena of genius, the craving for immortality and 
 Hebraism. Naturally these comprehensive interrelations aid 
 the special problem, for, as it is considered from so many 
 points of view, its scope enlarges. And if in this wider 
 sense it be proved that culture can give only the smallest 
 hope for the nature of woman, if the final results are a 
 depreciation, even a negation of womanhood, there will be 
 no attempt in this to destroy what exists, to humble what 
 has a value of its own. Horror of my own deed would 
 overtake me were I here only destructive and had I left only 
 a clean sheet. Perhaps the affirmations in my book are less 
 articulate, but he that has ears to hear will hear them. 
 
 The treatise falls into two parts, the first biological- 
 psychological, the second logical-philosophical. It may be 
 objected that I should have done better to make two books, 
 the one treating of purely physical science, the other intro- 
 spective. It was necessary to be done with biology before 
 turnmg to psychology. The second part treats of certain 
 psychical problems in a fashion totally different from the 
 method of any contemporary naturalist, and for that reason 
 I think that the removal of the first part of the book would 
 have been at some risk to many readers. Moreover, the 
 first part of the book challenges an attention and criticism 
 from natural science possible in a few places only in the 
 second part, which is chiefly introspective. Because the 
 second part starts from a conception of the universe that is 
 anti-positivistic, many will think it unscientific (although 
 there is given a strong proof against Positivism). For the 
 present I must be content with the conviction that I have 
 rendered its due to Biology, and that I have established 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE xiii 
 
 an enduring position for non-biological, non-physiological 
 psychology. 
 
 'My investigation may be objected to as in certain points 
 not being supported by enough proof, but I see little force 
 in such an objection. For in these matters what can 
 " proof " mean ? I am not dealing with mathematics or 
 with the theory of cognition (except with the latter in two 
 cases) ; I am dealing with empirical knowledge, and in that 
 one can do no more than point to what exists ; in this 
 region proof means no more than the agreement of new 
 experience with old experience, and it is much the same 
 whether the new phenomena have been produced experi- 
 mentally by men, or have come straight from the creative 
 hand of nature. Of such latter proofs my book contains 
 many. 
 
 Finally, I should like to say that my book, if I may be 
 allowed to judge it, is for the most part not of a quality to 
 be understood and absorbed at the first glance. I point out 
 this myself, to guide and protect the reader. 
 
 The less I found myself able in both parts of the book 
 (and especially in the second) to confirm what now passes 
 for knowledge, the more anxious I have been to point out 
 coincidences where I found myself in agreement with what 
 has already been known and said. 
 
 I have to thank Professor Dr. Laurenz Müllner for the great 
 assistance he has given me, and Professor Dr. Friedrich 
 Jodl for the kindly interest he has taken in my work from 
 the beginning. I am specially indebted to the kind friends 
 who have helped me with correction of the proofs. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Author's Preface to the First German Edition . . ix 
 
 FIRST OR PREPARATORY PART 
 SEXUAL COMPLEXITY 
 
 Introduction 
 
 On the development of general conceptions — Male and female 
 — Contradictions — Transitional forms — Anatomy and natural 
 endowment — Uncertainty of anatomy 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Males and Females 5 
 
 Embryonic neutral condition — Rudiments in the adult — 
 Degrees of " gonochorism " — Principle of intermediate forms — 
 Male and female — Need for typical conceptions — Resum6 — 
 Early anticipations 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Male and Female Plasmas XI 
 
 Position of sexuality — Steenstrup's view adopted — Sexual 
 characters — Internal secretions — Idioplasm — Arrhenoplasm 
 — Thely plasm — Variations — Proofs from the effects of cas- 
 tration — Transplantation and transfusion — Organotherapy — 
 Individual differences between eells — Origin of intermediate 
 sexual conditions — Brain — Excess of male births — Determi- 
 nation of sex — Comparative pathology 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Pofe 
 
 The Laws of Sexual Attractiom ... . . «6 
 
 Sexual preference — Probability of these being controlled by a 
 law — First formula — First interpretation —Proofs — Hetero- 
 stylism — Interpretation of heterostylism — Animal kingdom — 
 Further laws — Second formula — Chemotaxis — Resemblances 
 and differences — Goethe, " elective affinities — Marriage and 
 free love — Effects on progeny 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Homo-sexuality and Pederasty 45 
 
 Homo-sexuals as intermediate forms — Inborn or acquired, 
 healthy or diseased ? — A special instance of the law of attrac- 
 tion — All men have the rudiments of homo-sexuality — Friend- 
 ship and sexuality — Animals — Failure of medical treatment 
 — Homo-sexuality, punishment and ethics — Distinction 
 between homo-sexuality and pederasty 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Science of Character and the Science of Form . 53 
 
 Principle of sexually intermediate forms as fundamental prin- 
 ciple ol the psychology rf>f individuals — Simultaneity or 
 periodicity ? — Methods of psychological investigation — 
 EJcamples — Individualised education — Conventionalising— 
 Parallelism between morphology and characterology — Phy- 
 siognomy and the principles of psycho-physics — Method of 
 the doctrine of variation — A new way of stating the prob- 
 lem — Deductive morphology — Correlation — Outlook 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Emancipated Women ... 64 
 
 The woman question— Claim for emancipation and maleness^ 
 Emancipation and homo-sexuality — Sexual preferences of 
 emancipated women — Physiognomy of emancipated women — 
 Other celebrated womeo — Femaleness and emancipation — 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 Pagt 
 
 Practical rules — Genius essentially male — Movements of 
 women in historical times — Periodicity — Biology and the 
 conception of history — Outlook of the woman movement — 
 Its fundamental error 
 
 SECOND OR PRINCIPAL PART 
 
 THE SEXUAL TYPES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Man and Woman 
 
 79 
 
 Bisexuality and unisexuality — Man or woman, male or female 
 — Fundamental difficulty in characterology — Experiment, 
 analysis of sensation and psychology — Dilthey — Conception 
 of empirical character — What is and what is not the object 
 of psychology — Character and individuality — Problem of 
 characterology and the problem of the sexes 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Male and Female Sexuality 85 
 
 The problem of a female psychology — Man as the interpreter 
 of female psychology — Differences in the sexual impulse — 
 The absorbing and liberating factors — Intensity and activity 
 — Sexual irritability of women — Larger field of the sexual life 
 in woman — Local diff'erences in the perception of sexuality — 
 Local and periodical cessation of male sexuality — Differ- 
 ences in the degrees of consciousness of sexuality 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Male and Female Consciousness 93 
 
 Sensation and feeling — Avenarius' division into " element " 
 and '• character." These inseparable at the earliest stage — 
 Process of " clarification " — Presentiments — Grades of under- 
 standing — Forgetting — Paths and organisation — Conception 
 of " henids " — The henid as the simplest, psychical datum 
 — Sexual differences in the organisation of the contents of 
 
 b 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 the mind— Sensibility— Certainty of judgment — Developed 
 consciousness as a male character 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Talent and Genius 
 
 Genius and talent— Genius and giftedness — Methods — Com- 
 prehension of many men — What is meant by comprehending 
 men — Great complexity of genius — Periods in psychic hfe — 
 No disparagement of famous men — Understanding and notic- 
 ing — Universal consciousness of genius — Greatest distance 
 from the henid stage — A higher grade of maleness — Genius 
 always universal — The female devoid of genius or of hero- 
 worship — Giftedness and sex 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Talent and Memory 
 
 Organisation and the power of reproducing thoughts — Memory 
 of experiences a sign of genius — Remarks and conclusions — 
 Remembrance and apperception — Capacity for comparison 
 and acquisition — Reasons for the masculinity of music, 
 drawing and painting — Degrees of genius — Relation of genius 
 to ordinary men — Autobiography — Fixed ideas — Remem- 
 brance of personal creations — Continuous and discontinu- 
 ance memory — Continuity and piety — Past and present — 
 Past and future — Desire for immortality — Existing psycho- 
 logical explanations — True origin — Inner development of 
 man until death — Ontogenetic psychology or theoretical 
 biography— Woman lacking in the desire for immortality — 
 Further extension of relation of memory to genius — Memory 
 and time — Postulate of timelessness — Value as a timeless 
 quality — First law of the theory of value — Proofs — Individua- 
 tion and duration constituents of value — Desire for immor- 
 tality a special case — Desire for immortality in genius con- 
 nected with timelessness, by his universal memory and the 
 duration of his creations — Genius and history — Genius and 
 nations — Genius and language — Men of action and men of 
 science, not to be called men of genius — Philosophers, 
 founders of reUgion and artists have genius 
 
 Pmft 
 
CONTENTS xix 
 
 Page 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Memory, Logic and Ethics . 14a 
 
 Psychology and " psychologismus " — Value of memory — 
 Theory of memory — Doctrines of practice and of association 
 — Confusion with recognition —Memory peculiar to man — 
 Moral significance — Lies — Transition to logic— Memory and 
 the principle of identity — Memory and the syllogism — 
 Woman non-logical and non-ethical — Intellectual and moral 
 knowledge — The intelligible ego 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Logic, Ethics and the Ego 153 
 
 Critics of the conception of the Ego — Hume: Lichtenberg, 
 Mach — The ego of Mach and biology — Individuation and 
 individuaUty — Logic and ethics as witnesses for the exist- 
 ence of the ego — Logic — Laws of identity and of contraries 
 — Their use and significance — Logical axioms as the laws of 
 essence — Kant and Fichte — Freedom of thought and freedom 
 of the will — Ethics — Relation to logic — The psychology of 
 the Kantian ethics — Kant and Nietzsche 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The •' I " Problem and Genius 165 
 
 Characterology and the belief in the *' I " — Awakening of the 
 ego — Jean Paul, Novalis, Schelling — The awakening of the 
 ego and the view of the world — Self -consciousness and arro- 
 gance — The view of the genius to be more highly valued 
 than that of other men — Final statements as to the idea of 
 genius — The personality of the genius as the perfectly- con- 
 scious microcosm — The naturally- synthetic activity of genius 
 — Significant and symbolical — Definition of the genius in 
 relation to ordinary men — Universality as freedom — Morality 
 or immoraUty of genius ? — Duties towards self and others — 
 What duty to another is — Criticism of moral sympathy and 
 social ethics — Understanding of other men as the one require- 
 
XX CONTENTS 
 
 ment of morality and knowledge — I and thou — Individualism 
 and universalism — Morality only in monads — The man of 
 greatest genius as the most moral man — Why man is faop 
 voXiTiKov — Consciousness and morality — The great criminaf 
 — Genius as duty and submission — Genius and crime — 
 Genius and insanity — Man as his own creator 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Male and Female Psychology i86^ 
 
 SouUessness of woman — History of this knowledge — Woman 
 devoid of genius — No masculine women in the true sense — 
 The unconnectedness of woman's nature due to her want of 
 an ego — Revision of the henid-theory — Female " thought " 
 — Idea and object — Freedom of the object — Idea and judg- 
 ment — Nature of judgment — Woman and truth as a criterion 
 of thought — Woman and logic — Woman non-moral, not 
 immoral — Woman and soUtude — Womanly sympathy and 
 modesty — The ego of women — Female vanity — Lack of true 
 self-appreciation — Memory for compliments — Introspection 
 and repentance — Justice and jealousy — Name and individu- 
 aUty — Radical difference between male and female mental 
 life — Psychology with and without soul — Is psychology a 
 science ? — Soul and psychology — Problem of the influence of 
 the psychical sexual characters of the male or the female 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Motherhood and Prostitution «14 
 
 Special characterology of woman — Mother and prostitute — 
 Relation of two types to the child — Woman polygamous — 
 Analogies between motherhood and sexuality — Motherhood 
 and the race — Maternal love ethically indifferent — The pros- 
 titute careless of the race — The prostitute, the criminal and 
 the conqueror — Emperor and prostitute — Motive of the pros- 
 titute — Coitus an end in itself — Coquetry — The sensations of 
 the woman in coitus in relation to the rest of her life — The 
 prostitute as the enemy — The friend of life and its enemy — 
 No prostitution amongst animals — Its origin a mystery 
 
CONTENTS xxi 
 
 Fage 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Erotics and iEsxHETics 236 
 
 Women, and the hatred of women — Erotics and sexuality — 
 Platonic love — The idea of love — Beauty of women — Relation 
 to sexual impulse — Love and beauty — Difference between 
 aesthetics, logic and ethics — Modes of love — Projection phe- 
 nomena — Beauty and morality — Nature and ethics — Natural 
 and artistic beauty — Sexual love as guilt — Hate, love and 
 morality — Creation of the devil — Love and sympathy — Love 
 and shyness — Love and vanity — Love of woman as a means to 
 an end — Relation between the child and love, the child and 
 sexuahty — Love and murder — Madonna-worship — Madonna, 
 a male idea, without basis in womanhood — Woman sexual, 
 not erotic — Sense of beauty in women — How man acts on 
 woman — The fate of the woman — Why man loves woman 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 The Nature of Woman and Her Significance in the 
 
 Universe 252 
 
 Meaning of womanhood — Instinct for pairing or matchmaking 
 — Man, and matchmaking — High valuation of coitus — Indi- 
 vidual sexual impulse, a special case — Womanhood as pairing 
 or universal sexuality — Organic falseness of woman — 
 Hysteria — Difference between man and beast, woman and 
 man — The higher and lower life — Birth and death — Freedom 
 and happiness — Happiness and man — Happiness and woman 
 — Woman and the problem of existence — Non-existence of 
 woman — Male and female friendship — Pairing identical with 
 womanhood — Why women must be regarded as human — 
 Gantrast between subject — Object, matter, form, man, 
 woman — Meaning of henids — Formation of woman by man 
 — Significance of woman in the universe — Man as something, 
 woman as nothing — Psychological problem of the fear of 
 woman — Womanhood and crime — Creation of woman by 
 man's crime — Woman as his own sexuality accepted by man 
 — Woman as the guilt of man — What man's love of woman is. 
 in its deepest significance 
 
xxü CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XIII ^'^ 
 
 Judaism 301 
 
 Differences amongst men — Intermediate forms and racial 
 anthropology — Comparison of Judaism and femaleness 
 — Jud.dsm as an idea — Antisemitism — Rictiard Wagner — 
 Similarities between Jews and women — Judaism in science — 
 The Jew not a monad — The Jew and the Englishman — 
 Natureof humour — Humour and satire — The Jewess — Deepest 
 significance of Judaism — Want of faith — The Jew not non- 
 mystical, yet impious — Want of earnestness, and pride — The 
 Jew as opposed to the hero — Judaism and Christianity — 
 Origin of Christianity — Problem of the founders of religion 
 — Christ as the conqueror of the Judaism in Himself — The 
 founders of religions as the greatest of men — Conquest of 
 inherent Judaism necessary for all founders of reUgion — 
 Judaism and the present time — Judaism, femaleness, culture 
 and humanity 
 
 CHAP I ER XIV 
 
 Woman and Mankind 331 
 
 The idea of humanity, and woman as the match-maker — 
 Goethe-worship — Womanising of man — Virginity and purity 
 — Male origin of these ideas - Failure of woman to understand 
 the erotic — Woman's relation to sexuality — Coitus and love 
 — Woman as the enemy of her own emancipation — Asceticism 
 immoral — Sexual impulse as a want of respect — Problem of 
 the Jew — Problem of the woman — Problem of slavery — Moral 
 relation to women — Man as the opponent of emancipation — 
 Ethical postulates — Two possibilities — The problem of 
 women as the problem of humanity — Subjection of women — 
 Persistence or disappearance of the human race — True 
 ground of the immorality of the sexual impulse — Earthly 
 paternity — Inclusion of women in the conception of humanity 
 — The mother and the education of the human race — Last 
 questions 
 
 Index • 350 
 
FIRST OR PREPARATORY PART 
 SEXUAL COMPLEXITY 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 All thought begins with conceptions to a certain extent 
 generalised, and thence is developed in two directions. On 
 the one hand, generalisations become wider and wider, 
 binding together by common properties a larger and larger 
 number of phenomena, and so embracing a wider field of 
 the world of facts. On the other hand, thought approaches 
 more closely the meeting-point of all conceptions, the 
 individual, the concrete complex unit towards which w^e 
 approach only by thinking in an ever-narrowing circle, and 
 by continually being able to add new specific and differen- 
 tiating attributes to the general idea, " thing," or " some- 
 thing." It was known that fishes formed a class of the 
 animal kingdom distinct from mammals, birds, or inverte- 
 brates, long before it was recognised on the one hand that 
 fishes might be bony or cartilaginous, or on the other that 
 fishes, birds and mammals composed a group differing from 
 the invertebrates by many common characters. 
 
 The self-assertion of the mind over the world of facts 
 in all its complexity of innumerable resemblances and 
 differences has been compared with the rule of the struggle 
 for existence among living beings. Our conceptions stand 
 between us and reality. It is only step by step that we 
 can control them. As in the case of a madman, we may first 
 have to throw a net over the whole body so that some 
 limit may be set to his struggles ; and only after the whole 
 has been thus secured, is it possible to attend to the proper 
 restraint of each limb. 
 
 Two general conceptions have come down to us from 
 primitive mankind, and from the earliest times have held 
 our mental processes in their leash. Many a time these 
 
 A 
 
2 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 conceptions have undergone trivial corrections ; they have 
 been sent to the workshop and patched in head and limbs ; 
 they have been lopped and added to, expanded here, con- 
 tracted there, as when new needs pierce through and 
 through an old law of suffrage, bursting bond after bond. 
 None the less, in spite of all amendment and alteration, we 
 have still to reckon with the primitive conceptions, male 
 and female. 
 
 It is true that among those we call women are some who 
 are meagre, narrow-hipped, angular, muscular, energetic, 
 highly mentalised ; there are " women " with short hair and 
 deep voices, just as there are " men " who are beardless and 
 gossiping. We know, in fact, that there are unwomanly 
 women, man-like women, and unmanly, womanish, woman- 
 like men. \We assign sex to human beings from their birth 
 on one character only, and so come to add contradictory 
 ideas to our conceptions. Such a course is illogical/ 
 
 In private conversation or in society, in scientific or 
 general meetings, we have all taken part in frothy discus- 
 sions on " Man and Woman," or on the " Emancipation of 
 Women." There is a pitiful monotony in the fashion 
 according to which, on such occasions, " men " and 
 "women" have been treated as if, like red and white balls, 
 they were alike in all respects save colour. In no case 
 has the discussion been confined to an individual case, and 
 as every one had different individuals in their mind, a real 
 agreement was impossible. As people meant different things 
 by the same words, there was a complete disharmony be- 
 tween language and ideas. Is it really the case that all 
 women and men are marked off sharply from each other, 
 the women, on the one hand, alike in all points, the men on 
 the other ? It is certainly the case that all previous treat- 
 ment of the sexual differences, perhaps unconsciously, has 
 implied this view. And yet nowhere else in nature is there 
 such a yawning discontinuity. There are transitional forms 
 between the metals and non-metals, between chemical com- 
 binations and mixtures, between animals and plants, between 
 phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 birds. It is only in obedience to the most general, practical 
 demand for a superficial view that we classify, make sharp 
 divisions, pick out a single tune from the continuous melody 
 of nature. But the old conceptions of the mind, like the 
 customs of primitive commerce, become foolish in a new 
 age. From the analogies I have given, the improbability 
 may henceforward be taken for granted of finding in nature 
 a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one 
 side and all that is feminine on the other ; or that a living 
 being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly 
 on one side or the other of the line. Matters are not so 
 clear. 
 
 In the controversy as to the woman question, appeal has 
 been made to the arbitration of anatomy, in the hope that 
 by that aid a line could be drawn between those characters 
 of males or females that are unalterable because inborn, 
 and those that are acquired. (It was a strange adventure to 
 attempt to decide the differences between the natural 
 endowment of men and women on anatomical results ; 
 to suppose that if all other investigation failed to establish 
 the difference, the matter could be settled by a few more 
 grains of brain-weight on the one side.) ^However, the 
 answer of the anatomists is clear enough, whether it refer 
 to the brain or to any other portion of the body ; absolute 
 sexual distinctions between all men on the one side and all 
 women on the other do not exist) Although the skeleton of 
 the hand of most men is different from that of most women, 
 yet the sex cannot be determined with certainty either from 
 the skeleton or from an isolated part with its muscles, 
 tendons, skin, blood and nerves. The same is true of the 
 chest, sacrum or skull. And what are we to say of the 
 pelvis, that part of the skeleton in which, if anywhere, striking 
 sexual differences exist ? It is almost universally believed that 
 in the one case the pelvis is adapted for the act of parturition, 
 in the other case is not so adapted. And yet the character 
 of the pelvis cannot be taken as an absolute criterion of sex. 
 There are to be found, and the wayfarer knows this as well 
 as the anatomist, many women with narrow male-like pelves, 
 
4 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 and many men with the broad pelves of women. Are we 
 then to make nothing of sexual differences ? That would ; 
 imply, almost, that we could not distinguish between men 
 and women. 
 
 From what quarter are we to seek help in our problem ? 
 The old doctrine is insufficient, and yet we cannot make 
 shift without it. If the received ideas do not suffice, it 
 must be our task to seek out new and better guides. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 "MALES" AND "FEMALES" 
 
 In the widest treatment of most living things, a blunt separa- 
 tion of them into males or females no longer suffices for the 
 known facts. The limitations of these conceptions have 
 been felt more or less by many writers. The first purpose 
 of this work is to make this point clear. 
 
 I agree with other authors who, in a recent treatment of 
 the facts connected with this subject, have taken as a start- 
 ing-point what has been established by embryology regard- 
 ing the existence in human beings, plants, and animals of 
 an embryonic stage neutral as regards sex. 
 
 In the case of a human embryo of less than five weeks, 
 for instance, the sex to which it would afterwards beiong 
 cannot be recognised. In the fifth week of fcetal life pro- 
 cesses begin which, by the end of the fifth month of preg- 
 nancy, have turned the genital rudiments, at first alike m 
 the sexes, into one sex and have determined the sex of the 
 whole organism. The details of these processes need not 
 be described more fully here. It can be shown that how- 
 ever distinctly unisexual an adult plant, animal or human 
 being may be, there is always a certain persistence of the 
 bisexual character, <never a complete disappearance of the 
 characters of the andeveloped sex) Sexual differentiation, in 
 fact, is never complete. All the peculiarities of the male sex 
 may be present in the female in some form, however weakly 
 developed ; and so also the sexual characteristics of the 
 woman persist in the man, although perhaps they are not 
 so completely rudimentary. The characters of the other 
 sex occur in the one sex in a vestigial form. Thus, in the 
 
6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 case of human beings, in which our interest is greatest, to 
 take an example, it will be found that the most womanly 
 woman has a growth of colourless hair, known as "lanugo" 
 in the position of the male beard ; and in the most manly 
 man there are developed under the skin of the breast masses 
 of glandular tissue connected with the nipples. ^This con- 
 dition of things has been minutely investij^ated in the true 
 genital organs and ducts, the region called the " urino-geni- 
 tal tract," and in each sex there has been found a complete 
 but rudimentary set of parallels to the organs of the other 
 sex./ 
 
 These embryological conclusions can be brought into 
 relation with another set of facts. Haeckel has used the 
 word " gonochorism " for the separation ol the sexes, and 
 in different classes and groups of creatures different 
 degrees of gonochorism may be noted. Different kmds 
 of animals and plants may be distinguished by the extent 
 to which the characters of one sex are rudimentary in the 
 other. The most extreme case of sexual differentiation, the 
 sharpest gonochorism, occurs in sexual dimorphism, that is 
 to say, in that condition of affairs in which (as for instance 
 in some water-fleas) the males and females of the same 
 species differ as much or even more from each other as the 
 members of different species, or genera. There is not so 
 sharply marked gonochorism amongst vertebrates as in the 
 case of Crustacea or insects. Amongst the former there does 
 not exist a distinction betwee i m des and females so complete 
 as to reach sexual dimorphis n. A condition much more 
 frequent amongst them is the occurrence of forms inter- 
 mediate in regard to sex, what is called abnormal hermaph- 
 roditism ; whilst in certain fishes hermaphroditism is the 
 normal condition. 
 
 I must point out here that it must not be assumed that 
 there exist only extreme males with scanty remnants of the 
 female condition, extreme females with traces of the male, 
 hermaphrodite or transitional forms, and wide gaps between 
 these conditions. I am dealing specially with human beings, 
 but what I have to say of them might be applied, with more 
 
I "MALES" AND "FEMALES" 7 
 
 or less modification, to nearly all creatures in which sexual 
 reproduction takes place. 
 
 Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows : 
 There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male 
 and female — sexual transitional forms. In physical inquiries 
 an " ideal gas " is assumed, that is to say, a gas, the be- 
 haviour of which follows the law of Boyle-Guy-Lussac 
 exactly, although, in fact, no such gas exists, and laws are 
 deduced from this so that the deviations from the ideal laws 
 may be established in the case of actually existing gases. In 
 the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal 
 man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types, 
 although these types do not actually exist. Such types not 
 only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in 
 art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the 
 Platonic Idea. The science of physics investigates the 
 behaviour of bodies that are absolutely rigid or absolutely 
 elastic, in the full knowledge that neither the one nor the 
 other actually exists. The intermediate conditions actually 
 existing between the two absolute states of matter serve 
 merely as a starting-point for investigation of the *' types" 
 and in the practical application of the theory are treated 
 as mixtures and exhaustively analysed. So also there 
 exist only the intermediate stages between absolute males 
 and females, the absolute conditions never presenting them- 
 selves. 
 
 Let it be noted clearly that I am discussing the existence 
 not merely of embryonic sexual neutrality, but of a per- 
 manent bisexual condition. Nor am I taking into con- 
 sideration merely those intermediate sexual conditions, 
 those bodily or psychical hermaphrodites upon which, up 
 to the present, attention has been concentrated. In 
 ^'another respect my conception is new. Until now, in deal- 
 ing with sexual intermediates, only hermaphrodites were 
 considered ; as if, to use a physical analogy, there were in 
 between the two extremes a single group of intermediate 
 forms, and not an intervening tract equally beset with stages 
 in different degrees of transition. 
 
8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 The fact is that males and females are like two sub- 
 stances combined in different proportions, but with either 
 element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, 
 never either a man or a woman, but only the male con- 
 dition and the female condition. Any individual, " A " or 
 " B," is never to be designated merely as a man or a 
 woman, but by a formula showing that it is a composite 
 of male and female characters in different proportions, for 
 instance, as follows : 
 
 la'W Xß'M 
 
 always remembering that each of the factors a, a, ß, ß' must 
 be greater than o and less than unity. 
 
 Further proofs of the validity of this conception are 
 numerous, and I have already given, in the preface, a 
 few of the most general. We may recall the existence of 
 " men " with female pelves and female breasts, with narrow 
 waists, overgrowth of the hair of the head ; or of 
 " women " with small hips and flat breasts, with deep bass 
 voices and beards (the presence of hair on the chin is 
 more common than is supposed, as women naturally are at 
 pains to remove it ; I am not speaking of the special growth 
 that often appears on the faces of women who have reached 
 middle age). All such peculiarities, many of them coin- 
 ciding in the same individuals, are well known to doctors 
 and anatomists, although their general significance has not 
 been understood. 
 
 One of the most striking proofs of the view that I have 
 been unfolding is presented by the great range of numerical 
 variation to be found where sexual characters have been 
 measured either by the same or by different anthropological 
 or anatomical workers. The figures obtained by measuring 
 female characters do not begin where those got from males 
 leave off, but the two sets overlap. The more obvious this 
 uncertainty in the theory of sexual intermediate forms may 
 be, the more is it to be deplored in the interests of true 
 science. Anatomists and anthropologists of the ordinary 
 
« MALES " AND " FEMALES " 9 
 
 :ype have by no means striven against the scientific repre- 
 sentation of the sexual types, but as for the most part they 
 regarded measurements as the best indications, they were 
 overwhelmed with the number of exceptions, and thus, so 
 far, measurement has brought only vague and indefinite 
 results. 
 
 The course of statistical science, which marks off our in- 
 dustrial age from earlier times, although perhaps on account 
 of its distant relation to mathematics it has been regarded 
 as specially scientific, has in reality hindered the progress of 
 knowledge. It has dealt with averages, not with types. It 
 has not been recognised that in pure, as opposed to applied, 
 science it is the type that must be studied. And so those 
 who are concerned with the type must turn their backs on 
 the methods and conclusions of current morphology and 
 physiology. The real measurements and investigations of 
 details have yet to be made. Those that now exist are 
 inapplicable to true science. 
 
 Knowledge must be obtained of male and female by means 
 of a right construction of the ideal man and the ideal woman, 
 using the word ideal in the sense of typical, excluding judg- 
 ment as to value. When these types have been recognised 
 and built up we shall be in a position to consider individual 
 cases, and their analysis as mixtures in different proportions 
 will be neither difficult not fruitless. 
 
 I shall now give a summary of the contents of this chap- 
 ter. Living beings cannot be described bluntly as of one 
 sex or the other. The real world from the point of view of 
 sex may be regarded as swaying between two points, no 
 actual individual being at either point, but somewhere be- 
 tween the two. The task of science is to define the position 
 of any individual between these two points. The absolute 
 conditions at the two extremes are not metaphysical abstrac- 
 tions above or outside the world of experience, but their 
 construction is necessary as a philosophical and practical 
 mode of describing the actual world. 
 
 A presentiment of this bisexuality of life (derived from the 
 actual absence of complete sexual differentiation) is very old. 
 
10 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Traces of it may be found in Chinese myths, but it became 
 active in Greek thought. We may recall the mythical per- 
 sonification of bisexuality in the Hermaphroditos, the 
 narrative of Aristophanes in the Platonic dialogue, or in later 
 times the suggestion of a Gnostic sect (Theophites) that 
 primitive man was a " man-woman." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 
 
 The first thing expected of a book like this, the avowed 
 object of which is a complete revision of facts hitherto 
 accepted, is that it should expound a new and satisfactory 
 account of the anatomical and physiological characters of 
 the sexual types. Quite apart from the abstract question as 
 to whether the complete survey of a subject so enormous 
 is not beyond the powers of one individual, I must at once 
 disclaim any intention of making the attempt. I do not 
 pretend to have made sufficient independent investigations 
 in a field so wide, nor do I think such a review necessary 
 for the purpose of this book. Nor is it necessary to give a 
 compilation of the results set out by other authors, for 
 Havelock Ellis has already done this very well. Were I to 
 attempt to reach the sexual types by means of the probable 
 inferences drawn from his collected results, my work would 
 be a mere hypothesis and science might have been spared a 
 new book. The arguments in this chapter, therefore, will 
 be of a rather formal and general nature ; they will relate to 
 biological principles, but to a certain extent will lay stress 
 on the need for a closer investigation of certain definite 
 points, work which must be left to the future, but which 
 may be rendered more easy by my indications. 
 
 Those who know little of Biology may scan this section 
 hastily, and yet run little risk of failing to understand what 
 follows. 
 
 The doctrine of the existence of different degrees of 
 masculinity and femininity may be treated, in the first place, 
 on purely anatomical lines. Not only the anatomical form, 
 
12 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 but the anatomical position of male and female characters 
 must be discussed. The examples already given of irxual 
 differences in other parts of the body showed that sexuality 
 is not limited to the genital organs and glands. But where 
 are the limits to be placed ? Do they not reach beyond the 
 primary and secondary sexual characters ? In other words, 
 where does sex display itself, and where is it without 
 influence ? 
 
 Many points came to light in the last decade, which bring 
 fresh support to a theory first put forward in 1840, but 
 which at the time found little support since it appeared to 
 be in direct opposition to facts held as established alike 
 by the author of the theory and by his opponents. The 
 theory in question, first suggested by the zoologist J. J. S. 
 Steenstrup, of Copenhagen, ^^but since supported by many 
 others, is that sexual characters are present in every part 
 of the body.) 
 
 Ellis has collected the results of investigations on almost 
 every tissue of the body, which serve to show the universal 
 presence of sexual differences. It is plain that there is a 
 striking difference in the coloration of the typical male 
 and female. This fact establishes the existence of sexual 
 differences in the skin (cutis) and in the blood-vessels, and 
 also in the bulk of the colouring-matter in the blood and in 
 the number of red corpuscles to the cubic centimetre of the 
 blood fluid. Bischoff and Rudinger have proved the exist- 
 ence of sexual differences in brain weight, and more recently 
 Justus and Alice Gaule have obtained a similar result with 
 regard to such vegetative organs as the liver, lungs and 
 spleen. In fact, all parts of a woman, although in different 
 degrees in different zones, have a sexual stimulus for the 
 male organism, and similarly all parts of the male have their 
 effect on the female. 
 
 The direct logical inference may be drawn, and is sup- 
 ported by abundant facts, that every cell in the body is 
 sexually characteristic and has its definite sexual signifi- 
 cance. I may now add to the principle already laid down in 
 this book, of the universal presence of sexually intermediate 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 13 
 
 conditions, that these conditions may present different 
 degrees of development. Such a conception of the exist- 
 ence of different degrees of development in sexuality makes 
 it easy to understand cases of false hermaphroditism or even 
 of the true hermaphroditism, which, since the time of 
 Steenstrup, has been established for so many plants and 
 animals, although not certainly in the case of man. Steen- 
 strup wrote : " If the sex of an animal has its seat only in 
 the genital organs, then one might think it possible for an 
 animal really to be bisexual, if it had at the same time two 
 sets of sexual organs. But sex is not limited to one region, 
 it manifests itself not merely by the presence of certain 
 organs ; it pervades the whole being and shows itself in 
 every point. In a male body, everything down to the 
 smallest part is male, however much it may resemble the 
 correspondmg lemale part, and so also in the female the 
 smallest part is female. The presence of male and female 
 sexual organs in the same body would make the body 
 bisexual only if both sexes ruled the whole body and made 
 themselves manifest in every point, and such a condition, as 
 the manifestations of the sexes are opposing forces, would 
 result simply in the negation of sex in the body in question." 
 If, however, the principle of the existence of innumerable 
 sexually transitional conditions be extended to all the cells 
 of the body, and empirical knowledge supports such a view, 
 Steenstrup's difficulty is resolved, and hermaphroditism no 
 longer appears to be unnatural. There may be conceived 
 for every cell all conditions, from complete masculinity 
 through all stages of diminishing masculinity to its com- 
 plete absence and the consequent presence of complete 
 femininity. Whether we are to think of these gradations in 
 the scale of sexual differentiation as depending on two real 
 substances united in different proportions, or as a single 
 kind of protoplasm modified in different ways (as, for 
 instance, by different spatial dispositions of its molecules), 
 it were wiser not to guess. The first conception is difficult 
 to apply physiologically ; it is extremely difficult to imagine 
 that two sets of conditions should be able to produce the 
 
14 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 essential physiological similarities of two bodies, one with a 
 male and the other a female diathesis. The second view 
 recalls too vividly certain unfortunate speculations on 
 heredity. Perhaps both views are equally far from the 
 truth. At present empirical knowledge does not enable us 
 to say wherein the masculinity or the femininity of a cell 
 really lies, or to define the histological, molecular or 
 chemical differences which distinguish every cell of a male 
 from every cell of a female. Without anticipating any dis- 
 covery of the future (it is plain already, however, that the 
 specific phenomena of living matter are not going to be 
 referred to chemistry and physics), it may be taken for 
 granted that individual cells possess sexuality in different 
 degrees quite apart from the sexuality of the whole body. 
 Womanish men usually have the skin softer, and in them 
 the cells of the male organs have a lessened power of 
 division upon which depends directly the poorer develop- 
 ment of the male macroscopic characters. 
 
 The distribution of sexual characters affords an important 
 proof of the appearance of sexuality in different degrees. 
 Such characters (at least in the animal kingdom) may be 
 arranged according to the strength of their exciting influ- 
 ence on the opposite sex. To avoid confusion, I shall 
 make use of John Hunter's terms for classifying sexual 
 characters. The primordial sexual characters are the male 
 and female genital glands (testes and epididymis, ovaries 
 and epoophoron) ; the primary sexual characters are the 
 internal appendages of the sexual glands (vasa deferential 
 vesiculae seminales, oviducts and uterus), which may have 
 sexual characters quite distinct from those of the glands 
 and the external sexual organs, according to which alone 
 the sex of human beings is reckoned at birth (sometimes 
 quite erroneously, as I shall show) and their consequent fate 
 in life decided. After the primary, come all those sexual 
 characters not directly necessary to reproduction. Such 
 secondary sexual characters are best defined as those which 
 begin to appear at puberty, and which cannot be developed 
 except under the influence on the system of the internal 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 15 
 
 secretions of the genital glands. Examples of these are the 
 beards in men, the luxuriant growth of hair in women, the 
 i development of the mammary glands, the character of the 
 voice. As a convenient mode of treatment, and for practical 
 rather than theoretical reasons, certain inherited characters, 
 such as the development of muscular strength or of mental 
 obstinacy may be reckoned as tertiary sexual characters. 
 Under the designation "quaternary sexual characters" may 
 be placed such accessories as relative social position, differ- 
 ence in habit, mode of livelihood, the smoking and drinking 
 habit in man, and the dom -stic duties of women. All these 
 characters possess a- potent and direct sexual influence, and 
 in my opinion often may be reckoned with the tertiary 
 characters or even with the secondary. \This classification 
 of sexual characters must not be taken as implying a defi- 
 nite chain of sequence, nor must it be assumed that the 
 mental sexual characters either determine the bodily charac- 
 ters or are determined by them in some causal nexus. The 
 classification relates only to the strength of the exciting 
 influence on the other sex, to the order in time in which 
 this influence is exerted, and to the degree of certainty with 
 which the extent of the influence may be predicted.^ 
 
 Study of secondary sexual characters is bound up with 
 consideration of the eflfect of internal secretions of the 
 genital glands on general metabolism. The relation of this 
 influence or its absence (as in the case of artificially cas- 
 trated animals) has been traced out in the degree of de- 
 velopment of the secondary characters. The internal 
 secretions, however, undoubtedly have an influence on all 
 the cells of the body. This is clearly shown by the changes 
 which occur at puberty in all parts of the body, and not only 
 in the s ;■- of the secondary sexual characters. As a matter 
 of fact, ! internal secretions of all the glands must be 
 regard"(^ r iffecting all the tissues. 
 
 The inter'ial secretions of the genital glands must be 
 regarded as completing the sexuality of the individual. 
 Every eel' must be considered as possessing an original 
 sexuality, 10 which the influence of the internal secretion in 
 
i6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 sufficient quantity is the final determining condition under 
 the influence of which the cell acquires its final determinate 
 character as male or female. 
 
 The genital glands are the organs in which the sex of the 
 individual is most obvious, and in the component cells of 
 which it is most conspicuously visible. At the same time it 
 must be noted that the distinguishing characters of the 
 species, race and family to which an organism belongs are 
 also best marked in the genital cells. Just as Steenstrup, on 
 the one hand, was right in teaching that sex extends all over 
 the body and is not confined to the genital organs, so, on 
 the other hand, Naegeli, de Vries, Oskar Hertwig and others 
 have propounded the important theory, and supported it 
 by weighty arguments, that every cell in a multi-cellular 
 organism possesses a combination of the characters of its 
 species and race, but that these characters are, as it were, 
 specially condensed in the sexual cells. Probably this view 
 of the case will come to be accepted by all investigators, 
 since every living being owes its origin to the cleavage and 
 multiplication of a single cell. 
 
 Many phenomena, amongst which may be noticed 
 specially experiments on the regeneration of lost parts and 
 investigations into the chemical differences between the 
 corresponding tissues of nearly allied animals, have led the 
 investigators to whom I have just referred to conceive the 
 existence of an " Idioplasm," which is the bearer of the 
 specific characters, and which exists in all the cells of a 
 multi-cellular animal, quite apart from the purposes of re- 
 production. In a similar fashion I have been led to the 
 conception of an " Arrhenoplasm " (male plasm) and a 
 " Thelyplasm " (female plasm) as the two modes in which 
 the idioplasm of every bisexual organism may appear, and 
 which are to be considered, because of reasons which I 
 shall explain, as ideal conditions between which the actual 
 conditions always lie. Actually existing protoplasm is to be 
 thought of as moving from an ideal arrhenoplasm through 
 a real or imaginary indifferent condition (true hermaphro- 
 ditism) towards a protoplasm that approaches, but never 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 17 
 
 actually reaches, an ideal thelyplasm. This conception 
 brings to a point what I have been trying to say. I apolo- 
 gise for the new terms, but they are more than devices to 
 call attention to a new idea. 
 
 The proof that every single organ, and further, that every 
 single cell possesses a sexuality lying somewhere between 
 arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm, and further, that every cell 
 received an original sexual endowment definite in kind and 
 degree, is to be found in the fact that even in the same 
 organism the different cells do not always possess their 
 sexuality identical in kind and degree. In fact each cell of 
 a body neither contains the same proportion of M and 
 W nor is at the same approximation to arrhenoplasm or 
 thelyplasm ; similar cells of the same body may indeed lie 
 on different sides of the sexually neutral point. If, instead 
 of writing "masculinity" and "femininity" at length, we 
 choose signs to express these, and without any malicious 
 intention choose the positive sign ( + ) for M and the 
 negative ( — ) for W, then our proposition may be ex- 
 pressed as follows : The sexuality of the different cells of 
 the same organism differs not only in absolute quantity but 
 is to be expressed by a different sign. There are many men 
 with a poor growth of beard and a weak muscular develop- 
 ment who are otherwise t)^ically males ; and so also many 
 women with badly developed breasts are otherwise typically 
 womanly. There are womanish men with strong beards 
 and masculine women with abnormally short hair who 
 none the less possess well-developed breasts and broad 
 pelves. I know several men who have the upper part of 
 the thigh of a female with a normally male under part, and 
 some with the right hip of a male and the left of a female. 
 In most cases these local variations of the sexual character 
 affect both sides of the body, although of course it is only in 
 ideal bodies that there is complete symmetry about the 
 middle line. The degree to which sexuality displays itself, 
 however, as, for instance, in the growth of hair, is very often 
 unsymmetrical. This want of uniformity (and the sexual 
 manifestations never show complete uniformity) can hardly 
 
 B 
 
1 8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 depend on differences of the internal secretion ; for the 
 blood goes to all the organs, having in it the same amount 
 of the internal secretion; although different organs may 
 receive different quantities of blood, in all normal cases its 
 quality and quantity being proportioned to the needs of the 
 part. 
 
 Were we not to assume as the cause of these variations the 
 presence of a sexual determinant generally different in every 
 cell but stable from its earliest embryonic development, then 
 it would be simple to describe the sexuality of any individual 
 by estimating how far its sexual glands conformed to the 
 normal type of its sex, and the facts would be much simpler 
 than they really are. Sexuality, however, cannot be regarded 
 as occurring in an imaginary normal quantity distributed 
 equally all over an individual so that the sexual character of 
 any cell would be a measure of the sexual characters of 
 any other cells. Whilst, as an exception, there may occur 
 wide differences in the sexual characters of different cells 
 or organs of the same body, still as a rule there is the same 
 specific sexuality for all the cells. In fact it may be taken 
 as certain that an approximation to a complete uniformity 
 of sexual character over the whole body is much more 
 common than the tendency to any considerable divergences 
 amongst the different organs or still more amongst the 
 different cells. How far these possible variations may go 
 can be determined only by the investigation of individual 
 cases. 
 
 There is a popular view, dating back to Aristotle and 
 supported by many doctors and zoologists, that the castra- 
 tion of an animal is followed by the sudden appearance of 
 the characters of the other sex ; if the gelding of a male 
 were to bring about the appearance of female characteristics 
 then doubt would be thrown on the existence in every cell 
 of a primordial sexuality independent of the genital glands. 
 The most recent experimental results of Sellheim and 
 Foges, however, have shown that the type of a gelded male 
 is distinct from the female type, that gelding does not 
 induce the feminine character. It is better to avoid too 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 19 
 
 far-reaching and radical conclusions on this matter ; it may 
 be that a second latent gland of the other sex may awake 
 into activity and sexually dominate the deteriorating organ- 
 ism after the removal or atrophy of the normal gland. 
 There are many cases (too readily interpreted as instances 
 of complete assumption of the male character) in which 
 after the involution of the female sexual glands at the 
 climacteric the secondary sexual characters of the male are 
 acquired. Instances of this are the beard of the human 
 grandam, the occasional appearance of short antlers in old 
 does, or of a cock's plumage in an old hen. But such 
 changes are practically never seen except in association 
 with senile decay or with operative interference. 
 
 In the case of certain crustacean parasites of fish, how- 
 ever (the genera Cymothoa, Anilocra and Nerocila of the 
 family Cytnothoidce), the changes I have just mentioned are 
 part of the normal life history. These creatures are her- 
 maphrodites of a peculiar kind ; the male and female organs 
 co-exist in them but are not functional at the same period. 
 A sort of protandry exists ; each individual exercises first 
 the functions of a male and afterwards those of the female. 
 During the time of their activity as males they possess 
 ordinary male reproductive organs which are cast off when 
 the female genital ducts and brood organs develop. That 
 similar conditions may exist in man has been shown by 
 those cases of "eviratio" and " effeminatio " which the 
 sexual pathology of the old age of men has brought to 
 light. So also we cannot deny altogether the actual occur- 
 rence of a certain degree of effeminacy when the crucial 
 operation of extirpation of the human testes has been 
 performed.* On the other hand, the fact that the relation 
 is not universal or inevitable, that the castration of an 
 individual does not certainly result in the appearance of the 
 characters of the other sex, may be taken as a proof that 
 it is necessary to assume the original presence through- 
 
 * So also in the opposite case ; it cannot be wholly denied that 
 ovariotomy is followed by the appearance of masculine characters. 
 
20 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 out the body of cells determined by arrhenoplastn or 
 thelyplasm. 
 
 The possession by every cell of primitive sexuality on 
 which the secretion of the sexual glands has little effect 
 might be shown further by consideration of the effects of 
 grafting male genital glands on female organisms. For such 
 an experiment to be accurate it would be necessary that the 
 animal from which the testis was to be transplanted should 
 be as near akin as possible to the female on which the testis 
 was to be grafted, as, for instance, in the case of a brother and 
 sister ; the idioplasm of the two should be as alike as possible. 
 In this experiment much would depend on limiting the 
 conditions of the experiment as much as possible so that 
 the results would not be confused by conflicting factors. 
 Experiments made in Vienna have shown that when an 
 exchange of the ovaries has been made between unrelated 
 female animals (chosen at random) the atrophy of the 
 ovaries follows, but that there is no failure of the secondary 
 sexual characters {e.g., degeneration of the mammae). More- 
 over, when the genital glands of an animal are removed from 
 their natural position and grafted in a new position in the 
 same animal (so that it still retains its own tissues) the full 
 development of the secondary sexual characters goes on 
 precisely as if there had been no interference, at least in 
 cases where the operation is successful. The failure of the 
 transplantation of ovaries from one animal to another may 
 be due to the absence of family relationship between the 
 tissues ; the influence of the idioplasm probably is of primary 
 importance. 
 
 These experiments closely resemble those made in the 
 transfusion of alien blood. It is a practical rule with 
 surgeons that when a dangerous loss of blood has to be 
 made good, the blood required for transfusion must be 
 obtained from an individual not only of the same species 
 and family, but also of the same sex as that of the patient. 
 The parallel between transfusion and transplantation is at 
 once evident. If I am correct in my views, when surgeons 
 seek to transfuse blood, instead of being content with injec- 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 21 
 
 tions of normal salt solution they must take the blood not 
 merely from one of the same species, family and sex, but 
 of a similar degree of masculinity or femininity. 
 
 Experiments on transfusion not only lend support to my 
 belief in the existence of sex characters in the blood cor- 
 puscles, but they furnish additional explanations of the 
 failure of experiments in grafting ovaries or testis on indi- 
 viduals of the opposite sex. The internal secretions of the 
 genital glands are operative only in their appropriate en- 
 t'ironment of arrhenoplasm or thelyplasm. 
 
 In this connection, I may say a word as to the curative 
 value of organotherapy. Although, as I have shown to be 
 the case, the transplantation of freshly extirpated genital 
 glands into subjects of the opposite sex has no effect, it does 
 not follow that the injection of the ovarian secretion into 
 the blood of a male might not have a most injurious effect. 
 On the other hand, the principle of organotherapy has been 
 opposed on the ground that organic preparations procured 
 from non-allied species could not possibly be expected to 
 yield good results. It is more than likely that the medical 
 exponents of organotherapy have lost many valuable dis- 
 coveries in healing because of their neglect of the biological 
 theory of idioplasm. 
 
 The theory of an idioplasm, the presence of which gives 
 the specific race characters to those tissues and cells which 
 have lost the reproductive faculty, is by no means generally 
 accepted. But at the least all must admit that the race 
 characters are collected in the genital glands, and that if 
 experiments with extracts from these are to provide more 
 than a good tonic, the nearest possible relationship between 
 the animals experimented upon must be observed. Parallel 
 experiments might be made as to the effect of transplantation 
 of the genital glands and injections of their extracts on two 
 castrated cocks of the same strain. For instance, the effects 
 of the transplantation of the testes of one of them into any 
 other part of its own body or peritoneal cavity or into any 
 similar part of the other cock might be compared with the 
 efifects of intravenous injection of testis extract of the one on 
 
22 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the other. Such parallel investigations would also increase 
 our knowledge as to the most suitable media and quantities 
 of the extracts. It is also to be desired, from the theoretical 
 point of view, that knowledge may be gained as to whether 
 the internal secretion of the genital glands enters into 
 chemical union with the protoplasm of the cells or whether 
 it acts as a physiological stimulus independent of the 
 quantity supplied. So far we know nothing that would 
 enable us to come to a definite opinion on this point. 
 
 The limited influence of the internal secretions of the 
 sexual glands in formmg the sexual characters must be 
 realised to warrant the theory of a primary, generally slight, 
 difference in each cell, but still determinate sexual influence.* 
 If the existence of distinct graduations of these primary 
 characteristics in all the cells and tissues can be recognised, 
 there follow many important and far-reaching conclusions. 
 The individual egg-cells and spermatozoa may be found to 
 possess different degrees of maleness and femaleness, not 
 only in different individuals, but in the ovaries and testes 
 of the same individual, especially at different times ; for 
 instance, the spermatozoa differ in size and activity. We 
 are still quite ignorant on these matters, as no one has 
 worked on the requisite lines. 
 
 It is extremely interesting to recall in this connection that 
 many times different investigators have observed in the 
 testes of amphibia not only the different stages in the 
 development of spermatozoa, but mature eggs. This inter- 
 pretation of the observations was at first disputed, and it 
 was suggested that the presence of unusually large cells in 
 the tubes of the testes had given rise to the error, but the 
 matter has now been fully confirmed. Moreover, in these 
 Amphibia, sexually intermediate conditions are very common, 
 and this should lead us to be careful in making statements 
 as to the uniform presence of arrhenoplasm or thelyplasm 
 in a body. The methods of assigning sex to a new-born 
 
 * The existence of sexual distinctions before puberty shows that 
 the power of the internal secretions of the sexual glands does not 
 account for everything. 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 23 
 
 infant seem most unsatisfactory in the light of these 
 facts. If the child is observed to possess a male organ, even 
 although there may be complete epi- or hypo-spadism, or a 
 double failure of descent of the testes, it is at once described 
 as a boy and is henceforth treated as one, although in other 
 parts of the body, for instance in the brain, the sexual 
 determinant may be much nearer thelyplasm than arrheno- 
 plasm. The so> »ner a more exact method of sex discrimina- 
 tion is insisted upon the better. 
 
 As a result of these long mductions and deductions we 
 may rest assured that all the cells possess a definite primary 
 sexual determinant which mu-^t not be assumed to be alike 
 or nearly alike throughout the same body. Every cell, every 
 cell-complex, and every organ have their distinctive indices 
 on the scale between thelyplasm and arrhenoplasm. For 
 the exact definition of the sex, an estimation of the indices 
 over the whole body would be necessary. I should be con- 
 tent to bear the blame of all the theoretical and practical 
 errors in this book did I believe myself to have made the 
 working out of a single case possible. 
 
 Differences in the primary sexual determinants, together 
 with the varying internal secretions (which differ in quantity 
 and quality in different individuals) produce the pheno- 
 mena of sexually intermediate forms. Arrhenoplasm and 
 thelyplasm, in their countless modifications, are the micro- 
 scopic agencies which, in co-operation with the internal 
 secretions, give rise to the macroscopic differences cited m 
 the last chapter. 
 
 If the correctness of the conclusions so far stated maybe 
 assumed, the necessity is at once evident for a whole series 
 of anatomical, physiological, histological and histo-chemical 
 investigations into those differences between male and female 
 types, in the structure and function of the individual organs 
 by which tue dowers of arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm express 
 themselves in the tissues. The knowledge we possess at the 
 present time on these matters comes from the study o 
 averages, but averages fail to satisfy the modern statistician, 
 and their scientific value is very small. Investigations into 
 
24 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the sex-differences in the weight of the brain, for instance, 
 have so far proved very little, probably because no care 
 was taken to choose typical conditions, the assignment of 
 sex being dependent on baptismal certificates or on super- 
 ficial glances at the outward appearance. As if every 
 " John " or " Mary " were representative of their sexes 
 because they had been dubbed " male " and " female ! " It 
 would have been well, even if exact physiological data were 
 thought unnecessary, at least to make certain as to a few 
 facts as to the general condition of the body, which might 
 serve as guides to the male or female condition, such as, for 
 instance, the distance between the great trochanters, the iliac 
 spines, and so forth, for a sexual harmony in the different 
 parts of the body is certainly more common than great 
 sexual divergence. 
 
 This source of error, the careless acceptance of sexually 
 intermediate forms as representative subjects for measure- 
 ment, has maimed other investigations and seriously retarded 
 the attainment of genuine and useful results. Those, for 
 instance, who wish to speculate about the cause of the 
 superfluity of male births have to reckon with this source of 
 error. In a special way this carelessness will revenge itself 
 on those who are investigating the ultimate causes that de- 
 termine sex. Until the exact degree of maleness or female- 
 ness of all the living individuals of the group on which he 
 is working can be determined, the investigator will have 
 reason to distrust both his methods and his hypotheses. If 
 he classify sexually intermediate forms, for instance, accord- 
 ing to their external appearance, as has been done hitherto, 
 he will come across cases which fuller investigation would 
 show to be on the wrong side of his results, whilst other 
 instances, apparently on the wrong side, would right them- 
 selves. Without the conception of an ideal male and an 
 ideal female, he lacks a standard according to which to 
 estimate his real cases, and he gropes forward to a super- 
 ficial and doubtful conclusion. Maupas, for instance, who 
 made experiments on the determination of sex in Hydatina 
 senta, a Rotifer, found that there was always an experimental 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PLASMAS 25 
 
 error of from three to five per cent. At low temperatures 
 the production of females was expected, but always about 
 the above proportion of males appeared ; so also at the 
 higher temperatures a similar proportion of females 
 appeared. It is probable that this error was due to sexually 
 intermediate stages, arrhenoplasmic females at the high 
 temperature, thelyplastic males at the low temperature. 
 Where the problem is more complicated, as in the case 
 of cattle, to say nothing of human beings, the process of 
 investigation will yield still less harmonious results, and the 
 correction of the interpretation which will have to be made 
 by allowing for the disturbance due to the existence of 
 sexually intermediate forms will be much more difficult. 
 
 The study of comparative pathology of the sexual types is 
 as necessary as their morphology, physiology and develop- 
 ment. In this region of inquiry as elsewhere, statistics 
 would yield certain results. Diseases manifestly much more 
 abundant in one sex might be described as peculiar to or 
 idiopathic of thelyplasm or arrhenoplasm. Myxoedema, for 
 instance, is idiopathic of the female, hydrocele of the male. 
 
 But no statistics, however numerous and accurate, can be 
 regarded as avoiding a source of theoretical error until it 
 has been shown from the nature of any particular affection 
 dealt with that it is in indissoluble, functional relation with 
 maleness or femaleness. The theory of such associated 
 diseases must supply a reason why they occur almost ex- 
 clusively in the one sex, that is to say, in the phrase of this 
 treatise, why they are thelyplasmic or arrhenoplasmic. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 
 
 Carmen : 
 
 " L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, 
 Que nul ne peut apprivoiser : 
 Et c'est bien en vain qu'on I'appelle 
 S'il lui convient de refuser. 
 Rien n'y fait ; menace ou priere : 
 L'un parle, I'autre se tait ; 
 Et c'est I'autre que je prefere ; 
 II n'a rien dit, mais il me plait. 
 
 L'amour est enfant de Boheme 
 II n'a jamais connu de loi." 
 
 It has been recognised from time immemorial that, in all 
 forms of sexually differentiated life, there exists an attrac- 
 tion between males and females, between the male and 
 the female, the object of which is procreation. But as the 
 male and the female are merely abstract conceptions which 
 never appear in the real world, we cannot speak of sexual 
 attraction as a simple attempt of the masculine and the 
 feminine to come together. The theory which I am develop- 
 ing must take into account all the facts of sexual relations if 
 it is to be complete ; indeed, if it is to be accepted instead of 
 the older views, it must give a better interpretation of all 
 these sexual phenomena. My recognition of the fact that M 
 and F (maleness and femaleness) are distributed in the living 
 world in every possible proportion has led me to the dis- 
 covery of an unknown natural law, of a law not yet sus- 
 pected by any philosopher, a law of sexual attraction. As 
 
THE LAWS Uf SEXUAL ATTRACTION 27 
 
 observations on human beings first led me to my results, I. 
 shall begin with this side of the subject. 
 
 Every one possesses a definite, individual taste of his own 
 with regard to the other sex. If we compare the portrait of 
 the women which some famous man has been known to 
 love, we shall nearly always find that they are all closely 
 alike, the similarity being most obvious in the contour 
 (more precisely in the " figure ") or in the face, but on closer 
 examination being found to extend to the minutest details, 
 ad unguem, to the finger-tips. It is precisely the same with 
 every one else. So, also, every girl who strongly attracts a 
 man recalls to him the other girls he has loved before.'« 
 We see another side of the same phenomenon when we re- 
 call how often we have said of some acquaintance or 
 another, " I can't imagine how that type of woman 
 pleases him." Darwin, in the " Descent of Man," collected 
 many instances of the existence of this individuality of the 
 sexual taste amongst animals, and I shall be able to show 
 that there are analogous phenomena even amongst plants. 
 
 (Sexual attraction is nearly always, as in the case of gravi- 
 tation, reciprocal./ Where there appear to be exceptions to 
 this rule, there is nearly always evidence of the presence of 
 special influences which have been capable of preventing 
 the direct action of the special taste, which is almost always 
 reciprocal, or which have left an unsatisfied craving, if the 
 direct taste were not allowed its play. 
 
 The common saying, " Waiting for Mr. Right," or state- 
 ments such as that " So-and-so are quite unsuitable for 
 one another," show the existence of an obscure presenti- 
 ment of the fact that every man or woman possesses certain 
 individual peculiarities which qualify or disqualify him or 
 her for marriage with any particular member of the 
 opposite sex ; and that this man cannot be substituted 
 for that, or this woman for the other without creating a 
 disharmony. 
 
 It is a common personal experience that certain individuals 
 of the opposite sex are distasteful to us, that others leave us 
 cold ; whilst others again may stimulate us until, at last, 
 
28 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 some one appears who seems so desirable that everything 
 in the world is worthless and empty compared with union 
 with such a one. What are the qualifications of that per- 
 son ? What are his or her peculiarities ? If it really be the 
 case — and I think it is — that every male type has its female 
 counterpart with regard to sexual affinity, it looks as if there 
 were some definite law. What is this law ? How does it 
 act ? " Like poles repel, unlike attract," was what I was 
 told when, already armed with my own answer, I resolutely 
 importuned different kinds of men for a statement, and sub- 
 mitted instances to their power of generalisation. The 
 formula, no doubt, is true in a limited sense and for a cer- 
 tain number of cases. But it is at once too general and too 
 vague ; it would be applied differently by different persons, 
 and it is incapable of being stated in mathematical terms. 
 
 This book does not claim to state all the laws of sexual 
 affinity, for there are many ; nor does it pretend to be able 
 to tell every one exactly which individual of the opposite 
 sex will best suit his taste, for that would imply a complete 
 knowledge of all the laws in question. In this chapter 
 only one of these laws will be considered — the law which 
 stands in organic relation to the rest of the book. I am 
 working at a number of other laws, but the following is 
 that to which I have given most investigation, and which 
 is most elaborated. In criticising this work, allowance must 
 be made for the incomplete nature of the material conse- 
 quent on the novelty and difficulty of the subject. 
 
 Fortunately it is not necessary for me to cite at length 
 either the facts from which I originally derived this law 
 of sexual affinity or to set out in detail the evidence I 
 obtained from personal statements. I asked each of those 
 who helped me, to make out his own case first, and then 
 to carry out observations in his circle of acquaintances. 
 I have paid special attention to those cases which have been 
 notice and remembered, in which the taste of a friend has 
 not been understood, or appeared not to be present, or was 
 different from that of the observer. The minute degree of 
 knowledge of the external form of the human body which 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 29 
 
 is necessary for the investigation is possessed by every 
 one. 
 
 I have come to the law which I shall now formulate by a 
 method the validity of which I shall now have to prove. 
 
 The law runs as follows :("For true sexual union it is 
 necessary that there come together a complete male (M) 
 and a complete female (F), even although in different cases 
 the M and F are distributed between the two individuals in 
 different proportions.) 
 
 The law may be expressed otherwise as follows : 
 
 if we take fx, any individual regarded in the ordinary way 
 as a male, and denote his real sexual constitution as M^u, 
 so many parts really male, plus Wfx, so many parts really 
 female ; if we also take a>, any individual regarded in the 
 ordinary way as a female, and denote her real sexual con- 
 stitution as W(u, so many parts really female, plus Mw, so 
 many parts really male ; then, if there be complete sexual 
 affinity, the greatest possible sexual attraction between the 
 two individuals, jn and w, 
 
 (i) M/u (the truly male part in the "male") + Mw 
 (the truly male part in the " female ") will equal a con- 
 stant quantity, M, the ideal male ; and 
 
 (2) Wfx + W(u (the ideal female parts in respectively 
 the " male " and the " female ") will equal a second 
 constant quantity, W, the ideal female. 
 
 This statement must not be misunderstood. Both formulas 
 refer to one case, to a single sexual relation, the second 
 following directly from the first and adding nothing to it, as 
 I set out from the point of view of an individual possessing 
 just as much femaleness as he lacks of maleness. Were he 
 completely male, his requisite complement would be a 
 complete female, and vice versa. If, however, he is com- 
 posed of a definite inheritance of maleness, and also an 
 inheritance of femaleness (which must not be neglected), 
 then, to complete the individual, his maleness must be com- 
 pleted to make a unit ; but so also must his femaleness be 
 completed. 
 
30 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 If; for instance, an individual be composed thus : 
 
 [f M 
 ft i and 
 
 Uw, 
 
 then the best sexual complement of that individual will be 
 another compound as follows : 
 
 [iM 
 (t) i and 
 if W. 
 
 It can be seen at once that this view is wider in its reach 
 than the common statement of the case. That male and 
 female, as sexual types, attract each other is only one 
 instance of my general law, an instance in which an 
 imaginary individual, 
 
 J I M 
 
 ^\o W 
 finds its complement in an equally imaginary individual, 
 
 ( o M 
 
 There can be no hesitation in admittin^j the existence of 
 definite, individual sexual preferences, and such an admission 
 carries with it approval of the necessity of mvestigating the 
 laws of the preference, and its relation to the rest of the 
 bodily and mental characters of an individual. The law, as 
 I have stated it, can encounter no initial sense of impossi- 
 bility, and is contrary neither to scientific nor common 
 experience. But it is not self-evident. It might be that the 
 law, which cannot yet be regarded as fully worked out, 
 might run as follows : 
 
 M/i — Mfü = a constant ; 
 
 that is to say, it may be the difference between the degrees 
 of masculinity and not the sum of the degrees of ma-;cu- 
 linity that is a constant quality, so that the most masculine 
 man would stand just as far removed from his complement 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 31 
 
 (who in this case would he nearly midway between mascu- 
 hnity and femininity) as the most feminine man would be 
 removed from his complement who would be near the 
 extreme of femininity. Althouj^h, as I have said, this is 
 conceivable, it is not borne oui by experience. Recognising 
 that we have to do here witli an empirical law, and trying 
 to observe a wise scientilic re-.traint, we shall do well to 
 avoid speaking as if there were any " force " pulling the 
 two individuals together as if they were puppets ; the law is 
 no more than the statement tliat an identicnl relation can 
 be made out in each case of maximum sexual attraction. 
 We are dealing, in fact, with what Ostwald termed an 
 *' invariant" and Avenarius a " multiponible "; and this is 
 the constant sum formed by the total masculinity and the 
 total femininity in all cases where a pair of living beings 
 come together with the maximum sexual attraction. 
 
 In this matter we may neglect altogether the so-called 
 aesthetic factor, the stimulus of beauty. For does it not 
 frequently happen that one man is completely captivated by 
 a particular woman and raves about her beauty, whilst 
 another, who is not the sexual complement of the woman 
 in question, cannot imagine what his friend sees in her to 
 admire. (Without discussing the laws of aesthetics or 
 attempting to gather together examples of relative values, 
 it may readily be admitted that a man may consider a 
 woman beautiful who, from tlie aesthetic standpoint, is not 
 merely indifferent but actually ugly, that in fact pure 
 aesthetics deal not with absolute beauty, but merely with 
 conceptions of beauty from which the sexual factor has 
 been eliminatedJ 
 
 I have myseh worked out the law in, at the lowest, many 
 hundred cases, and I have found that the exceptions were 
 only apparent. Almost every couple one meets in the 
 street furnishes a new proof. The exceptions were specially 
 instructive, as they not only suggested but led to the investi- 
 gation of other laws of sexuality. (l myself made special 
 investigations in the followmg way. I obtained a set of 
 photographs of aesthetically beautiful women of blameless 
 
32 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 character, each of which was a good example of some 
 definite proportion of femininity, and I asked a number of 
 my friends to inspect these and select the most beautiful. 
 The selection made was invariably that which I had pre- 
 dicted. With other male friends, who knew on what I was 
 engaged, I set about in another fashion. They provided 
 me with photographs from amongst which I was to choose 
 the one I should expect them to think most beautiful. 
 Here, too, 1 was uniformly successful. With others, I was 
 able to describe most accurately their ideal of the opposite 
 sex, independently of any suggestions unconsciously given 
 by them, often in minuter detail than they had realised. 
 Sometimes, too, I was able to point out to them, for the 
 first time, the qualities that repelled them in individuals of 
 the opposite sex, although for the most part men realise 
 more readily the characters that repel them than the 
 characters that attract them./ 
 
 I believe that with a little practice any one could readily 
 acquire and exercise this art on any circle of friends. A 
 knowledge of other laws of sexual affinity would be of great 
 importance. A number of special constants might be taken 
 as tests of the existence of complementary individuals. For 
 instance, the law might be caricatured so as to require that 
 the sum of the length of the hairs of any two perfect lovers 
 should always be the same. But, as I have already shown 
 in chapter ii., this result is not to be expected, because 
 all the organs of the same body do not necessarily possess 
 the same degree of maleness or femaleness. Such heuristic 
 rules would soon multiply and bring the whole subject into 
 ridicule, and I shall therefore abstain from further sugges- 
 tions of the kind. 
 
 I do not deny that my exposition of the law is somewhat 
 dogmatical and lacks confirmation by exact detail. But I am 
 not so anxious to claim finished results as to incite others 
 to the study, the more so as the means for scientific investi- 
 gations are lacking in my own case. But even if much 
 remains theoretical, I hope that I shall have firmly riveted 
 the chief beams in my edifice of theory by showing how it 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 33 
 
 explains much that hitherto has found no explanation, and 
 so shall have, in a fashion, proved it retrospectively by 
 ihowing how much it would explain if it were true. 
 
 A most remarkable confirmation of my law may be found 
 in the vegetable kingdom, in a group of facts hitherto 
 regarded as isolated and to be so strange as to have no 
 parallel. Every botanist must have guessed already that I 
 have in mind the phenomena of heterostylism, first discovered 
 by Persoon, then described by Darwin and named by Hilde- 
 brand. Many Dicotyledons, and a few Monocotyledons, for 
 instance, species of Primulaceae and Geraneaceae and many 
 Rubiaceas, phanerogams in the flowers of which both the 
 pollen and the stigma are functional, although only in cross- 
 fertilisation, so that the flowers are hermaphrodite in struc- 
 ture but unisexual physiologically, display the peculiarity 
 that in different individuals the stamens and the stigma have 
 different lengths. The individuals, all the flowers of which 
 have long styles and therefore high stigmas and short 
 anthers, are, in my judgment, the more female, whilst the 
 individuals with short styles and long anthers are more male. 
 In addition to such dimorphic plants, there are also trimor- 
 phic plants, such as Lythriim salicaria, in which the sexual 
 organs display three forms differing in length. There are 
 not only long-styled and short-styled forms, but flowers with 
 styles of a medium length. 
 
 Although only dimorphism and trimorphism have been 
 recognised in the books, these conditions do not exhaust the 
 actual complexities of structure. Darwin himself pointed 
 out that if small differences were taken into account, no 
 less than five different situations of the anthers could be 
 distinguished. Alongside such plain cases of discontinuity, 
 of the separation of the different degrees of maleness and 
 femaleness in plainly distinct individuals, there are also cases 
 in which the different degrees grade into each other without 
 breaks in the series. There are analogous cases of discon- 
 tinuity in the animal kingdom, although they have always 
 been thought of as unique and isolated phenomena, as the 
 parallel with heterostylism had not been suggested, in 
 
 c 
 
34 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 several genera of insects, as, for instance, some Earwigs 
 (Forficulce) and Lamellicorn Beetles {Lucanus cervus), the 
 Sta.g-heet\e (Dynasies hercules), and Xylotrupes gideon, there are 
 some males in which the antennae, the secondary sexual 
 characters by which they differ most markedly from the 
 females, are extremely long, and others in which they are 
 very short. Bateson, who has written most on this subject, 
 distinguishes the two forms as " high males " and " low 
 males." It is true that a continuous series of intermediate 
 forms links the extreme types, but, none the less, the vast 
 majority of the individuals are at one extreme or the other. 
 Unfortunately, Bateson did not investigate the relations 
 between these different types of males and the females, and 
 so it is not known if there be female types with special 
 sexual affinity for these male types. Thus these observa- 
 tions can be taken only as a morphological parallel to 
 heterostylism and not as cases of the law of complementary 
 sexual attraction. 
 
 Heterostylous plants may possibly be the means of estab« 
 lishing my view that the law of sexual complements holds 
 good for every kind of living thing. Darwin first, and after 
 him many other investigators have proved that in heterosty- 
 lous plants fertilisation has the best results, or, indeed, may 
 be possible only when the pollen from a macrostylous flower 
 (a flower with the shortest form of anthers and longest pistil) 
 falls on the stigma of a microstylous blossom (one where 
 the pistil is the shortest possible and the stamens at their 
 greatest length), or vice versa. In other words, if the 
 best result is to be attained by the cross-fertilisation of a 
 pair of flowers, one flower with a long pistil, and there- 
 fore high degree of femaleness, and short stamens must 
 be mated with another possessing a correspondingly short 
 pistil, and so, with the amount of femaleness complementary 
 to the first flower, and with long stamens complementary to 
 the short stamens of the first flower. In the case of flowers 
 where there are three pistil lengths, the best results may be 
 expected when the pollen of one blossom is transmitted to 
 another blossom in which the stigma is the nearest comple. 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 35 
 
 ment of the stigma of the flower from which the pollen 
 came ; if another combination is made, either naturally or 
 by artificial fertilisation, then, if a result follows at all, the 
 seedlings are scanty, dwarfed and sometimes infertile, much 
 as when hybrids between species are formed. 
 
 It is to be noticed that the authors who have discussed 
 heterostylism are not satisfied with the usual explanation, 
 which is that the insects which visit the flowers carry the 
 pollen at different relative positions on their bodies corre- 
 sponding to the different lengths of the sexual organs and 
 so produce the wonderful result. Darwin, moreover, admits 
 that bees carry all sorts of pollen on every part of their 
 bodies ; so that it has still to be made clear how the female 
 organs dusted with two or three kinds of pollen make their 
 choice of the most suitable. The supposition of a power of 
 choice, however interesting and wonderful it is, does not 
 account for the bad results which follow artificial dusting 
 with the wrong kind of pollen (so-called " illegitimate 
 fertilisation "). The theory that the stigmas can only 
 make use of, or are capable of receiving only " legitimate 
 pollen " has been proved by Darwin to be erroneous, inas- 
 much as the insects which act as fertilisers certainly some- 
 times start various cross-breedings. 
 
 The hypothesis that the reason for this selective retention 
 on the part of individuals is a special quality, deep-seated 
 in the flowers themselves, seems more probable. CWe have 
 probably here to do with the presence, just as in human 
 beings, of a maximum degree of sexual attraction between 
 individuals, one of which possesses just as much femaleness as 
 the other possesses maleness, and this is merely another mode 
 of stating my sexual law. > The probability of this interpreta- 
 tion is increased by the fact that in the short-styled, long- 
 anthered, more male flowers, the pollen grains are larger 
 and the papillae on the stigmas are smaller than the corre- 
 sponding parts of the long-styled, short-anthered, more 
 female flowers. Here we have certainly to do with different 
 degrees of maleness and femaleness. These circumstances 
 supply a stong corroboration of my law of sexual affinity, 
 
36 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 that in the vegetable kingdom as well as in the animal 
 kingdom (I shall return later to this point) fertilisation has 
 the best results when it occurs between parents with 
 maximum sexual affinity.* 
 
 Consideration of sexual aversion affords the readiest proof 
 that the law holds good throughout the animal kingdom. I 
 should like to suggest here that it would be extremely 
 interesting to make observations as to whether the larger, 
 heavier and less active egg-cells exert a special attraction on 
 the smaller and more active spermatozoa, whilst those egg- 
 cells with less food-yolk attract more strongly the larger and 
 less active spermatozoa. It may be the case, as L. Weill 
 has already suggested in a speculation as to the factors that 
 determine sex, that there is a correlation between the rates 
 of motion or kinetic energies of conjugating sexual cells. 
 It has not yet been determined, although indeed it would 
 be difficult to determine, if the sexual cells, apart from the 
 streams and eddies of their fluid medium, approach each 
 other with equal velocities or sometimes display special 
 activity. There is a wide field for investigation here. 
 
 ^s I have repeatedly remarked, my law is not the only 
 law of sexual affinity, otherwise, no doubt, it would have 
 been discovered long ago. Just because so many other 
 factors are bound up with it,t because another, perhaps 
 manv other laws sometimes overshadow it, cases of undis- 
 turbed action of sexual affinity are rareJ As the necessary 
 investigations have not yet been finished, I will not speak 
 at length of such laws, but rather by way of illustration I 
 shall refer to a few factors which as yet cannot be demon- 
 strated mathematically. 
 
 I shall begin with some phenomena which are pretty 
 
 * For special purposes the breeder, whose object frequently is to 
 modify natural tendencies, will often disregard this law. 
 
 f In speaking of the sexual taste in men and women, one thinks 
 at once of the usual but not invariable preference individuals show 
 for a particular colour of hair. It would certainly seem as if the 
 reason for so strongly marked a preference must lie deep in human 
 nature. 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 37 
 
 generally recognised. Men when quite young, say under 
 twenty, are attracted by much older women (say those of 
 thirty-five and so on), whilst men of thirty-five are attracted 
 by women much younger than themselves. So also, on the 
 other hand, quite young girls (sweet seventeen) generally 
 prefer much older men, but, later in life, may marry strip- 
 lings. The whole subject deserves close attention and is 
 both popular and easily noticed. 
 
 In spite of the necessary limitation of this work to the 
 consideration of a single law, it will make for exactness if I 
 try to state the formula in a more definite fashion, without 
 the deceptive element of simplicity. Even without being 
 able to state in definite quantities the other factors and the 
 co-operating laws, we may reach a satisfactory exactness by 
 the use of a variable factor. 
 
 The first formula was only an abstract general statement 
 of what is common to all cases of maximum sexual attrac- 
 tion so far as the sexual relation is governed by the law. I 
 must now try to find an expression for the strength of the 
 sexual affinity in any conceivable case, an expression which, 
 on account of its general form, can be used to describe the 
 relationship between any two living beings, even if these 
 belong to different species or to the same sex. 
 
 If 
 
 f a M ' ( ßW 
 
 ß' M 
 
 (where a, a', ß, and ß' are each greater than o and less than 
 unity) define the sexual constitutions of any two living beings 
 between which there is an attraction, then the strength of 
 the attraction may be expressed thus : 
 
 a- ß 
 
 where /' is an empirical or analytical function of the 
 period during which it is possible for the individuals to act 
 upon one another, what may be called the "reaction-time"; 
 whilst K is the variable factor in which we place all the 
 
38 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 known and unknown laws of sexual affinity, and which also 
 varies with the degree of specific, racial and family relation- 
 ship, and with the health and absence of deformity in the 
 two individuals, and which, finally, will become smaller as 
 the actual spacial distance between the two is greater, and 
 which can be determined in any individual case. 
 
 When in this formula a = /3 A must be infinity ; this is the 
 extreme case ; it is sexual attraction as an elemental force, 
 as it has been described with a weird mastercrait by 
 Lynkeus in the novel "Im Postwangen." Such sexual 
 attraction is as much a natural law as the downward growth 
 of a rootlet towards the earth, or the migration of bacteria 
 to the oxygen at the edge of a microscopic cover-glass. 
 But it takes some time to grow accustomed to such a view. 
 I shall refer to this point again. 
 
 li a — ß has its maximun value, which is when it equals 
 unity, then A = K . /. 
 
 This would be the extreme case of the action of all the 
 sympathetic and antipathetic relations between human beings 
 (leaving out of account social relations in their narrowest 
 sense, which are merely the safeguards of communities) 
 which are not included in the l.iw of sexual affinity. As K 
 generally increases with the strength of congenital relation- 
 ship, A has a greater value when the individuals are of the 
 same nationality than when they belong to different nation- 
 alities. The value of f is great in this case, and onr; can 
 investigate its fluctuations, as, for instance, when two domestic 
 animals of different species are in association ; at first it 
 usually stands for violent enmity, or fear of each other (and 
 A has a negative value), whilst later on a friendship may 
 come about. 
 
 When K = o in the formula 
 
 _ K./' 
 
 A = 
 
 then A = o, which means that between two living beings 
 of origin too remote there may be no trace of sexual 
 attraction. 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 39 
 
 The provisions of the criminal statute-books, however, in 
 reference to sodomy and bestiality show plainly that even 
 in the case of very remote species K has a value greater 
 than nothing. The formula may apply to two individuals 
 not only not of the same species, but even not of the same 
 order. 
 
 It is a new theory that the union of male and female 
 organisms is no mere matter of chance, but is guided by a 
 definite law ; and the actual complexities which I have 
 merely suggested show the need for complete investigation 
 into the mysterious nature of sexual attraction. 
 
 The experiments of Wilhelm Pfeffer have shown that the 
 male cells of many cryptogams are naturally attracted not 
 merely by the female cells, but also by substances which they 
 have come in contact with under natural conditions, or which 
 have been nitroduced to them experimentally, in the latter 
 case the substances being sometimes of a kind with which 
 they could not possibly have come in contact, except under 
 the conditions of experiment. Thus the male cells of ferns 
 are attracted not only by the malic acid secreted naturally 
 by the archegonia, but by synthetically prepared malic acid, 
 whilst the male cells of mosses are attracted either by the 
 natural acid of the female cells or by acid prepared from 
 cane sugar. A male cell, which, we know not how, is 
 influenced by the degree of concentration of a solution, 
 moves towards the most concentrated part of the fluid. 
 Pfeffer named such movements " chemotactic " and coined 
 the word " chemotropism " to include these and many other 
 asexual cases of motion stimulated by chemical bodies. 
 There is much to support the view that the attraction 
 exercised by females on males which perceive them at a 
 distance by sense organs is to be regarded as analogous 
 in certain respects with chemotropism. 
 
 It seems highly probable that chemotropism is also the 
 explanation of the restless and persistent energy with which 
 for days together the mammalian spermatozoa seek the 
 entrance to the uterus, although the natural current pro- 
 duced from the mucous membrane of the uterus is frorO 
 
40 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 within outwards. The spermatozoon, in spite of all me- 
 chanical and other hindrances, makes for the egg-cell with 
 an almost incredible certainty. In this connection we may 
 call to mind the prodigious journeys made by many fish ; 
 salmon travel for months together, practically without taking 
 any food, from the open sea to the sources of the Rhine, 
 against the current of the river, in order to spawn in locali- 
 ties that are safe and well provided with food. 
 
 I have recently been looking at the beautiful sketches 
 which P. Falkenberg has made of the processes of fertilisa- 
 tion in some of the Mediterranean seaweeds. When we 
 speak of the lines of force between the opposite poles of 
 magnets we are dealing with a force no more natural than 
 that which irresistibly attracts the spermatozoon and the 
 egg-cell. The chief jdifference seems to be that in the case 
 of the attraction between the inorganic substances, strains 
 are set up in the media between the two poles, whilst in the 
 living matter the forces seem confined to the organisms 
 themselves. According to Falkenberg's observations, the 
 spermatozoa, in moving towards the egg-cells, are able to 
 overcome the force which otherwise would be exercised 
 upon them by a source of light. The sexual attraction, 
 the chemotactic force, is stronger than the phototactic 
 force. 
 
 /when a union has taken place between two individuals 
 wno, according to my formula, are not adapted to each 
 other, if later, the natural complement of either appears, 
 the inclination to desert the makeshift at once asserts itself, 
 in accordance with an inevitable law of nature. A divorce 
 takes place, as much constitutional, depending on the nature 
 of things, as when, if iron sulphate and caustic potash are 
 brought together, the SO4 ions leave the iron to unite with 
 the potassium. When in nature an adjustment of such 
 differences of potential is about to take place, he who would 
 approve or disapprove of the process from the moral point 
 of view would appear to most to play a ridiculous partf 
 
 This is the fundamental idea in Goethe's "Wahlver- 
 wandtschaften " (Elective Affinities), and in the fourth 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 41 
 
 cnapter of the first part of that work he makes it the 
 subject of a playful introduction which was full of un- 
 dreamed of future significance, and the full force of which 
 he was fated himself to experience in later life. I must con- 
 fess to being proud that this book is the first work to take up 
 his ideas. None the less, it is as little my intention as it was 
 the intention of Goethe to advocate divorce ; I hope only 
 to explain it. There are human motives which indispose 
 man to divorce and enable him to withstand it. This I shall 
 discuss later on. The physical side of sex in man is less 
 completely ruled by natural law than is the case with lower 
 animals. We get an indication of this in the fact that man 
 is sexual throughout the year, and that in him there is less 
 trace than even in domestic animals of the existence of a 
 special spring breeding-season. 
 
 The law of sexual affinity is analogous in another respect 
 to a well-known law of theoretical chemistry, although, 
 indeed, there are marked differences. The violence of a 
 chemical reaction is proportionate to the mass of the sub- 
 stances involved, as, for instance, a stronger acid solution 
 unites with a stronger basic solution with greater avidity, 
 just as in the case of the union of a pair of living beings 
 with strong maleness and femaleness. But there is an 
 essential difference between the living process and the 
 reaction of the lifeless chemical substances. The living 
 organism is not homogeneous and isotropic in its composi- 
 tion ; it is not divisible into a number of small parts 
 of identical properties. The difference depends on the 
 principle of individuality, on the fact that every living 
 thing is an individual, and that its individuality is essen- 
 tially structural. And so in the vital process it is not as in 
 inorganic chemistry ; there is no possibility of a larger pro- 
 portion forming one compound, a smaller proportion form- 
 ing another. The organic chemotropism, moreover, may 
 be negative. In certain cases the value of A may result in 
 a negative quantity, that is to say, the sexual attraction may 
 appear in the form of sexual repulsion. It is true that in 
 purely chemical processes the same reaction may take place 
 
42 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 at different rates. Taking, however, the total failure of some 
 reaction by catalytic interference as the equivalent of a 
 sexual repulsion, it never happens, according to the latest 
 investigations at least, that the interference merely induces 
 the reaction after a longer or shorter interval. On the other 
 hand, it happens frequently that a compound which is 
 formed at one temperature breaks up at another tempera- 
 ture. /Here the " direction " of the reaction is a function of 
 the temperature, as, in the vital process, it may be a function 
 of time. 
 
 In the value of the factor " /," the time of reaction, a 
 final analogy of sexual attraction with chemical processes 
 may be found, if we are willing to trace the comparison 
 without laying too much stress upon ity Consider the 
 formula for the rapidity of the reaction, the different 
 degrees of rapidity with which a sexual attraction between 
 two individuals is established, and reflect how the value of 
 "A" varies with the value of " t." However, what Kant 
 termed mathematical vanity must not tempt us to read 
 into our equations complicated and difficult processes, the 
 validity of which is uncertain. All that can be implied is 
 simple enough ; sensual desire increases with the time 
 during which two individuals are in propinquity ; if they 
 were shut up together, it would develop if there were no 
 repulsion, or practically no repulsion between them, in the 
 fashion of some slow chemical process which takes much 
 time before its result is visible. Such a case is the confi- 
 dence with which it is said of a marriage arranged without 
 love, " Love will come later ; time will bring it." 
 
 It is plain that too much stress must not be laid on the 
 analogy between sexual affinity and purely chemical pro- 
 cesses. None the less, I thought it illuminating to make the 
 comparison. It is not yet quite clear if the sexual attrac- 
 tion is to be ranked with the " tropisms," and the matter 
 cannot be settled without going beyond mere sexuality to 
 discuss the general problem of erotics. The phenomena 
 of love require a different treatment, and I sliall return to 
 them in the second part of this book. None the less, there 
 
THE LAWS OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION 43 
 
 are analogies that cannot be denied when human attractions 
 and chemotropism are compared. I may refer as an instance 
 to the relation between Edward and Ottilie in Goethe's 
 " Wahlverwandtschaften." 
 
 Mention of Goethe's romance leads naturally to a dis- 
 cussion of the marriage problem, and I may here give a few 
 of the practical inferences which would seem to follow 
 from the theoretical considerations of this chapter. It is 
 clear that a natural law, not dissimilar to other natural laws, 
 exists with regard to sexual attraction ; this law shows that, 
 whilst innumerable gradations of sexuality exist, there always 
 may be found pairs of beings the members of which are 
 almost perfectly adapted to one another. So far, marriage 
 has its justification, and, from the standpoint of biology, 
 free love is condemned. Monogamy, however, is a more 
 difficult problem, the solution of which involves other con- 
 siderations, such as periodicity, to which I shall refer later, 
 and the change of the sexual taste with advancing years. 
 ^A second conclusion may be derived from heterostylism, 
 especially with reference to the fact that " illegitimate fertili- 
 sation " almost invariably produces less fertile offspring. 
 This leads to the consideration that amongst other forms of 
 life the strongest and healthiest offspring will result from 
 unions in which there is the maximum of sexual suitability. 
 As the old saying has it, " love-children " turn out to be the 
 finest, strongest, and most vigorous of human beings. Those 
 who are interested in the improvement of mankind must 
 therefore, on purely hygienic grounds, oppose the ordinary 
 mercenary marriages of convenience.} 
 
 It is more than probable that the law of sexual attraction 
 may yield useful results when applied to the breeding of 
 animals. More attention will have to be given to the 
 secondary sexual characters of the animals which it is 
 proposed to mate. The artificial methods made use of to 
 secure the serving of mares by stallions unattractive to them 
 do not always fail, but are followed by indifferent results. 
 Probably an obvious result of the use of a substituted 
 stallion in impregnating a mare is the extreme nervousness 
 
44 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 of the progeny, which must be treated with bromide and 
 other drugs. So, also, the degeneration of modern Jews 
 may be traced in part to the fact that amongst them 
 marriages for other reasons than love are specially 
 common. 
 
 Amongst the many fundamental principles established by 
 the careful observations and experiments of Darwin, and 
 since confirmed by other investigators, is the fact that both 
 very closely related individuals, and those whose specific 
 characters are too unlike, have little sexual attraction for 
 each other, and that if in spite of this sexual union occurs, 
 the offspring usually die at an early stage or are very feeble, 
 or are practically infertile. So also, in heterostylous plants 
 " legitimate fertilisation " brings about more numerous and 
 vigorous seeds than come from other unions. 
 
 ^t may be said in general that the offspring of those 
 parents which showed the greatest sexual attraction succeed 
 best^ 
 
 Tnis rule, which is certainly universal, implies the correct, 
 ness of a conclusion which might be drawn from the earlier 
 part of this book, When a marriage has taken place and 
 children have been produced, these have gained nothing 
 from the conquest of sexual repulsion by the parents, for 
 such a conquest could not take place without damage to the 
 mental and bodily characters of the children that would 
 come of it. ^t is certain, however, that many childless 
 marriages have been loveless marriages. The old idea that 
 the chance of conception is increased where there is a 
 mutual participation in the sexual act is closely connected 
 with what we have been considering as to the greater 
 intensity of the sexual attraction between two comple- 
 mentary individuals^ 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HOMO-SEXUALITY AND PEDERASTY 
 
 The law of Sexual Attraction gives the long-sought-for 
 explanation of sexual inversion, of sexual inclination 
 towards members of the same sex, whether or no that be 
 accompanied by aversion from members of the opposite sex. 
 Without reference to a distinction which I shall deal with 
 later on, I may say at once that it is exceedingly probable 
 that, in all cases of sexual inversion, there will be found 
 indications of the anatomical characters of the other sex. 
 There is no such thing as a genuine "psycho-sexual her- 
 maphroditism " ; the men who are sexually attracted by 
 men have outward marks of effeminacy, just as women of a 
 similar disposition to those of their own sex exhibit male 
 characters. That this should be so is quite intelligible if we 
 admit the close parallelism between body and mind, and 
 further light is thrown upon it by the facts explained in the 
 second chapter of this book ; the facts as to the male or 
 female principle not being uniformly present all over the 
 same body, but distributed in different amounts in different 
 organs. In all cases of sexual inversion, there is invariably 
 an anatomical approximation to the opposite sex. 
 
 Such a view is directly opposed to that of those who 
 would maintain that sexual inversion is an acquired 
 character, and one that has superseded normal sexual 
 impulses. Schrenk-Notzing, Kraepelin, and Fere are 
 amongst those writers who have urged the view that sexual 
 inversion is an acquired habit, the result of abstinence from 
 normal intercourse and particularly induced by example. 
 But what about the first offender ? Did the god Herma- 
 
46 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 phroditos teach him ? It might equally be sought to prove ; 
 that the sexual inclination of a normal man for a normal 
 woman was an unnatural, acquired habit — a habit, as some 
 ancient writers have suggested, that arose from some acci- 
 dental discovery of its agreeable nature. Just as a normal 
 man discovers for himself what a woman is, so also, in the 
 case of a sexual " invert " the attraction exercised on him 
 by a person of his own sex is a normal product of his 
 development from his birth. Naturally the opportunity 
 must come in which the individual may put in practice his 
 desire for inverted sexuality, but the opportunity will be 
 taken only when his natural constitution has made the indi- 
 vidual ready for it. That sexual abstinence (to take the 
 second supposed cause of inversion) should result in any- 
 thing more than masturbation may be explained by the 
 supposition that inversion is acquired, but that it should be 
 coveted and eagerly sought can only happen when the 
 demand for it is rooted in the constitution. In the same 
 fashion normal sexual attraction might be said to be an 
 acquired character, if it could be proved definitely that, to 
 fall in love, a normal man must first see a woman or a 
 picture of a woman. Those who assert that sexual inversion 
 is an acquired character, are making a merely incidental or 
 accessory factor responsible for the whole constitution of 
 an organism. 
 
 There is little reason for saying that sexual inversion is 
 acquired, and there is just as little for regarding it as in- 
 herited from parents or grandparents. Such an assertion, 
 it is true, has not been made, and seems contrary to all 
 experience ; but it has been suggested that it is due to a 
 neuropathic diathesis, and that general constitutional weak- 
 ness is to be found in the descendants of those who have 
 displayed sexual inversion. In fact sexual inversion has 
 usually been regarded as psycho-pathological, as a symptom 
 of degeneration, and those who exhibit it have been con- 
 sidered as physically unfit. This view, however, is falling 
 into disrepute, especially as Krafft-Ebing, its principal 
 champion, abandoned it in the later editions of his work. 
 
HOMO-SEXUALITY AND PEDERASTY 47 
 
 None the less, it is not generally recognised that sexual 
 inverts may be otherwise perfectly healthy, and with regard 
 to other social matters quite normal. When they have been 
 asked if they would have wished matters to be different 
 with them in this respect, almost invariably they answer in 
 the negative. 
 
 It is due to the erroneous conceptions that I have men- 
 tioned that homo-sexuality has not been considered in 
 relation with other facts. Let those who regard sexual 
 inversion as pathological, as a hideous anomaly of mental 
 development (the view accepted by the populace), or believe 
 it to be an acquired vice, the result of an execrable seduc- 
 tion, remember that there exist all transitional stages 
 reaching from the most masculine male to the most 
 effeminate male and so on to the sexual invert, the false 
 and true hermaphrodite ; and then, on the other side, suc- 
 cessively through the sapphist to the virago and so on until 
 the most feminine virgin is reached. In the interpretation 
 of this volume, sexual inverts of both sexes are to be defined 
 as individuals in whom the factor a (see page 8, chap, i.) 
 is very nearly 0.5 and so is practically equal to a ; in other 
 words, individuals in whom there is as much maleness as 
 femaleness, or indeed who, although reckoned as men, may 
 contain an excess of femaleness, or as women and yet be 
 more male than female. Because of the want of uniformity 
 in the sexual characters of the body, it is fairly certain that 
 many individuals have their sex assigned them on account 
 of the existence of the primary male sexual characteristic, 
 even although there may be delayed descensus iesHculorum, or 
 epi- or hypo-spadism, or, later on, absence of active sperma- 
 tozoa, or even, in the case of assignment of the female sex, 
 absence of the vagina, and thus male avocations (such as 
 compulsory military service) may come to be assigned to 
 those in whom a is less than 0.5 and a greater than 0.5. 
 The sexual complement of such individuals really is to be 
 found on their own side of the sexual line, that is to say, on 
 the side on which they are reckoned, although in reality 
 they may belong to the other. 
 
48 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Moreover, and this not only supports my view but can b« 
 explained only by it, there are no inverts who are completely 
 sexually inverted. In all of them there is from the begin- 
 ning an inclination to both sexes ; they are, in fact, bisexual. 
 It may be that later on they may actively encourage a slight 
 leaning towards one sex or the other, and so become 
 practically unisexual either in the normal or in the inverted 
 sense, or surrounding influence may bring about this result 
 for them. But in such processes the fundamental bisexuality 
 is never obliterated and may at any time give evidence of 
 its suppressed presence. 
 
 Reference has often been made, and in recent years has 
 increasingly been made, to the relation between homo- 
 sexuality and the presence of bisexual rudiments in the 
 embryonic stages of animals and plants. What is new in 
 my view is that according to it, homo-sexuality cannot be 
 regarded as an atavism or as due to arrested embryonic 
 development, or incomplete differentiation of sex ; it cannot 
 be regarded as an anomaly of rare occurrence interpolating 
 itself in customary complete separation of the sexes. 
 Homo-sexuality is merely the sexual condition of these 
 intermediate sexual forms that stretch from one ideally 
 sexual condition to the other sexual condition. In my view 
 all actual organisms have both homo-sexuality and hetero- 
 sexual ity. 
 
 That the rudiment of homo-sexuality, in however weak a 
 form, exists in every human being, corresponding to the 
 greater or smaller development of the characters of the 
 opposite sex, is proved conclusively from the fact that in 
 the adolescent stage, while there is still a considerable 
 amount of undifferentiated sexuality, and before the internal 
 secretions have exerted their stimulating force, passionate 
 attachments with a sensual side are the rule amongst boys 
 as well as amongst girls. 
 
 A person who retains from that age onwards a marked 
 tendency to "friendship" with a person of his own sex 
 must have a strong taint of the other sex in him. Those, 
 however, are still more obviously intermediate sexual forms, 
 
HOMO-SEXUALITY AND PEDERASTY 49 
 
 who, after association with both sexes, fail to have aroused 
 in them the normal passion for the opposite sex, but still 
 endeavour to maintain confidential, devoted affection with 
 those of their own sex. 
 
 There is no friendship between men that has not an ele- 
 ment of sexuality in it, however little accentuated it may be 
 in the nature of the friendship, and however painful the 
 idea of the sexual element would be. But it is enough to 
 remember that there can be no friendship unless there has 
 been some attraction to draw the men together. Much of 
 the affection, protection, and nepotism between men is due 
 to the presence of unsuspected sexual compatibility. 
 
 An analogy with the sexual friendship of youth may be 
 traced in the case of old men, when, for instance, with the 
 involution following old age, the latent amphisexuality of 
 man appears. This may be the reason why so many men 
 of fifty years and upwards are guilty of indecency. 
 
 Homo-sexuality has been observed amongst animals to 
 a considerable extent. F. Karsch has made a wide, if not 
 complete, compilation from other authors. Unfortunately, 
 practically no observations were made as to the grades of 
 maleness or femaleness to be observed in such cases. But 
 we may be reasonably certain that the law holds good in 
 the animal world. If bulls are kept apart from cows for a 
 considerable time, homo-sexual acts occur amongst them; the 
 most female are the first to become corrupted, the others 
 later, some perhaps never. (It is amongst cattle that the 
 greatest number of sexually intermediate forms have been 
 recorded.) This shows that the tendency was latent in 
 them, but that at other times the sexual demand was satis- 
 fied in normal fashion. Cattle in captivity behave precisely 
 as prisoners and convicts in these matters. Animals exhibit 
 not merely onanism (which is known to them as to human 
 beings), but also homo-sexuality ; and this fact, together 
 with the fact that sexually intermediate forms are known to 
 occur amongst them, I regard as strong evidence for my 
 law of sexual attraction. 
 
 Inverted sexual attraction, then, is no exception to my 
 
 D 
 
50 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 law of sexual attraction, but is merely a special case of 
 it. An individual who is half-man, half-woman, requires as 
 sexual complement a being similarly equipped with a share 
 of both sexes in order to fulfil the requirements of the law. 
 This explains the fact that sexual inverts usually associate 
 only with persons of similar character, and rarely admit to 
 intimacy those who are normal. The sexual attraction is 
 mutual, and this explains why sexual inverts so readily 
 recognise each other. This being so, the normal element 
 in human society has very little idea of the extent to which 
 homo-sexuality is practised, and when a case becomes public 
 property, every normal young profligate thinks that he has 
 a right to condemn such " atrocities." So recently as the 
 year 1900 a professor of psychiatry in a German university 
 urged that those who practised homo-sexuality should be 
 castrated. 
 
 The therapeutical remedies which have been used to 
 combat homo-sexuality, in cases where such treatment has 
 been attempted, are certainly less radical than the advice of 
 the professor ; but they serve to show only how little the 
 nature of homo-sexuality was understood. The method used 
 at present is hypnotism, and this can rest only on the theory 
 that homo-sexuality is an acquired character. By suggesting 
 the idea of the female form and of normal congress, it is 
 sought to accustom those under treatment to normal rela- 
 tions. But the acknowledged results are very few. 
 
 The failure is to be expected from our standpoint. The 
 hypnotiser suggests to the subject the image of a "typical" 
 woman, ignorant of the innate differences in the subject 
 and unaware that such a type is naturally repulsive to him. 
 And as the normal typical woman is not his complement, it 
 is fruitless of the doctor to advise the services of any casual 
 Venus, however attractive, to complete the cure of a man 
 who has long shunned normal intercourse. If our formula 
 were used to discover the complement of the male invert, it 
 would point to the most man-like woman, the Lesbian or 
 Sapphist type. Probably such is the only type of woman 
 who would attract the sexual invert or please him. If a 
 
HOMO-SEXUALITY AND PEDERASTY 51 
 
 cure for sexual inversion must be sought because it cannot 
 be left to its own extinction, then this theory offers the 
 following solution. Sexual inverts must be brought to 
 sexual inverts, from homo-sexualists to Sapphists, each in 
 their grades. Knowledge of such a solution should lead to 
 repeal of the ridiculous laws of England, Germany and 
 Austria directed against homo-sexuality, so far at least as 
 to make the punishments the lightest possible. In the 
 second part of this book it will be made clear why both the 
 active and the passive parts in male homo-sexuality appear 
 disgraceful, although the desire is greater than in the case 
 of the normal relation of a man and woman. In the abstract 
 there is no ethical difference between the two. 
 
 In spite of all the present-day clamour about the existence 
 of different rights for different individualities, there is only 
 one law that governs mankind, just as there is only one 
 logic and not several logics. It is in opposition to that law, 
 as well as to the theory of punishment according to which 
 the legal offence, not the moral offence, is punished, that 
 we forbid the homo-sexualist to carry on his practices whilst 
 we allow the hetero-sexualist full play, so long as both avoid 
 open scandal. Speaking from the standpoint of a purer 
 state of humanity and of a criminal law untainted by the 
 pedagogic idea of punishment as a deterrent, the only 
 logical and rational method of treatment for sexual inverts 
 would be to allow them to seek and obtain what they 
 require where they can, that is to say, amongst other 
 inverts. 
 
 My theory appears to me quite incontrovertible and con- 
 clusive, and to afford a complete explanation of the entire 
 set of phenomena. The exposition, however, must now 
 face a set of facts which appear quite opposed to it, and 
 which seem absolutely to contradict my reference of sexual 
 inversion to the existence of sexually intermediate types, 
 and my explanation of the law governing the attraction of 
 these types for each other. It is probably the case that my 
 explanation is sufficient for all female sexual inverts,fbut it 
 is certainly true that there are men with very little taint oi 
 
52 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 femaleness about them who yet exert a very strong influ- 
 ence on members of their own sex, a stronger influence 
 than that of other men who may have more femaleness 
 — an influence which can be exerted even on very male 
 men, and an influence which, finally, often appears to be 
 much greater than the influence any woman can exert on 
 these men.^ Albert Moll is justified in saying as follows : 
 "There exist psycho-sexual hermaphrodites who are at- 
 tracted by members of both sexes, but who in the case of 
 each sex appear to care only for the characters peculiar to 
 that sex ; and, on the other hand, there are also psycho- 
 sexual (?) hermaphrodites who, in the case of each sex, are 
 attracted, not by the characteristics peculiar to that sex, 
 but by those which are either sexually indifferent or even 
 antagonistic to the sex in question." Upon this distinction 
 depends the difference between the two sets of phenomena 
 indicated in the title of this chapter — Homo- sexuality and 
 Pederasty. The distinction may be expressed as follows : 
 The homo-sexualist is that type of sexual invert who prefers 
 very female men or very male women, in accordance with 
 the general law of sexual attraction. The pederast, on the 
 other hand, may be attracted either by very male men or by 
 very female women, but in the latter case only in so far 
 as he is not pederastic. Moreover, his inclination for the 
 male sex is stronger than for the female sex, and is more 
 deeply seated in his nature. The origin of pederasty is 
 a problem in itself and remains unsolved by this investi- 
 gation. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND THE 
 SCIENCE OF FORM 
 
 In view of the admitted close correspondence between 
 matter and mind, we may expect to find that the conception 
 of sexually intermediate forms, if applied to mental facts, 
 will yield a rich crop of results. The existence of a female 
 mental type and a male mental type can readily be imagined 
 (and the quest of these types has been made by many 
 investigators), but such perfect types never occur as actual 
 individuals, simply because in the mind, as in the body, all 
 sorts of sexually intermediate conditions exist. My concep- 
 tion will also be of great service in helping us to discriminate 
 between the different mental qualities, and to throw some 
 light into what has always been a dark corner for psycholo- 
 gists — the differences between different individuals. A great 
 step will be made if we are able to supply graded categories 
 for the mental diathesis of individuals ; if it shall cease to 
 be scientific to say that the character of an individual is 
 merely male or female ; but if we can make a measured 
 judgment and say that such and such an one is so many 
 parts male and so many parts female. Which element in 
 any particular individual has done, said, or thought this or 
 the other ? By making the answer to such a question pos- 
 sible, we shall have done much towards the definite descrip- 
 tion of the individual, and the new method will determine 
 the direction of future investigation. The knowledge of the 
 past, which set out from conceptions which were really 
 confused averages, has been equally far from reaching the 
 broadest truths as from searching out the most intimate, 
 
54 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 detailed knowledge. This failure of past methods gives us 
 hope that the principle of sexually intermediate forms may 
 serve as the foundation of a scientific study of character 
 and justifies the attempt to make of it an illuminating 
 principle for the psychology of individual differences. Its 
 application to the science of character, which, so far, has 
 been in the hands of merely literary authors, and is from 
 the scientific point of view an untouched field, is to be 
 greeted more warmly as it is capable of being used quanti- 
 tatively, so that we venture to estimate the percentage of 
 maleness and femaleness which an individual possesses 
 even in the mental qualities. The answer to this question 
 is not given even if we know the exact anatomical position 
 of an organism on the scale stretching from male to female, 
 although as a matter of fact congruity between bodily and 
 mental sexuality is more common than incongruity. But 
 we must remember what was stated in chap. ii. as to the 
 uneven distribution of sexuality over the body. 
 
 The proportion of the male to the female principle in the 
 same human being must not be assumed to be a constant 
 quantity. An important new conclusion must be taken 
 into account, a conclusion which is necessary to the right 
 application of the principle which clears up in a striking 
 fashion earlier psychological work. The fact is that every 
 human being varies or oscillates between the maleness and 
 the femaleness of his constitution. In some cases these 
 oscillations are abnormally large, in other cases so small as 
 to escape observation, but they are always present, and 
 when they are great they may even reveal themselves in 
 the outward aspect of the body. Like the variations in the 
 magnetism of the earth, these sexual oscillations are either 
 regular or irregular. The regular forms are sometimes 
 minute ; for instance, many men feel more male at night. 
 The large and regular oscillations correspond to the great 
 divisions of organic life to which attention is only now 
 being directed, and they may throw light upon many 
 puzzling phenomena. The irregular oscillations probably 
 depend chiefly upon the environment, as for instance on 
 
SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND FORM 55 
 
 che sexuality of surrounding human beings. They may 
 help to explain some curious points in the psychology of a 
 crowd which have not yet received sufficient attention. 
 
 In short, bi-sexuality cannot be properly observed in a 
 single moment, but must be studied through successive 
 periods of time. This time-element in psychological differ- 
 ences of sexuality may be regularly periodic or not. The 
 swing towards one pole of sexuality may be greater than 
 the following swing to the other side. Although theoreti- 
 cally possible, it seems to be extremely rare for the swing 
 to the male side to be exactly equal to the swing towards 
 the female side. 
 
 It may be admitted in principle, before proceeding to 
 detailed investigation, that the conception of sexually inter- 
 mediate forms makes possible a more accurate description 
 of individual characters in so far as it aids in determining 
 the proportion of male and female in each individual, and 
 of measuring the oscillations to each side of which any 
 individual is capable. A point of method must be decided 
 at once, as upon it depends the course the investigation 
 will pursue. Are we to begin by an empirical investigation 
 of the almost innumerable intermediate conditions in 
 mental sexuality, or are we to set out with the abstract sexual 
 types, the ideal psychological man and woman, and then in- 
 vestigate deductively how far such ideal pictures correspond 
 with concrete cases ? The former method is that which the 
 development of psychological knowledge has pursued; ideals 
 have been derived from facts, sexual types constructed from 
 observation of the manifold complexity of nature ; it would 
 be inductive and analytic. The latter mode, deductive and 
 synthetic, is more in accordance with formal logic. 
 
 I have been unwilling to pursue the second method as 
 fully as is possible, because every one can apply for himself 
 to concrete facts the two well-defined extreme types ; once 
 it is understood that actual individuals are mixtures of the 
 types, it is simple to appiy theory to practice, and the actual 
 pursuit of detailed cases would involve much repetition and 
 bring little theoretical advantage. The second method, 
 
56 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 however, is impracticable. The collection of the long series 
 of details from which the inductions would be made would 
 simply weary the reader. 
 
 In the first or biological part of my work, I give little 
 attention to the extreme types, but devote myself to the 
 fullest investigation of the intermediate stages. In the 
 second part, I shall endeavour tv> make as full a psycho- 
 logical analysis as possible of the characters of the male 
 and female types, and will touch only lightly on concrete 
 instances. 
 
 I shall first mention, without laying too much stress on 
 them, some of the more obvious mental characteristics of 
 the intermediate conditions. 
 
 Womanish men are usually extremely anxious to marry, 
 at least (I mention this to prevent misconception) if a 
 sufficiently brilliant opportunity offers itself. When it is 
 possible, they nearly always marry whilst they are still quite 
 young. It is especially gratifying to them to get as wives 
 famous women, artists or poets, or singers and actresses. 
 
 Womanish men are physically lazier than other men in 
 proportion to the degree of their womanishness. There are 
 " men " who go out walking with the sole object of display- 
 ing their faces like the faces of women, hoping that they 
 will be admired, after which they return contentedly home. 
 The ancient " Narcissus " was a prototype of such persons. 
 These people are naturally fastidious about the dressing of 
 their hair, their apparel, shoes, and linen ; they are con- 
 cerned as to their personal appearance at all times, and 
 about the minutest details of their toilet. They are con- 
 scious of every glance thrown on them by other men, and 
 because of the female element in them, they are coquettish 
 in gait and demeanour. Viragoes, on the other hand, fre- 
 quently are careless about their toilet, and even about the 
 personal care of their bodies; they take less time in dressing 
 than many womanish men. The dandyism of men on the 
 one hand, and much of what is called the emancipation of 
 women, are due to the increase in the numbers of these 
 epicene creatures, and not merely to a passing fashion. 
 
SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND FORM 57 
 
 ^Indeed, if one inquires why anything becomes the fashion 
 it will be found that there is a true cause for iy 
 
 The more femaleness a woman possesses the less will she 
 understand a man, and the sexual characters of a man will 
 have the greater influence on her. This is more than a 
 mere application of the law of sexual attraction, as I have 
 already stated it. So also the more manly a man is the less 
 will he understand women, but the more readily be in- 
 fluenced by them as women. Those men who claim to 
 understand women are themselves very nearly women. 
 Womanish men often know how to treat women much 
 better than manly men. Manly men, except in most rare 
 cases, learn how to deal with women only after long expe- 
 rience, and even then most imperfectly. 
 
 Although I have been touching here in a most superficial 
 way on what are no more than tertiary sexual characters, I 
 wish to point out an application of my conclusions to peda- 
 gogy. I am convinced that the more these views are 
 understood the more certainly will they lead to an indi- 
 vidual treatment in education. At the present time shoe- 
 makers, who make shoes to measure, deal more rationally 
 with individuals than our teachers and schoolmasters in 
 their application of moral principles. ^At present the 
 sexually intermediate forms of individuals (especially on 
 the female side) are treated exactly as if they were good 
 examples of the ideal male or female types. There is 
 wanted an " orthopaedic" treatment of the soul instead of 
 the torture caused by the appUcation of ready-made con- 
 ventional shapes. The present system stamps out much 
 that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and 
 distorts much into artificial and unnatural forms.y 
 
 From time immemorial there have been only two systems 
 of education ; one for those who come into the world desig- 
 nated by one set of characters as males, and another for 
 those who are similarly assumed to be females. Almost at 
 once the "boys" and the "girls" are dressed differently, 
 learn to play different games, go through different courses 
 of instruction, the girls being put to stitching and so forth. 
 
58 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 The intermediate individuals are placed at a great disad- 
 vantage. And yet the instincts natural to their condition 
 reveal themselves quickly enough, often even before puberty. 
 There are boys who like to play with dolls, who learn to 
 knit and sew with their sisters, and who are pleased to be 
 given girls' names. There are girls who delight in the 
 noisier sports of their brothers, and who make chums and 
 playmates of them. After puberty, there is a still stronger 
 display of the innate differences. Manlike women wear their 
 hair short, affect manly dress, study, drink, smoke, are fond of 
 mountaineering, or devote themselves passionately to sport. 
 Womanish men grow their hair long, wear corsets, are 
 experts in the toilet devices of women, and show the 
 greatest readiness to become friendly and intimate w'th 
 them, preferring their society to that of men. 
 
 Later on, the different laws and customs to which the so« 
 called sexes are subjected press them as by a vice into 
 distinctive moulds. The proposals which should follow 
 from my conclusions will encounter more passive resist- 
 ance, I fear, in the case of girls than in that of boys. I 
 must here contradict, in the most positive fashion, a dogma 
 that is authoritatively and widely maintained at the present 
 time, the idea that all women are alike, that no individuals 
 exist amongst women. It is true that amongst those indi- 
 viduals whose constitutions lie nearer the female side than 
 the male side, the differences and possibilities are not so 
 great as amongst those on the male side ; the greater varia- 
 bility of males is true not only for the human race but for 
 the living world, and is related to the principles established 
 by Darwin. None the less, there are plenty of differences 
 amongst women. The psychological origin of this common 
 error depends chiefly on a fact that I explained in chap, iii., 
 the fact that every man in his life becomes intimate only 
 with a group of women defined by his own constitution, 
 and so naturally he finds them much alike. /For the 
 same reason, and in the same way, one may often hear a 
 woman say that all men are alike. And the narrow uniform 
 view about men, displayed by most of the leaders of the 
 
SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND FORM 59 
 
 women's rights movement depends on precisely the same 
 cause./ 
 
 It is clear that the principle of the existence of innu- 
 merable individual proportions of the male and female 
 principles is a basis of the study of character which must 
 be applied in any rational scheme of pedagogy. 
 
 The science of character must be associated with some 
 form of psychology that takes into account some theory of 
 the real existence of mental phenomena in the same fashion 
 that anatomy is related to physiology. And so it is necessary, 
 quite apart from theoretical reasons, to attempt to pursue a 
 psychology of individual differences. This attempt will be 
 readily enough followed by those who believe in the paral- 
 lelism between mind and matter, for they will see in psycho- 
 logy no more than the physiology of the central nervous 
 system, and Vv^ill readily admit that the science of character 
 must be a sister of morphology. As a matter of fact 
 there is great hope that in future characterology and mor- 
 phology will each greatly help the other. The principle of 
 sexually intermediate forms, and still more the parallelism 
 between characterology and morphology in the widest 
 application, make us look forward to the time when phy- 
 siognomy will take its honourable place amongst the 
 sciences, a place which so many have attempted to gain 
 for it but as yet unsuccessfully. 
 
 The problem of physiognomy is the problem of the rela- 
 tion between the static mental forces and the static bodily 
 forces, just as the problem of physiological psychology 
 deals with the dynamic aspect of the same relations. It is 
 a great error in method, and in fact, to treat the study of 
 physiognomy, because of its difficulty, as impracticable. 
 And yet this is the attitude of contemporary scientific 
 circles, unconsciously perhaps rather than consciously, 
 but occasionally becoming obvious, as for instance in 
 the case of the attempt of von Möbius to pursue the 
 work of Gall with regard to the physiognomy of those with 
 a natural aptitude for mathematics. ^If it be possible, and 
 many have shown that it is possible, to judge correctly 
 
/ 
 
 6o SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 much of the character of an individual merely from the 
 examination of his external appearance, without the aid of 
 cross-examination or guessing, it cannot be impossible to 
 reduce such modes of observation to an exact method^) There 
 is little more required than an exact study of the expression 
 of the characteristic emotions and the tracking (to use a 
 rough analogy) of the routes of the cabled passing to the 
 speech centres. 
 
 None the less it will be long before official science 
 ceases to regard the study of physiognomy as illegitimate. 
 Although people will still believe in the parallelism of mind 
 and body, they will continue to treat the physiognomist as 
 as much of a charlatan as until quite recently the hypnotist 
 was thought to be. ^None the less, all mankind at least 
 unconsciously, and intelligent persons consciously, will 
 continue to be physiognomists, people will continue to 
 judge character from the nose, although they will not admit 
 the existence of a science of physiognomy J and the portraits 
 of celebrated men and of murderers will continue to interest 
 every one. 
 
 I am inclined to believe that the assumption of a univer- 
 sally acquired correspondence between mind and body may 
 be a hitherto neglected fundamental function of our mind. 
 It is certainly the case that every one believes in physiog- 
 nomy and actually practises it. The principle of the exist- 
 ence of a definite relation between mind and body must be 
 accepted as an illuminating axiom for psychological research, 
 and it will be for religion and metaphysics to work out 
 the details of a relationship which must be accepted as 
 existing. 
 
 Whether or no the science of character can be linked with 
 morphology, it will be valuable not only to these sciences 
 but to physiognomy if we can penetrate a little deeper into 
 the confusion that now reigns in order to find if wrong 
 methods have not been responsible for it. I hope that 
 the attempt I am about to make will lead some little 
 way into the labyrinth, and will prove to be of general 
 application. 
 
SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND FORM 6i 
 
 Some men are fond of dogs and detest cats ; others are 
 devoted to cats and dislike dogs. Inquiring minds have 
 delighted to ask in such cases, Why are cats attractive to 
 one person, dogs to another ? Why ? 
 
 1 do not think that this is the most fruitful way of stating 
 the problem. I believe it to be more important to ask in 
 what other respects lovers of dogs and of cats differ from 
 one another. The habit, where one difference has been 
 detected, of seeking for the associated differences, will 
 prove extremely useful not only to pure morphology and to 
 the science of character,'(but ultimately to physiognomy, the 
 meeting-point of the two science^ Aristotle pointed out 
 long ago that many characteristics of animals do not vary 
 independently of each other. Later on Cuvier, in par- 
 ticular, but also Geoffrey St. Hilaire and Darwin made a 
 special study of these " correlations." Occasionally the 
 association of the characters is easy to understand on 
 obvious utilitarian principles ; where for instance the ali- 
 mentary canal is adapted to the digestion of flesh, the jaws 
 and body must be adapted for the capture of the prey. But 
 association such as that between ruminant stomachs and 
 the presence of cloven hoofs and of horns in the male, or 
 of immunity to certain poisons with particular colouring of 
 the hair, or among domestic pigeons of short bills with 
 small feet, of long bills with large feet, or in cats of deafness 
 with white fur and blue eyes — such are extremely difficult 
 to refer to a single purpose. 
 
 I do not in the least mean to assert that science must be 
 content with no more than the mere discovery of correla- 
 tions. Such a position would be little better than that of a 
 person who was satisfied by finding out that the placing of 
 a penny in the slot of a particular automatic machine 
 always was followed by the release of a box of matches. It 
 would be making resignation the leading principle of meta- 
 physics. We shall get a good deal further by such correla- 
 tions, as, for instance, that of long hair and normal ovaries ; 
 but these are within the sphere of physiology, not of 
 morphology. Probably the goal of an ideal morphology 
 
62 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 could be reached best not by deductions from an attempted 
 synthesis of observations on all the animals that creep on 
 the land or swim in the sea (in the fashion of collectors of 
 postage stamps), but by a complete study of a few 
 organisms. Cuvier by a kind of guess-work used to re- 
 construct an entire animal from a single bone : full 
 knowledge would enable us to do this in a complete, 
 definite, qualitative and quantitative fashion. When such a 
 knowledge has been attained, each single character will at 
 once define and limit for us the possibilities of the other 
 characters. Such a true and logical extension of the prin- 
 ciple of correlation in morphology is really an application 
 of the theory of functions to the living world. It would 
 not exclude the study of causation, but limit it to its proper 
 sphere. No doubt the "causes" of the correlations of 
 organisms must be sought for in the idioplasm. 
 
 The possibility of applying the principle of correlated 
 variation to psychology depends on differential psychology, 
 the study of psychological variation. I believe, moreover, 
 that a combination of study of the anatomical "habit," and 
 the mental characteristics will lead to a statical psycho- 
 physics, a true science of physiognomy. The rule of 
 investigation in all the three sciences will have to be that 
 the question is posed as follows ; given that two organisms 
 are known to differ in one respect, in what other respects 
 are they different ? This will be the golden rule of dis- 
 covery, and, following it, we shall no longer lose ourselves 
 hopelessly in the dark maze that surrounds the answer to 
 the question " Why ? " As soon as we are informed as to 
 one difference, we must diligently seek out the others, and 
 the mere putting of the question in this form will directly 
 bring about many discoveries. 
 
 The conscious pursuit of this rule of investigation will be 
 particularly valuable in dealing with problems of the mind. 
 Mental actions are not co-existent in the sense of physical 
 characters, and it has been only by accidental and fortunate 
 chances, when the phenomena have presented themselves 
 in rapid succession in an individual, that discoveries of 
 
SCIENCE OF CHARACTER AND FORM 63 
 
 correlation in mental phenomena have been noticed. The 
 correlated mental phenomena may be very different in 
 kind, and it is only when we know what we are after and 
 deliberately seek for them that we shall be able to transcend 
 the special difficulties of the kind of material we are investi- 
 gating, and so secure for psychology what is comparatively 
 simple in anatomy. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 EMANCIPATED WOMEN 
 
 As an immediate application of the attempt to establish the 
 principle of intermediate sexual forms by means of a 
 differential psychology, we must now come to the question 
 which it is the special object of this book to answer, 
 theoretically and practically, I mean the woman question, 
 theoretically so far as it is not a matter of ethnology and 
 national economics, and practically in so far as it is not 
 merely a matter of law and domestic economy, that is to 
 say, of social science in the widest sense. The answer 
 which this chapter is about to give must not be considered 
 as final or as exhaustive. It is rather a necessary pre- 
 liminary investigation, and does not go beyond deductions 
 from the principles that I have established. It will deal 
 with the exploration of individual cases and will not 
 attempt to found on these any laws of general significance. 
 The practical indications that it will give are not moral 
 maxims that could or would guide the future ; they are no 
 more than technical rules abstracted from past cases. The 
 idea of male and female types will not be discussed here ; 
 that is reserved for the second part of my book. This 
 preliminary investigation will deal with only those charac- 
 tero-logical conclusions from the principle of sexually 
 intermediate forms that are of significance in the woman 
 question. 
 
 The geneial direction of the investigation is easy to 
 understand from what has already been stated. A woman's 
 demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in 
 direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her. The 
 
EMANCIPATED WOMEN 65 
 
 idea of emancipation, however, is many-sided, and its 
 indefiniteness is increased by its association with many 
 practical customs which have nothing to do with the theory 
 of emancipation. By the term emancipation of a woman, 
 I imply neither her mastery at home nor her subjection of 
 her husband, I have not in mind the courage which 
 enables her to go freely by night or by day unaccompanied 
 in public places, or the disregard of social rules which 
 prohibit bachelor women from receiving visits from men, 
 or discussing or listening to discussions of sexual matters. 
 I exclude from my view the desire for economic indepen- 
 dence, the becoming fit for positions in technical schools, 
 universities and conservatoires or teachers' institutes. And 
 there may be many other similar movements associated 
 with the word emancipation which I do not intend to deal 
 with. /Emancipation, as I mean to discuss it, is not the 
 wish for an outward equality with man, but what is of real 
 importance in the woman question, the deep-seated craving 
 to acquire man's character, to attain his mental and moral 
 freedom, to reach his real interests and his creative power/ 
 I maintain that the real female element has neither the 
 desire nor the capacity for emancipation in this sense. All 
 those who are striving for this real emancipation, all women 
 who are truly famous and are of conspicuous mental ability, 
 to the first glance of an expert reveal some of the ana- 
 tomical characters of the male, some external bodily resem- 
 blance to a man. Those so-called "women" who have 
 been held up to admiration in the past and present, by the 
 advocates of woman's rights, as examples of what women 
 can do, have almost invariably been what I have described 
 as sexually intermediate forms. The very first of the his- 
 torical examples, Sappho herself, has been handed down to 
 us as an example of the sexual invert, and from her name 
 has been derived the accepted terms for perverted sexual 
 relations between women. The contents of the second and 
 third chapter thus at once become important with regard to 
 the woman question. The characterological materia) at 
 our disposal with regard to celebrated and emancipated 
 
66 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 women is too vague to serve as the foundation of any satis^ 
 factory theory. What is wanted is some principle which 
 would enable us to determine at what point between male 
 and female such individuals were placed. My law of sexual 
 affinity is such a principle. Its application to the facts of 
 homo-sexuality showed that the woman who attracts and is 
 attracted by other women is herself half male. Interpreting 
 the historical evidence at our disposal in the light of this 
 principle, we find that the degree of emancipation and the 
 proportion of maleness in the composition of a woman are 
 practically identical. Sappho was only the forerunner of a 
 long line of famous women who were either homo-sexually 
 or bisexually inclined. Classical scholars have defended 
 Sappho warmly against the implication that there was 
 anything more than mere friendship in her relations with 
 her own sex, as if the accusation were necessarily degrading. 
 In the second part of my book, however, I shall show 
 reasons in favour of the possibility that homo-sexuality is a 
 higher form than hetero-sexuality. For the present, it is 
 enough to say that homo-sexuality in a woman is the out- 
 come of her masculinity and presupposes a higher degree of 
 development. Catherine II. of Russia, and Queen Christina 
 of Sweden, the highly gifted although deaf, dumb and blind, 
 Laura Bridgman, George Sand, and a very large number of 
 highly gifted women and girls concerning whom 1 myself 
 have been able to collect information, were partly bisexual, 
 partly homo-sexual. 
 
 I shall now turn to other indications in the case of the 
 large number of emancipated women regarding whom there 
 is no evidence as to homo-sexuality, and I shall show that 
 my attribution of maleness is no caprice, no egotistical wish 
 of a man to associate all the higher manifestations of intelli- 
 gence with the male sex. Just as homo-sexual or bisexual 
 women reveal their maleness by their preference either for 
 women or for womanish men, so hetero-sexual women dis- 
 play maleness in their choice of a male partner who is not 
 preponderatingly male. The most famous of George Sand's 
 many affairs were those with de Musset, the most effeminat« 
 
EMANCIPATED WOMEN e-j 
 
 and sentimental poet, and with Chopin, who might be 
 described almost as the only female musician, so effeminate 
 are his compositions.* Vittoria Colonna is less known 
 because of her own poetic compositions than because of 
 the infatuation for her shown by Michael Angelo, whose 
 earlier friendships had been with youths. The authoress, 
 Daniel Stern, was the mistress of Franz Liszt, whose life 
 and compositions were extremely effeminate, and who had 
 a dubious friendship with Wagner, the interpretation of 
 which was made plain by his later devotion to King 
 Ludwig IL of Bavaria. Madame de Staal, whose work on 
 Germany is probably the greatest book ever produced by a 
 woman, is supposed to have been intimate with August 
 Wilhelm Schlegel, who was a homo-sexualist, and who had 
 been tutor to her children. At certain periods of his life, 
 the face of the husband of Clara Schumann might have 
 been taken as that of a woman, and a good deal of his 
 music, although certainly not all, was effeminate. 
 
 When there is no evidence as to the sexual relations of 
 famous women, we can still obtain important conclusions 
 from the details of their personal appearance. Such data 
 support my general proposition. 
 
 George Eliot had a broad, massive forehead ; her move- 
 ments, like her expression, were quick and decided, and 
 lacked all womanly grace. The face of Lavinia Fontana 
 was intellectual and decided, very rarely charming ; whilst 
 that of Rachel Ruysch was almost wholly masculine. The 
 biography of that original poetess, Annette von Droste- 
 Hülshoff, speaks of her wiry, unwomanly frame, and of her 
 face as being masculine, and recalling that of Dante. The 
 authoress and mathematician, Sonia Kowalevska, like 
 Sappho, had an abnormally scanty growth of hair, still less 
 than is the fashion amongst the poetesses and female 
 
 * Chopin's portraits shovp his effeminacy plainly. erimee 
 
 describes George Sand as being as thin as a nail. At the first 
 meeting of the two, the lady behaved like a man, and the man like 
 a girl. He blushed when she looked at him and began to pay him 
 compliments in her bass voice. 
 
68 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 students of the present day. It would be a serious omission 
 to forget Rosa Bonheur, the very distinguished painter ; 
 and it would be difficult to point to a single female trait 
 in her appearance or character. The notorious Madame 
 Blavatsky is extremely masculine in her appearance. 
 
 I might refer to many other emancipated women at 
 present well known to the public, consideration of whom 
 has provided me with much material for the support of 
 my proposition that the true female element, the abstract 
 "woman," has nothing to do with emancipation. There is 
 some historical justification for the saying "the longer the 
 hair the smaller the brain," but the reservations made in 
 chap. ii. must be taken into account. 
 
 (jt is only the male element in emancipated women that 
 craves for emancipation^ 
 
 There is, then, a stronger reason than has generally been 
 supposed for the familiar assumption of male pseudonyms 
 by women writers. Their choice is a mode of giving ex- 
 pression to the inherent maleness they feel ; and this is 
 still more marked in the case of those who, like George 
 Sand, have a preference for male attire and masculine pur- 
 suits. The motive for choosing a man's name springs from 
 the feeling that it corresponds with their own character 
 much more than from any desire for increased notice from 
 the public. As a matter of fact, up to the present, partly 
 owing to interest in the sex question, women's writings have 
 aroused more interest, ceteris paribus, than those of men ; 
 and, owing to the issues involved, have always received a 
 fuller consideration and, if there were any justification, a 
 greater meed of praise than has been accorded to a man's 
 work of equal merit. At the present time especially many 
 women have attained celebrity by work which, if it had 
 been produced by a man, would have passed almost un- 
 noticed. Let us pause and examine this more closely. 
 
 If we attempt to apply a standard taken from the names of 
 men who are of acknowledged value in philosophy, science, 
 literature and art, to the long list of women who have 
 achieved some kind of fame, there will at once be a miserable 
 
EMANCIPATED WOMEN 69 
 
 collapse. Judged in this way, it is difficult to grant any 
 real degree of merit to women like Angelica Kaufmann or 
 Madame Lebrun, Fernan Caballero or Hroswitha von 
 Gapküersheim, Mary Somerville or George Egerton, Eliza- 
 beth Barrett Browning or Sophie Germain, Anna Maria 
 Schurmann or Sybilla Merian. I will not speak of names 
 (such as that of Droste-Hülshoff) formerly so over-rated in 
 the annals of feminism, nor will I refer to the measure of 
 fame claimed for or by living women. It is enough to 
 make the general statement that there is not a single woman 
 in the history of thought, not even the most manlike, who 
 can be truthfully compared with men of fifth or sixth-rate 
 genius, for instance with Riickert as a poet. Van Dyck as a 
 painter, or Scheirmacher as a philosopher. If we eliminate 
 hysterical visionaries,* such as the Sybils, the Priestesses 
 of Delphi, Bourignon, Kettenberg, Jeanna de la Mothe 
 Guyon, Joanna Southcote, Beate Sturmin, St. Teresa, there 
 still remain cases like that of Marie Bashkirtseff. So far as 
 I can remember from her portrait, she at least seemed to be 
 qui^e womanly in face and figure, although her forehead 
 was rather masculine. But to any one who studies her 
 pictures in the Salle des Etrangers in the Luxemburg 
 Gallery in Paris, and compares them with those of her 
 adored master, Bastien Lepage, it is plain that she simply 
 had assimilated the style of the latter, as in Goethe's " Elec- 
 tive Affinities " Ottilie acquired the handwriting of Eduard. 
 There remain the interesting and not infrequent cases 
 where the talent of a clever family seems to reach its maxi- 
 mum in a female member of the family. But it is only 
 talent that is transmitted in this way, not genius. Mar- 
 garethe van Eyck and Sabina von Steinbach form the best 
 illustrations of the kind of artists who, according to Ernst 
 Guhl, in author with a great admiration for women- workers, 
 " have been undoubtedly influenced in their choice of an 
 
 * Hysteria is the principal cause of much of the intellectual 
 activity of many of the women above mentioned. But the usual 
 view, that these cases are pathological, is too limited an interpreta- 
 tion, us I shall show in the second part of this work. 
 
70 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 artistic calling by their fathers, mothers, or brothers. In 
 other words, they found their incentive in their own families. 
 There are two or three hundred of such cases on record, 
 and probably many hundreds more could be added without 
 exhausting the numbers of similar instances." In order to 
 give due weight to these statistics it may be mentioned that 
 Guhl had just been speaking of " roughly, a thousand names 
 of women artists known to us." 
 
 This concludes my historical review of the emancipated 
 women. It has justified the assertion that real desire for 
 emancipation and real fitness for it are the outcome of a 
 woman's maleness. 
 
 "NThe vast majority of women have never paid special 
 attention to art or to science, and regard such occupations 
 merely as higher branches of manual labour, or if they pro- 
 fess a certain devotion to such subjects, it is chiefly as a 
 mode of attracting a particular person or group of persons 
 of the opposite sex.) Apart from these, a close investigation 
 shows that women really interested in intellectual matters 
 are sexually intermediate forms. 
 
 If it be the case that the desire for freedom and equality 
 with man occurs only in masculine women, the inductive 
 conclusion follows that the female principle is not conscious 
 of a necessity for emancipation ; and the argument becomes 
 stronger if we remember that it is based on an examination 
 of the accounts of individual cases and not on psychical 
 investigation of an " abstract woman." 
 
 If we now look at the question of emancipation from the 
 point of view of hygiene (not morality) there is no doubt as 
 to the harm in it. The undesirability of emancipation lies 
 in the excitement and agitation involved. It induces women 
 who have no real original capacity but undoubted imitative 
 powers to attempt to study or write, from various motives, 
 such as vanity or the desire to attract admirers. Whilst it 
 cannot be denied that there are a good many women with 
 a real craving for emancipation and for higher education, 
 these set the fashion and are followed by a host of others 
 who get up a ridiculous agitation to convince themselves of 
 
EMANCIPATED WOMEN 71 
 
 the reality of their views. And many otherwise estimable 
 and worthy wives use the cry to assert themselves against 
 their husbands, whilst daughters take it as a method of 
 rebelling against maternal authority. The practical outcome 
 of the whole matter would be as follows ; it being remem- 
 bered that the issues are too mutable for the establishment 
 of uniform rules or laws. Let there be the freest scope 
 given to, and the fewest hindrances put in the way of all 
 women with masculine dispositions who feel a psychical 
 necessity to devote themselves to masculine occupations and 
 are physically fit to undertake them. But the idea of mak- 
 ing an emancipation party, of aiming at a social revolution, 
 must be abandoned. Away with the whole ** woman's 
 movement," with its unnaturalness and artificiality and its 
 fundamental errors. 
 
 It is most important to have done with the senseless cry 
 for " full equality," for even the malest woman is scarcely 
 more than 50 per cent, male, and it is only to that male 
 part of her that she owes her special capacity or whatever 
 importance she may eventually gam. It is absurd to make 
 comparisons between the few really intellectual women 
 and one's average experience of men, and to deduce, as 
 has been done, even the superiority of the female sex. 
 As Darwin pointed out, the proper comparison is between 
 the most highly developed individuals of two stocks. 
 " If two lists," Darwin wrote in the " Descent of Man," 
 " were made of the most eminent men and women in 
 poetry, painting, sculpture, music — comprising composition 
 and performance, history, science, and philosophy, with 
 half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists 
 would not bear comparison." Moreover, if these lists 
 were carefully examined it would be seen that the 
 women's list would prove the soundness of my theory 
 of the maleness of their genius, and the comparison would 
 be still less pleasing to the champions of woman's rights» 
 
 It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a 
 public feeling in favour of the full and unchecked mental 
 development of women. Such an argument overlooks 
 
72 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the fact that " emancipation," the " woman question," 
 " women's rights movements," are no new things in history, 
 but have always been with us, although with varying 
 prominence at different times in history. It also largely 
 exaggerates the difficulties men place in the way of the 
 mental development of women, especially at the present 
 time.* Furthermore it neglects the fact that at the present 
 time it is not the true woman who clamours for eman- 
 cipation, but only the masculine type of woman, who 
 misconstrues her own character and the motives that 
 actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name 
 of woman. 
 
 <s^s has been the case with every other movement in 
 history, so also it has been with the contemporary woman's 
 movement. Its origmators were convmced that it was being 
 put forward for the first time, and that such a thing had 
 never been thought of before. They maintained that women 
 had hitherto been held in bondage and enveloped in dark- 
 ness by man, and that it was high time for her to assert her- 
 self and claim her natural rights./ 
 
 But the prototype of this movement, as of other move- 
 ments, occurred in the earliest times. Ancient history and 
 mediaeval times alike give us instances of women who, in 
 social relations and intellectual matters, fought for such 
 emancipation, and of male and female apologists of the 
 female sex. It is totally erroneous to suggest that hitherto 
 women have had no opportunity for the undisturbed 
 development of their mental powers. 
 
 Jacob Burckhardt, speaking of the Renaissance, says : 
 " The greatest possible praise which could be given to the 
 Italian women-celebrities of the time was to say that they 
 were like men in brains and disposition ! " The virile 
 deeds of women recorded in the epics, especially those of 
 Boiardo and Ariosto, show the ideal of the time. To call 
 
 * There have been many celebrities amongst men who received 
 practically no education — for instance, Robert Burns and Wolfram 
 von Eschenbach ; but there are no similar cases amongst women to 
 compare with them- 
 
EMANCIPATED WOMEN 73 
 
 >a woman a "virago " nowadays would be a doubtful com- 
 ipliment, but it originally meant an honour. 
 
 Women were first allowed on the stage in the sixteenth 
 century, and actresses date from that time. " At that 
 period it was admitted that women were just as capable as 
 men of embodying the highest possible artistic ideals." 
 It was the period when panegyrics on the female sex were 
 rife ; Sir Thomas More claimed for it full equality with the 
 male sex, and Agrippa von Nettesheim goes so far as to 
 represent women as superior to men ! And yet this was 
 all lost for the fair sex, and the whole question sank into 
 the oblivion from which the nineteenth century recalled it. 
 
 Is it not very remarkable that the agitation for the eman- 
 cipation of women seems to repeat itself at certain intervals 
 in the world's history, and lasts for a definite period ? 
 
 yt has been noticed that in the tenth, fifteenth, and six- 
 teenth, and now again in the nineteenth and twentieth 
 centuries, the agitation for the emancipation of women has 
 been more marked, and the woman's movement more 
 vigorous than in the intervening periods. It would be 
 premature to found a hypothesis on the data at our dis- 
 posal, but the possibility of a vastly important periodicity 
 must be borne in mind, of regularly recurring periods in 
 which it may be that there is an excess of production of 
 hermaphrodite and sexually intermediate forms. Such a 
 state of affairs is not unknown in the animal kingdom. 
 
 According to my interpretation, such a period would be 
 one of minimum " gonochorism," cleavage of the sexes ; 
 and it would be marked, on the one hand, by an increased 
 production of male women, and on the other, by a similar 
 increase in female men. There is strong evidence in favour 
 of such a periodicity ; if it occurs it may be associated with 
 the "secessionist taste," which idealised tall, lanky women 
 with fiat chests and narrow hips.^ The enormous recent 
 increase in a kind of dandified homo-sexuality may be due 
 to the increasing effeminacy of the age, and the peculiarities 
 of the Pre-Raphaelite movement may have a similar 
 explanation. 
 
74 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 The existence of such periods in organic Hfe, comparable 
 with stages in individual life, but extending over several 
 generations, would, if proved, throw much light on many 
 obscure points in human history, concerning which the 
 so-called " historical solutions," and especially the economic- 
 materialistic views now in vogue have proved so futile. The 
 history of the world from the biological standpoint has still 
 to be written ; it lies in the future. Here 1 can do little more 
 than indicate the direction which future work should take. 
 
 Were it proved that at certain periods fewer herma- 
 phrodite beings were produced, and at certain other periods 
 more, it would appear that the rising and falling, the periodic 
 occurrence and disappearance of the woman movement in 
 an unfailing rhythm of ebb and flow, was one of the ex- 
 pressions of the preponderance of masculine and feminine 
 women with the concomitant greater or lesser desire for 
 emancipation. 
 
 Obviously I do not take into account in relation to the 
 woman question the large number of womanly women, the 
 wives of the prolific artisan class whom economic pressure 
 forces to factory or field labour. The connection between 
 industrial progress and the woman question is much less 
 close than is usually realised, especially by the Social 
 Democratic Group. The relation between the mental 
 energy required for intellectual and for industrial pursuits 
 is even less. .^France, for instance, although it can boast 
 three of the most famous women, has never had a successful 
 woman's movement, and yet in no other European country 
 are there so many really businesslike, capable womei'^^ 
 The struggle for the material necessities of life has nothing 
 to do with the struggle for intellectual development, and a 
 sharp distinction mast be made between the two. 
 
 The pro-pects of the movement for intellectual advance 
 on the part of women are not very promising ; but still less 
 promising is another view, sometimes discussed in the 
 same connection, the view that^he human race is moving 
 towards a complete sexual differentiation, a definite sexual 
 dimorphism.N 
 
EMANCIPATED WOMEN 75 
 
 The latter view seems to me fundamentally untenable, 
 because in the higher groups of the animal kingdom there 
 is no evidence for the increase of sexual dimorphism. 
 Worms and rotifers, many birds and the mandrills amongst 
 the apes, have more advanced sexual dimorphism than man. 
 On the view that such an increased sexual dimorphism 
 were to be expected, the necessity for emancipation would 
 gradually disappear as mankind became separated into the 
 completely male and the completely female. On the other 
 hand, the view that there will be periodical resurrections 
 of the woman's movement would reduce the whole affair to 
 ridiculous impotence, making it only an ephemeral phase in 
 the history of mankind. 
 
 A complete obliteration will be the fate of any emancipa- 
 tion movement which attempts to place the whole sex in a 
 new relation to society, and to see in man its perpetual 
 oppressor. A corps of Amazons might be formed, but as 
 time went on the material for the corps would cease to 
 occur. The history of the woman movement during the 
 Renaissance and its complete disappearance contains a 
 lesson for the advocates of women's rights. Real intellectual 
 freedom cannot be attained by an agitated mass ; it must be 
 fought for by the individual. Who is the enemy ? What 
 are the retarding influences ? 
 
 The greatest, the one enemy of the emancipation of 
 women is woman herself. It is left to the second part of 
 my work to prove this. 
 
SECOND OR PRINCIPAL PART 
 THE SEXUAL TYPES 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 MAN AND WOMAN 
 
 " All that a man does is physiognomical of him." 
 
 Carlyle, 
 
 A FREE field for the investigation of the actual contrasts 
 between the sexes is gained when we recognise that male 
 and female, man and woman, must be considered only as 
 types, and that the existing individuals, upon whose quali- 
 ties there has been so much controversy, are mixtures of the 
 types in different proportions. {Sexually intermediate forms, 
 which are the only actually existing individualsy^were dealt 
 with in a more or less schematic fashion in the first part of 
 this book. Consideration of the general biological applica- 
 tion of my theory was entered upon there ; but now I have 
 to make mankind the special subject of my investigation, 
 and to show the defects of the results gained by the method 
 of introspective analysis, as these results must be qualified 
 by the universal existence of sexually intermediate condi- 
 tions. In plants and animals the presence of hermaphro- 
 ditism is an undisputed fact ; but in them it appears more 
 to be the juxtaposition of the male and female genital 
 glands in the same individual than an actual fusion of the 
 two sexes, more the co-existence of the two extremes than 
 a quite neutral condition. In the case of human beings, 
 however, it appears to be psychologically true that an indi- 
 vidual, at least at one and the same moment, is always 
 either man or woman. This is in harmony with the fact 
 that each individual, whether superficially regarded as male 
 or female, at once can recognise his sexual complement in. 
 
8o SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 another individual "woman" or " man."* This uni-sexuaHty 
 is demonstrated by the fact, the theoretical value of which 
 can hardly be over-estimated, that, in the relations of two 
 homo-sexual men one always plays the physical and psy- 
 chical roll of the man, and in cases of prolonged inter- 
 course retains his male first-name, or takes one, whilst the 
 other, who plays the part of the woman, either assumes a 
 woman's name or calls himself by it, or — and this is suffi- 
 ciently characteristic — receives it from the former. 
 
 In the same way, in the sexual relations of two women, 
 one always plays the male and the other the female part, a 
 fact of deepest significance. Here we encounter, in a 
 most unexpected fashion, the fundamental relationship 
 between the male and female elements. In spite of all 
 sexually intermediate conditions, human beings are always 
 one of two things, either male or female. There is a deep 
 truth underlying the old empirical sexual duality, and this 
 must not be neglected, even although in concrete cases 
 there is not a necessary harmony in the anatomical and 
 morphological conditions. To realise this is to make a 
 great step forward and to advance towards most important 
 results. In this way we reach a conception of a real 
 " being." The task of the rest of this book is to set forth 
 the significance of this " existence." As, however, this 
 existence is bound up with the most difficult side of 
 characterology, it will be well, before setting out on our 
 adventurous task, to attempt some preliminary orientation. 
 
 The obstacles in the way of characterological investiga- 
 tion are very great, if only on account of the complexity of 
 the material. Often and often it happens that when the 
 path through the jungle appears to have been cleared, it is 
 lost again in impenetrable thickets, and it seems impossible 
 
 * I once heard a bi-sexual man exclaim, when he saw a bi-sexual 
 actress with a slight tendency to a beard, a deep sonorous voice, 
 and very little hair on her head, " There is a fine woman." 
 " Woman " means something different for every man or for every 
 poet, and yet it is always the same, the sexual complement of their 
 own constitution. 
 
MAN AND WOMAN 8i 
 
 to recover it. But the greatest difficulty is that when the 
 systematic method of setting out the complex material has 
 been proceeded with and seems about to lead to good 
 results, then at once objections of the most serious kind 
 arise and almost forbid the attempt to make types. With 
 regard to the differences between the sexes, for instance, 
 the most useful theory that has been put forward is the 
 existence of a kind of polarity, two extremes separated by 
 a multitude of intermediate conditions. The characterolo- 
 gical differences appear to follow this rule in a fashion not 
 dissimilar to the suggestion of the Pythagorean, Alcmaeon 
 of Kroton, and recalling the recent chemical resurrection 
 of Schelling's " Natur-philosophie." 
 
 But even if we are able to determine the exact point 
 occupied by an individual on the line between two ex- 
 tremes, and multiply this determination by discovering it 
 for a great many characters, would this complex system of 
 co-ordmate lines really give us a conception of the indivi- 
 dual ? Would it not be a relapse to the dogmatic scepticism 
 of Mach and Hume, were we to expect that an analysis 
 could be a full description of the human individual ? 
 And in a fashion it would be a sort of Weismannistic doc- 
 trine of particulate determinants, a mosaic psychology. 
 
 /rhis brings us in a new way directly against the old, over- 
 ripe problem. Is there in a man a single and simple exist- 
 ence, and, if so, in what relation does that stand to the ^' 
 complex psychical phenomena ? Has man, indeed, a soul ? 
 It is easy to understand why there has never been a science 
 of character. The object of such a science, the character 
 itself, is problematical. The problem of all metaphysics 
 and theories of knowledge, the fundamental problem of 
 psychology, is also the problem of characterology. At the 
 least, characterology will have to take into account the 
 the'^ry of knowledge itself with regard to its postulates, 
 claims, and objects, and will have to attempt to obtain infor- 
 mation as to all the differences in the nature of men./ 
 
 This unlimited science of character will be something 
 more than the " psychology of individual differences," the 
 
 F 
 
82 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 renewed insistence upon which as a goal of science we owe 
 to L. William Stern ; it will be more than a sort of polity of 
 the motor and sensory reactions of the individual, and in so 
 far will not sink so low as the usual " results " of the modern 
 experimental psychologists, which, indeed, are little more 
 than statistics of physical experiments. It will hope to 
 retain some kind of contact with the actuahties of the soul 
 which the modern school of psychology seems to have 
 forgotten, and will not have to fear that it will have to offer 
 to ardent students of psychology no more than profound 
 studies of words of one syllable, or of the results on the 
 mind of small doses of caffein. It is a lamentable testimony 
 to the insufficiency of modern psychology that distinguished 
 men of science, who have not been content with the study 
 of perception and association, have yet had to hand over to 
 poetry the explanation of such fundamental facts as heroism 
 and self-sacrifice. 
 {No science will become shallow so quickly as psychology 
 if it deserts philosophy. Its separation from philosophy is 
 the true cause of its impotency. Psychology will have to 
 discover that the doctrine of sensations is practically useless 
 to it. The empirical psychologists of to-day, in their search 
 for the development of character, begin with investigation 
 of touch and the common sensations. But the analysis of 
 sensations is simply a part of the physiology of sense, and 
 any attempt to bring it into relation with the real problems 
 of psychology must fail!\ 
 
 It is a misfortune of the scientific psychology of the day 
 that it has been influenced so deeply by two physicists, 
 Fechner and von Helmholtz, with the result that it has 
 failed to recognise that only the external and not the 
 internal world can be reconstructed from sensations. The 
 two most intelligent of the empirical psychologists of recent 
 times, William James and R. Avenarius, have felt almost 
 instinctively that psychology cannot really rest upon sensa- 
 tions of the skin and muscles, although, indeed, all modern 
 psychology does depend upon study of sensations. Dilthey 
 did not lay enough stress on his argument that existing 
 
MAN AND WOMAN 83 
 
 psychology does nothing towards problems that are 
 eminently psychological, such as murder, friendship, lone- 
 liness, and so forth. If anything is to be gained in the 
 future there must be a demand for a really psychological 
 psychology, and its first battle-cry must be : " Away with 
 the study of sensations." 
 
 In attempting the broad and deep characterology that I 
 have indicated, I must set out with a conception of character 
 itself as a unit existence. As in the fifth chapter of Part I., 
 I tried to show that behind the fleeting physiological changes 
 there is a permanent morphological form, so in charac- 
 terology we must seek the permanent, existing something 
 through the fleeting changes. 
 
 \The character, however, is not something seated behind 
 the thoughts and feelings of the individual, but something 
 revealing itself in every thought and feeling. " All that a 
 man does is physiognomical of him." Just as every cell 
 bears within it the characters of the whole individual, so 
 every psychical manifestation of a man involves not merely a 
 few little characteristic traits, but his whole being, of which 
 at one moment one quality, at another moment another 
 quality, comes into prominence.^ 
 
 Just as no sensation is ever isolated, but is set in a com- 
 plete field of sensation, the world of the Ego, of which now 
 one part and now the other, stands out more plainly, so the 
 whole man is manifest in every moment of the psychical 
 life, although, now one side, now the other, is more visible. 
 This existence, manifest in every moment of the psychical 
 life, is the object of characterology. By accepting this, 
 there will be completed for the first time a real psychology, 
 existing psychology, in manifest contradiction of the mean- 
 ing of the word, having concerned itself almost entirely with 
 the motley world, the changing field of sensations, and over- 
 looked the ruling force of the Ego. The new psychology 
 would be a doctrine of the whole, and would become fresh 
 and fertile inasmuch as it would combine the complexity 
 of the subject and of the object, two spheres which can be 
 separated only in abstraction. Many disputed points of 
 
84 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 psychology (perhaps the most important) would be settled 
 by an application of such characterology, as that would 
 explain why so many different views have been held on the 
 same subject. The same psychical process appears from 
 time to time in different aspects, merely because it takes tone 
 and colouring from the individual character. And so it 
 well may be that the doctrine of differential psychology may 
 receive its completion in the domain -of general psychology. 
 vThe confusion of characterology with the doctrine of the 
 soul has been a great misfortune, but because this has 
 occurred in actual history, is no reason why it should con- 
 tinue. The absolute sceptic differs only in a word from the 
 absolute dogmatist. The man who dogmatically accepts 
 the position of absolute phenomenalism, believing it to 
 relieve him of all the burden of proof that the mere entering 
 on another standpoint would itself entail, will be ready to 
 dismiss without proof the existence which characterology 
 posits, and which has nothing to do with a metaphysical 
 " essence."/ 
 
 Characterology has to defend itself against two great 
 enemies. The one assumes that character is something 
 ultimate, and as little the subject-matter of science as is 
 the art of a painter. The other looks on the sensations 
 as the only realities, on sensation as the ground-work of 
 the world of the Ego, and denies the existence of cha- 
 racter. What is left for characterology, the science of 
 character ? On the one hand, there are those who cry, 
 " Deindividuo nulla scientia," and " Individuum est ineffa- 
 bile " ; on the other hand, there are those sworn to 
 science, who maintain that science has nothing to do with 
 character. 
 
 In such a cross-fire, characterology has to take its place, 
 and it may well be feared that it may share the fate of its 
 sisters and remain a trivial subject like physiognomy or a 
 diviner's art like graphology. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MALE AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 
 
 " Woman does not betray her secret." 
 
 Kant. 
 
 " From a woman you can learn nothing of women." 
 
 Nietzsche. 
 
 (i 
 
 Py psychology, as a whole, we generally understand the 
 psychology of the psychologists, and these are exclusively 
 men ! Never since human history began have we heard 
 of a female psychology !,) None the less the psychology 
 of woman constitutes a chapter as important with regard to 
 general psychology as that of the child. And inasmuch as 
 the psychology of man has always been written with un- 
 conscious but definite reference to man, general psychology 
 has become simply the psychology of men, and the problem 
 of the psychology of the sexes will be raised as soon as the 
 existence of a separate psychology of women has been 
 realised. Kant said that in anthropology the peculiarities 
 of the female were more a study for the philosopher than 
 those of the male, and it may be that the psychology of the 
 sexes will disappear in a psychology of the female. 
 
 None the less the psychology of women will have to be 
 written by men. It is easy to suggest that such an attempt 
 is foredoomed to failure, inasmuch as the conclusions must 
 be drawn from an alien sex and cannot be verified by intro- 
 spection. Granted the possibility that woman could 
 describe herself with sufficient exactness, it by no means 
 follows that she would be interested in the sides of her 
 
86 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 character that would interest us. Moreover, even if she 
 could and would explore herself fully, it is doubtful if she 
 could bring herself to talk about herself. I shall show that | 
 these three improbabilities spring from the same source j 
 in the nature of woman. 
 
 This investigation, therefore, lays itself open to the 
 charge that no one who is not female can be in a posi- 
 tion to make accurate statements about women. In the 
 meantime the objection must stand, although, later, I shall 
 have more to say of it. I will say only this much — up to 
 now, and is this only a consequence of man's suppression ? — 
 we have no account from a pregnant woman of her sensa- 
 tions and feelings, neither in poetry nor in memoirs, nor 
 even in a gynaecological treatise. This cannot be on 
 account of excessive modesty, for, as Schopenhauer rightly 
 pointed out, there is nothing so far removed from a pregnant 
 woman as shame as to her condition. Besides, there would 
 still remain to them the possibility of, after the birth, con- 
 fessing from memory the psychical life during the time ; if 
 a sense of shame had prevented them from such communi- 
 cation during the time, it would be gone afterwards, and 
 the varied interests of such a disclosure ought to have 
 induced some one to break silence. But this has not been 
 done. Just as we have always been indebted to men for 
 really trustworthy expositions of the psychical side of 
 women, so also it is to men that we owe descriptions of 
 the sensations of pregnant women. What is the meaning 
 of this ? 
 
 Although in recent times we have had revelations of the 
 psychical life of half-women and three-quarter women, it is 
 practically only about the male side of them that they have 
 written. We have really only one clue ; we have to rely 
 upon the female element in men. The principle of sexually 
 intermediate forms is the authority for what we know about 
 women through men. I shall define and complete the 
 application of this principle later on. In its indefinite form, 
 the principle would seem to imply that the most womanish 
 man would be best able to describe woman, and that the 
 
MALE AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 87 
 
 description might be completed by the real woman. 
 This, however, is extremely doubtful. I must point out 
 that a man can have a considerable proportion of female- 
 ness in him without necessarily, to the same extent, being 
 able to portray intermediate forms. It is the more remark- 
 able that the male can give a faithful account of the nature 
 of the female ; since, indeed, it must be admitted from the 
 extreme maleness of successful portrayers of women that 
 we cannot dispute the existence of this capacity in the 
 abstract male ; this power of the male over the female is a 
 most remarkable problem, and we shall have to consider it 
 later. For the present we must take it as a fact, and pro- 
 ceed to inquire in what lies the actual psychological 
 difference between male and female. 
 
 It has been sought to attribute the fundamental difference 
 of the sexes to the existence of a stronger sexual impulse in 
 man, and to derive everything else from that. Apart from the 
 question as to whether the phrase "sexual instinct" denotes 
 a simple and real thing, it is to be doubted if there is proof of 
 such a difference. It is not more probable than the ancient 
 theories as to the influence of the "unsatistied womb" in 
 the female, or of the " semen retentum " in men, and we 
 have to be on guard against the current tendency to refer 
 nearly everything to sublimated sexual instinct. No sys- 
 tematic theory could be founded on a generalisation so 
 vague. It is most improbable that the greater or lesser 
 strength of the sexual impulse determines other qualities. 
 
 O^s a matter of fact, the statements that men have stronger 
 sexual impulses than women, or that women have them 
 stronger than men, are false. The strength of the sexual 
 impulse in a man does not depend upon the proportion of 
 masculinity in his composition, and in the same way the 
 degree of femininity of a woman does not determine her 
 sexual impulse*' These differences in mankind still await 
 classification. 
 
 Contrary to the general opinion, there is no difference in 
 the total sexual impulses of the sexes. However, if we 
 examine the matter in respect to the two component forces 
 
88 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 into which Albert Moll analysed the impulse, we shall find 
 that a difference does exist. These forces may be termed 
 the " liberating " and the " uniting " impulses. The first 
 appears in the form of the discomfort caused by the accu- 
 mulation of ripe sexual cells ; the second is the desire of 
 the ripe individual for sexual completion. Both impulses 
 are possessed by the male ; in the female only the latter is 
 present. The anatomy and the physiological processes of 
 the sexes bear out the distinction. 
 
 In this connection it may be noted that only the most 
 male youths are addicted to masturbation, and although 
 it is often disputed, I believe that similar vices occur only 
 among the maler of women, and are absent from the female 
 nature. 
 
 I must now discuss the "uniting" impulse of women, for 
 that plays the chief, if not the sole part in her sexuality. 
 But it must not be supposed that this is greater in one sex 
 than the other. Any such idea comes from a confusion 
 between the desire for a thing and the stimulus towards the 
 active part in securing what is desired. Throughout the 
 animal and plant kingdoms, the male reproductive cells are 
 the motile, active agents, which move through space to seek 
 out the passive female cells, and this physiological difference 
 is sometimes confused with the actual wish for, or stimulus 
 to, sexual union. And to add to the confusion, it happens, 
 in the animal kingdom particularly, that the male, in addition 
 to the directly sexual stimulus, has the instinct to pursue 
 and bodily capture the female, whilst the latter has only the 
 passive part to be taken possession of. These differences 
 of habit must not be mistaken for real differences of desire. 
 
 It can be shown, moreover, that woman is sexually much 
 more excitable (not more sensitive) physiologically than 
 man. 
 
 /The condition of sexual excitement is the supreme moment 
 of a woman's life.; The woman is devoted wholly to sexual 
 matters, that is to say, to the spheres of begetting and of 
 reproduction. Her relations to her husband and children 
 complete her life, whereas the male is something more than 
 
MALE AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 89 
 
 sexual. In this respect, rather than in the relative strength 
 of the sexual impulses, there is a real difference between the 
 sexes.y It is important to distinguish between the intensity 
 with which sexual matters are pursued and the proportion 
 of the total activities of life that are devoted to them and to 
 their accessory cares. The greater absorption of the human 
 female by the sphere of sexual activities is the most signifi- 
 cant difference between the sexes. 
 
 The female, moreover, is completely occupied and content 
 with sexual matters, whilst the male is interested in much 
 else, in war and sport, in social affairs and feasting, in philo- 
 sophy and science, in business and politics, in religion and 
 art. I do not mean to imply that this difference has always 
 existed, as I do not think that important. As in the case of 
 the Jewish question, it may be said that the Jews have their 
 present character because it has been forced upon them, and 
 that at one time they were different. It is now impossible to 
 prove this, and we may leave it to those who believe in the 
 modification by the environment to accept it. The his- 
 torical evidence is equivocal on the point. In the question 
 of women, we have to take people as they exist to-day. If, 
 however, we happen to come on attributes that could not 
 possibly have been grafted on them from without, we may 
 believe that such have always been with them. Of contem- 
 porary women at least one thing is certain. Apart from 
 an exception to be noted in chap. xii.,(it is certain that 
 when the female occupies herself with matters outside the 
 interests of sex, it is for the man that she loves or by whom 
 she wishes to be loved^ She takes no real interest in the 
 things for themselves. It may happen that a real female 
 learns Latin ; if so, it is for some such purpose as to help her 
 son who is at school. Desire for a subject and ability for 
 it, interest in it, and the facility for acquiring it, are usually 
 proportional. He who has slight muscles has no desire to 
 wield an axe ; those without the faculty for mathematics do 
 not desire to study that subject. Talent seems to be rare 
 and feeble in the real female (although possibly it is merely 
 that the dominant sexuality prevents its development), with 
 
90 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the result that woman has no power of forming the com- 
 binations which, although they do not actually make the 
 individuality, certainly shape it. 
 
 Corresponding to true women, there are extremely female 
 men who are to be found always in the apartments of the 
 women, and who are interested in nothing but love and 
 sexual matters. Such men, however, are not the Don Juans. 
 (The female principle is, then, nothing more than sexuality ; 
 the male principle is sexual and something more.') This 
 difference is notable in the different way in which men and 
 women enter the period of puberty. In the case of the 
 male the onset of puberty is a crisis; he feels that something 
 new and strange has come into his being, that something 
 has been added to his powers and feelmgs independently of 
 his will. The physiological stimulus to sexual activity appears 
 to come from outside his being, to be independent of his will, 
 and many men remember the disturbing event throughout 
 their after lives. The woman, on the other hand, not only 
 is not disturbed by the onset of puberty, but feels that her 
 importance has been increased by it. The male, as a youth, 
 has no longing for the onset of sexual maturity ; the female, 
 from the time when she is still quite a young girl, looks 
 forward to that time as one from which everything is to be 
 expected. Man's arrival at maturity is frequently accom- 
 panied by feelings of repulsion and disgust ; the young 
 female watches the development of her body at the approach 
 of puberty with excitement and impatient delight. It seems 
 as if the onset of puberty were a side path in the normal 
 development of man, whereas in the case of woman it is the 
 direct conclusion. There are few boys approaching puberty 
 to whom the idea that they would marry (in the general 
 sense, not a particular girl) would not appear ridiculous, 
 whilst the smallest girl is almost invariably excited and 
 interested in the question of her future marriage. For such 
 reasons a woman assigns positive value only to her period of 
 maturity in her own case and in that of other women ; in 
 childhood, as in old age, she has no real relation to the 
 world. \The thought of her childhood is for her, later on, 
 
MALE AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 91 
 
 only the remembrance of her stupidity ; she faces the 
 /approach of old age with dislike and abhorrence^ The only 
 real memories of her childhood are connected with sex, and 
 these fade away in the intensely greater significance of her 
 maturity. The passage of a woman from virginity is the 
 great dividing point of her life, whilst the corresponding 
 event in the case of a male has very little relation to the 
 course of his life./ 
 
 Woman is only sexual, man is partly sexual, and this 
 difference reveals itself in various ways. The parts of the 
 male body by stimulation of which sexuality is excited are 
 limited in area, and are strongly localised, whilst in the case 
 of the woman, they are diffused over her whole body, so 
 that stimulation may take place almost from any part. 
 When in the second chapter of Part I., I explained that 
 sexuality is distributed over the whole body in both sexes, I 
 did not mean that, therefore, the sense organs, through which 
 the definite impulses are stimulated, were equally distributed. 
 There are, certainly, areas of greater excitability, even in the 
 case of the woman, but there is not, as in the man, a sharp 
 division between the sexual areas and the body generally. 
 
 'The morphological isolation of the sexual area from the 
 rest of the body in the case of man, may be taken as sym- 
 bolical of the relation of sex to his whole nature./ Just as 
 there is a contrast between the sexual and the sexless parts 
 of a man's body, so there is a time-change in his sexuality. 
 &he female is always sexual, the male is sexual only inter- 
 mittently. The sexual instinct is always active in woman 
 (as to the apparent exceptions to this sexuality of women, I 
 shall have to speak later on), whilst in man it is at rest from 
 time to time. And thus it happens that the sexual impulse of 
 the male is eruptive in character and so appears stronger. 
 The real difference between the sexes is that in the male 
 the desire is periodical, in the female continuous/ 
 
 This exclusive and persisting sexuality of the female has 
 important physical and psychical consequences. As the 
 sexuality of the male is an adjunct to his life, it is possible 
 for him to keep it in the physiological background, and out 
 
92 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 of his consciousness. And so a man can lay aside his 
 sexuality and not have to reckon with it. A woman has not 
 her sexuality limited to periods of time, nor to localised 
 organs. (And so it happens that a man can know about his 
 sexuality, whilst a woman is unconscious of it and can in 
 all good faith deny it, because she is nothing but sexuality, 
 because she is sexuality itself.) 
 vjt is impossible for women, because they are only sexual 
 to recognise their sexuality, because recognition of anything 
 requires duality. With man it is not only that he is not 
 merely sexual, but anatomically and physiologically he can 
 " detach " himself from it. That is why he has the power 
 to enter into whatever sexual relations he desires ; if he 
 likes he can limit or increase such relations ; he can refuse 
 or assent to them. He can play the part of a Don Juan or 
 a monk. He can assume which he will. To put it bluntly, 
 man possesses sexual organs ; her sexual organs possess 
 woman./ 
 
 We i^ay, therefore, deduce from the previous arguments 
 that man has the power of consciousness of his sexuality 
 and so can act against it, whilst the woman appears to 
 be without this power. This implies, moreover, that there is 
 greater differentiation in man, as in him the sexual and the 
 unsexual parts of his nature are sharply separated. The 
 possibility or impossibility of being aware of a particular 
 definite object is, however, hardly a part of the customary 
 meaning of the word consciousness, which is generally used 
 as implying that if a being is conscious he can be conscious 
 of any object. This brings me to consider the nature of 
 the female consciousness, and I must take a long detour to 
 consider it. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 Before proceeding to consider the main difference between 
 the psychical hfe of the sexes, so far as the latter takes 
 subjective and objective things as its contents, a few psy- 
 chological soundings must be taken, and conceptions 
 formulated. As the views and principles of prevailing 
 systems of psychology have been formed without con- 
 sideration of the subject of this book, it is not surprising 
 that they contain little that I am able to use. (At present 
 there is no psychology but many psychologists^ and it 
 would really be a matter of caprice on my part to choose 
 any particular school and attempt to apply its principles 
 to my subject. I shall rather try to lay down a few useful 
 principles on my own account. 
 
 The endeavours to reach a comprehensive and unifying 
 conception of the whole psychical process by referring it to 
 a single principle have been particularly evident in the 
 relations between perceptions and sensations suggested by 
 different psychologists. Herbart, for instance, derived 
 the sensations from elementary ideas, whilst Horwicz 
 supposed them to come from perceptions. Most modern 
 psychologists have insisted that such monistic attempts 
 must be fruitless. None the less there was some truth in 
 the view. 
 
 /To discover this truth, however, it is necessary to make a 
 distinction that has been overlooked by modern workers. 
 We must distinguish between the perceiving of a percep- 
 tion, feeling of a sensation, thinking a thought from the 
 later repetitions of the process in which recognition plays a 
 
94 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 part. In many cases this distinction is of fundamental 
 importance. 
 
 Every simple, clear, plastic perception and every distinct 
 idea, before it could be put into words, passes through a 
 stage (which may indeed be very short) of indistinctness. 
 So also in the case of association ; for a longer or shorter 
 time before the elements about to be grouped have actually 
 come together, there is a sort of vague, generalised expecta- 
 tion or presentiment of association^ Leibnitz, in particular, 
 has worked at kindred processes, and I believe them to 
 underlie the attempts of Herbart and Horwicz. 
 
 The common acceptance of pleasure and pain as the 
 fundamental sensations, even with Wundt's addition of the 
 sensations of tension and relaxation, of rest and stimulation, 
 makes the division of psychical phenomena into sensations 
 and perceptions too narrow for due treatment of the vague 
 preliminary stages to which I have referred. I shall go back 
 therefore to the widest classification of psychical phenomena 
 that I know of, that of Avenarius into " elements " and 
 " characters." The word " character " in this connection, 
 of course, has nothing to do with the subject of charac- 
 terology. 
 
 Avenarius added to the difficulty of applying his theories 
 by his use of a practically new terminology (which is cer- 
 tainly most striking and indispensable for some of the new 
 views he expounded). But what stands most in the way of 
 accepting some of his conclusions is his desire to derive his 
 psychology from the physiology of the brain, a physiology 
 which he evolved himself out of his inner consciousness 
 with only a slight general acquaintance with actual biological 
 facts. The psychological, or second part of his " Critique 
 of Pure Experience," was really the source from which he 
 derived the first or physiological part, with the result that 
 the latter appears to its readers as an account of some dis- 
 covery in Atlantis. Because of these difficulties I shall 
 give here a short account of the system of Avenarius, as I 
 find it useful for my thesis. 
 
 An " Element " in the sense of Avenarius represents what 
 
MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS 95 
 
 thV usual psychology terms a perception^ or the content of a 
 perception, what Schopenhauer called a presentation, what 
 in England is called an " impression " or " idea," the 
 " thing," " fact," or "object" of ordinary language; and 
 the word is used independently of the presence or absence 
 of a special sense-organ stimulation — a most important and 
 novel addition. In the sense of Avenarius, and for our 
 purpose, it is a matter of indifference to the terminology how 
 far what is called " analysis " takes place, the whole tree may 
 be taken as the " element," or each single leaf, or each hair, 
 or (where most people would stop), the colours, sizes, 
 weights, temperatures, resistances, and so forth. Still, the 
 analysis may go yet further, and the colour of the leaf may 
 be taken as merely the resultant of its quality, intensity, 
 luminosity, and so forth, these being the elements. Or we 
 may go still further and take modern ultimate conceptions 
 reaching units incapable of sub-division. 
 
 In the sense of Avenarius, then, elements are such ideas 
 as "green," "blue," "cold," "warm," "soft," "hard," 
 "sweet," "bitter," and their "character" is the particular 
 kind of quality with which they appear, not merely their 
 pleasantness or unpleasantness, but also such modes of 
 presentation as "surprising," "expected," "novel," "in- 
 different," "recognised," "known," "actual," "doubtful," 
 categories which Avenarius first recognised as being psycho- 
 logical. For instance, what I guess, believe, or know is an 
 " element " ; the fact that I guess it, not believe it or know 
 it, is the " character " in which it presents itself psycho- 
 logically (not logically). 
 
 Now there is a stage in mental activity in which this 
 sub-division of psychical phenomena cannot be made, 
 which is too early for it. All " elements " at their first 
 appearance are merged with the floating background, the 
 whole being vaguely tinged by " character." To follow 
 my meaning, think of what takes place, when for the first 
 time at a distance one sees something in the landscape, 
 such as a shrub or a heap of wood, at the moment when 
 one does not yet know what " it " is. 
 
96 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 At this moment " element " and " character " are abso- 
 lutely indistinguishable (they are always inseparable as 
 Petzoldt ingeniously pointed out), so improving the original 
 statement of Avenarius. 
 
 In a dense crowd I perceive, for instance, a face which 
 attracts me across the swaying mass by its expression. I 
 have no idea what the face is like, and should be quite 
 unable to describe it or give an idea of it ; but it has 
 appealed to me in the most disturbing manner, and I find 
 myself asking with keen curiosity, " Where have 1 seen that 
 face before ? " 
 
 (^ man may see the head of a woman for a moment, and 
 this may make a very strong impression on him, and yet he 
 may be unable to say exactly what he has seen, or, for 
 instance, be able to remember the colour of her hair. The 
 retina must be exposed to the object sufficiently long, if 
 only a fraction of a second, for a photographic impression 
 to be made.\ 
 
 If one looks at any object from a considerable distance 
 one has at first only the vaguest impression of its outlines ; 
 and as one comes nearer and sees the details more clearly, 
 lively sensations, at first lost in the general mass, are 
 received. Think, for instance, of the first general impres- 
 sion of, say, the sphenoid bone disarticulated from a skull, 
 or of many pictures seen a little too closely or a little too 
 far away. I myself have a remembrance of having had 
 strong impressions from sonatas of Beethoven before I 
 knew anything of the musical notes. Avenarius and Petz- 
 oldt have overlooked the fact that the coming into con- 
 sciousness of the elements is accompanied by a kind of 
 secretion of characterisation. 
 
 Some of the simple experiments of physiological psy- 
 chology illustrate the point to which I have been referring. 
 If one stays in a dark room until the eye has adapted itself 
 to the absence of light, and then for a second subjects 
 oneself to a ray of coloured light, a sensation of illumina- 
 tion will be received, although it is impossible to recognise 
 the quality of the illumination ; something has been 
 
MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS 97 
 
 perceived, but what the something is cannot be apprehended 
 unless the stimulation lasts a definite time. . 
 
 yn the same way every scientific discovery, every tech- 
 nical invention, every artistic creation passes through a 
 preliminary phase of indistinctness. The process is similar 
 to the series of impressions that would be got as a statue 
 was gradually unwrapped from a series of swathings. The 
 same kind of sequence occurs, although, perhaps, in a very 
 brief space of time, when one is trying to recall a piece of 
 music. Every thought is preceded by a kind of half- 
 thought, a condition in which vague geometrical figures, 
 shifting masks, a swaying and indistinct background hover 
 in the mind. The beginning and the end of the whole 
 process, which I may term " clarification," are what take 
 place when a short-sighted person proceeds to look through 
 properly adapted lenses^ 
 
 Just as this process occurs in the life of the individual 
 (and he, indeed, may die long before it is complete), so it 
 occurs in history. \Definite scientific conceptions are pre- 
 ceded by anticipations. The process of clarification is 
 spread over many generations. There were ancient and 
 modern vague anticipations of the theory of Darwin and 
 Lamarck, anticipations which we are now apt to overvalue. 
 Mayer and Helmholz had their predecessors, and Goethe 
 and Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps two of the most many-sided 
 intellects known to us, anticipated in a vague way many of 
 the conclusions of modern science. The whole history of 
 thought is a continuous " clarification," a more and more 
 accurate description or realisation of details. The enormous 
 number of stages between light and darkness, the minute 
 gradations of detail that follow each other in the develop- 
 ment of thought can be realised best if one follows histori- 
 cally some complicated modern piece of knowledge, such 
 as, for instance, the theory of elliptical functions^ 
 
 The process of clarification may be reversed, and the act 
 of forgetting is such a reversal. This may take a consider- 
 able time, and is usually noticed only by accident at some 
 point or other of its course. The process is similar to the 
 
 G 
 
98 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 gradual obliteration of well-made roads, for the maintenance 
 of which no provision has been made. The faint anticipa- 
 tions of a thought are very like the faint recollections of it, 
 and the latter gradually become blurred as in the case of a 
 neglected road over the boundaries of which animals stray, 
 slowly obliterating it. In this connection a practical rule 
 for memorising, discovered and applied by a friend of mine, 
 is interesting. It generally happens that if one wants to 
 learn, say, a piece of music, or a section from the history of 
 philosophy, one has to go over parts of it again and again. 
 The problem was, how long should the intervals be between 
 these successive attempts to commit to memory ? The 
 answer was that they should not be so long as to make it 
 possible to take a fresh interest in the subject again, to be 
 interested and curious about it. If the interval has produced 
 that state of mind, then the process of clarification must begin 
 from the beginning again. The rather popular physiological 
 theory of Sigismund Exner as to the formation of "paths" 
 in the nervous system may perhaps be taken as a physical 
 parallel of the process of clarification. According to the 
 theory, the ne'-ves, or rather the fibrils, make paths easy for 
 the stimulations to travel along, if these stimulations last 
 sufficiently long or are repeated sufficiently often. So also 
 in the case of forgetting ; what happens is that these paths 
 or processes of the nerve-cells atrophy from disuse. Ave- 
 narius would have explained the above processes by his 
 theory of the articulation of the fibres of the brain, but his 
 physical doctrine was rather too crude and too simple for 
 application to psycho-physics. None the less his conception 
 of articulation or jointing is both convenient and appropriate 
 in its application to the process of clarification, and I shall 
 employ it in that connection. 
 
 The process of clarification must be traced thoroughly in 
 order to realise its importance, but for the moment, it is 
 important to consider only the initial stage. The distinction 
 of Avenarius between " element " and " character," which 
 later on will become evident in a process of clarification, is 
 not applicable to the very earliest moments of the process. 
 
MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS 99 
 
 It is necessary to coin a name for those minds to which the 
 duahty of element and character becomes appreciable at no 
 stage of the process. I propose for psychical data at this 
 earliest stage of their existence the word Hen id (from the 
 Greek h, because in them it is impossible to distinguish 
 perception and sensation as two analytically separable factors, 
 and because, therefore, there is no trace of duality in them). 
 
 Naturally the "henid" is an abstract conception and may 
 not occur in the absolute form. How often psychical data 
 in human beings actually stand at this absolute extreme of 
 undifferentiation is uncertain and unimportant ; but the 
 theory does not need to concern itself with the possibility 
 of such an extreme. A common example from what has 
 happened to all of us may serve to illustrate what a henid 
 is. I may have a definite wish to say something particular, 
 and then something distracts me, and the '* it " I wanted to 
 say or thmk has gone. Later on, by some process of asso- 
 ciation, the " it " IS quite suddenly reproduced, and I know 
 at once that it was what was on my tongue, but, so to speak, 
 in a more perfect stage of development. 
 
 I fear lest some one may expect me to describe exactly 
 what I mean by " henid." The wish can come only from a 
 misconception. The very idea of a henid forbids its de- 
 scription ; it is merely a something. Later on identification 
 will come with the complete articulation of the contents of 
 the henid ; but the henid is not the whole of this detailed 
 content, but is distinguished from it by a lower grade of 
 consciousness, by an absence of, so to speak, relief, by a 
 blending of the die and the impression, by the absence of 
 a central point in the field of vision. 
 
 And so one cannot describe particular henids ; one can 
 only be conscious of their existence. 
 
 None the less henids are things as vital as elements and 
 characters. Each henid is an individual and can be dis- 
 tinguished from other henids. Later on I shall show that 
 probably the mental data of early childhood (certainly of 
 the first fourteen months) are all henids, although perhaps 
 not in the absolute sense. Throughout childhood these 
 
100 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 data do not reach far from the henid stage ; in adults there 
 is always a certain process of development going on. 
 Probably the perceptions of some plants and animals are 
 henids. \[n the case of mankind the development from the 
 henid to the completely differentiated perception and idea 
 is always possible, although such an ideal condition may 
 seldom be attained) ^Whilst expression in words is im- 
 possible in the case of the absolute henid, as words imply 
 articulated thoughts, there are also in the highest stages of 
 the intellect possible to man some things still unclarified 
 and, therefore, unspeakable^ 
 
 The theory of henids will help in the old quarrel between 
 the spheres of perception and sensation, and will replace by 
 a developmental conception the ideas of element and 
 charater which Avenarius and Petzoldt deduced from the 
 process of clarification. It is only when the elements 
 become distinct that they can be distinguished from the 
 characters. Man is disposed to humours and sentimentali- 
 ties only so long as the contours of his ideas are vague ; 
 when he sees things in the light instead of the dark his 
 process of thinking will become different. 
 
 Now what is the relation between the investigation I have 
 been making and the psychology of the sexes ? What is 
 the distinction between the male and the female (and to 
 reach this has been the object of my digression) in the 
 process of clarification ? 
 
 Here is my answer : 
 
 The male has the same psychical data as the female, but 
 in a more articulated form ; where she thinks more or less 
 in henids, he thinks in more or less clear and detailed pre- 
 sentations in which the elements are distinct from the tones of 
 feeling, s^ith the woman, thinking and feeling are identical, 
 for man they are in opposition. The woman has many of 
 her mental experiences as henids, whilst in man these have 
 passed through a process of clarification. Woman is senti- 
 mental, and knows emotion but not mental excitement^ 
 
 The greater articulation of the mental data in man is 
 reflected in the more marked character of his body and 
 
MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS loi 
 
 face, as compared with the roundness and vagueness of the 
 woman. In the same connection it is to be remembered 
 that, notwithstanding the popular behef, the senses of the 
 male are much more acute than those of the woman. The 
 only exception is the sense of touch, an exception of great 
 interest to which I shall refer later. It has been established, 
 moreover, that the sensibility to pain is much more acute in 
 man, and we have now learned to distinguish between that 
 and the tactile sensations. 
 
 A weaker sensibility is likely to retard the passage of 
 mental data through the process of clarification, although 
 we cannot quite take it for granted that it must be so. 
 Perhaps a more trustworthy proof of the less degree of 
 articulation in the mental data of the woman may be drawn 
 from consideration of the greater decision in the judgments 
 made by men, although indeed it may be the case that this 
 distinction rests on a deeper basis. It is certainly the case 
 that whilst we are still near the henid stage we know much 
 more certainly what a thing is not than what it is. What 
 Mach has called instinctive experience depends on henids. 
 While we are near the henid stage we think round about a 
 subject, correct ourselves at each new attempt, and say that 
 that was not yet the right word. Naturally that condition 
 implies uncertainty and indecision in judgment. Judgment 
 comes towards the end of the process of clarification ; the 
 act of judgment is in itself a departure from the henid stage. 
 /The most decisive proof for the correctness of the view 
 that attributes henids to woman and differentiated thoughts 
 to man, and that sees in this a fundamental sexual distinction, 
 lies in the fact that wherever a new judgment is to be made, 
 (not merely something already settled to be put into pro- 
 verbial form) it is always the case that the female expects 
 from man the clarification of her data, the interpretation of 
 her henids. It is almost a tertiary sexual character of the 
 male, and certainly it acts on the female as such, that she 
 expects from him the interpretation and illumination of her 
 thoughts. It is from this reason that so many girls say that 
 they could only marry, or, at least, only love a man who was 
 
I02 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 cleverer than themselves ; that they would be repelled by a 
 man who said that all they thought was right, and did not 
 know better than they did. In short, the woman makes it a 
 criterion of manliness that the man should be superior to 
 herself mentally, that she should be influenced and domi- 
 nated by the man ; and this in itself is enough to ridicule all 
 ideas of sexual equalityX 
 
 SThe male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously. 
 This is certainly the necessary conclusion for the extreme 
 cases. The woman receives her consciousness from the 
 man ; the function to bring into consciousness what was 
 outside it is a sexual function of the typical man with 
 regard to the typical woman, and is a necessary part of his 
 ideal completeness^ 
 
 And now we are brought up against the problem of 
 talent ; the whole modern woman question appears to be 
 resolving itself into a dispute as to whether men or women 
 are more highly gifted. As the question is generally pro- 
 pounded there is no attempt to distinguish between the 
 pure types of sex ; the conclusions with regard to these that 
 I have been able to set forth have an important bearing on 
 the answer to the question. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 TALENT AND GENIUS 
 
 There has been so much written about the nature of genius 
 that, to avoid misunderstanding, it will be better to make a 
 few general remarks before going into the subject. 
 
 And the first thing to do is to settle the question of 
 talent. Genius and talent are nearly always connected in 
 the popular idea, as if the first were a higher, or the highest, 
 grade of the latter, and as if a man of very high and varied 
 talents might be a sort of intermediate between the two. 
 This view is entirely erroneous. Even if there were 
 different degrees or grades of genius, they would have 
 absolutely nothing to do with so-called " talent." A 
 talent, for instance the mathematical talent, may be 
 possessed by some one in a very high degree from birth ; 
 and he will be able to master the most difficult problems of 
 that science with ease ; but for this he will require no 
 genius, which is the same as originality, individuality, and 
 a condition of general productiveness. 
 
 On the other hand, there are men of great genius who 
 have shown no special talent in any marked degree ; for 
 instance, men like Novalis or Jean Paul. Genius is dis- 
 tinctly not the superlative of talent ; there is a world-wide 
 difference between the two ; they are of absolutely unlike 
 nature ; they can neither be measured by one another or 
 compared to each other. 
 
 vfalent is hereditary ; it may be the common possession 
 of a whole family {e.g., the Bach family) ; genius is not 
 transmitted ; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual/ 
 
 Many ill-balanced people, and in particular women, 
 
104 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 regard genius and talent as identical. Women, indeed, 
 have not the faculty of appreciating genius, although this 
 is not the common view. Any extravagance that distin- 
 guishes a man from other men appeals equally to their 
 sexual ambition ; they confuse the dramatist with the actor, 
 and make no distinction between the virtuoso and the artist. 
 For them the talented man is the man of genius, and 
 Nietzsche is the type of what they consider genius. What 
 has been called the French type of thought, which so 
 strongly appeals to them, has nothing to do with the \ 
 highest possibilities of the mind. {Great men take them- 
 selves and the world too seriously to become what is called 
 merely intellectual. Men who are merely intellectual are 
 insincere ; they are people who have never really been 
 deeply engrossed by things and who do not feel an over- 
 powering desire for production. All that they care about is 
 that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well-cut 
 stone, not that it should illuminate anything. They are 
 more occupied with what will be said of what they think { 
 than by the thoughts themselvesN There are men who are 
 willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely 
 because she is admired by other men. Such a relation 
 exists between many men and their thoughts. I cannot 
 help thinking of one particular living author, a blaring,' 
 outrageous person, who fancies that he is roaring when he 
 is only snarling. Unfortunately, Nietzsche (however 
 superior he is to the man I have in mind) seems to have 
 devoted himself chiefly to what he thought would shock 
 the public. He is at his best when he is most unmindful 
 of effect. His was the vanity of the mirror, saying to what 
 it reflects, " See how faithfully I show you your image." 
 In youth when a man is not yet certain of himself he may 
 try to secure his own position by jostling others. ^Great 
 men, hcwevef, ;ire painfully ni^j'-^'T-si'/c only from f^xes^^y.) 
 They are not like a girl who is most pleased about a new 
 dress because she knows that it will annoy her frier^ds. 
 
 Genius ! genius ! how much mental disturbance and dis- 
 comfort, hatred and envy, jealousy and pettiness, has it not 
 
TALENT AND GENIUS 105 
 
 aroused in the majority of men, and how much counterfeit 
 and tinsel has the desire for it not occasioned ? 
 
 I turn gladly from the imitations of genius to the thing 
 itself and its true embodiment. But where can I begin ? 
 All the qualities that go to make genius are in so intimate 
 connection that to begin with any one of them seems to 
 lead to premature conclusions. 
 
 All discussions on the nature of genius are either biologi- 
 cal-clinical, and serve only to show the absurd presumption 
 of present knowledge of this kind in its hope to solve a 
 problem so difficult ; or they descend from the heights of a 
 metaphysical system for the sole purpose of including 
 genius in their purview. If the road that I am about to 
 take does not lead to every goal at once, it is only because 
 that is the nature of roads. 
 
 Consider how much deeper a great poet can reach into 
 the nature of man than an average person. Think of the 
 extraordinary number of characters depicted by Shakespeare 
 or Euripides, or the marvellous assortment of human beings 
 that fill the pages of Zola. After the Penthesilea, Heinrich 
 von Kleist created Kätchen von Heilbronn, and Michael 
 Angelo embodied from his imagination the Delphic Sibyls 
 and the Leda. CThere have been few men so little devoted 
 to art as Kant and Schelling, and yet these have written 
 most profoundly and truly about ity In order to depict a 
 man one must understand him, and to understand him one 
 must be like him ; in order to portray his psychological 
 activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself. 
 To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself. 
 One must be like the mind one tries to grasp. It takes a 
 thief to know a thief, and only an innocent man can under- 
 stand another innocent man. The poseur only understands 
 other poseurs, and sees nothing but pose in the actions of 
 others ; whilst the simple-minded fails to understand the 
 most flagrant pose. ^To understand a man is really to be 
 that man) 
 
 It would seem to follow that a man can best understand 
 himself — a conclusion plainly absurd. No one can under- 
 
io6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 stand himself, for to do that he would have to get outside 
 himself ; the subject of the knowing and willing activity 
 would have to become its own object. To grasp the 
 universe it would be necessary to get a standpoint outside 
 the universe, and the possibility of such a standpoint is 
 incompatible with the idea of a universe. He who could 
 understand himself could understand the world. I do not 
 make the statement merely as an explanation : it contains 
 an important truth, to the significance of which I shall 
 recur. For the present I am content to assert that no one 
 can understand his deepest, most intimate nature. This 
 happens in actual practice ; when one wishes to understand 
 in a general way, it is always from other persons, never 
 from oneself, that one gets one's materials. The other 
 person chosen must be similar in some respect, however 
 different as a whole ; and, making use of this similarity, he 
 can recognise, represent, comprehend. So far as one under- 
 stands a man, one is that man. 
 
 ^he man of genius takes his place in the above argument 
 as he who understands incomparably more other beings 
 than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of him- 
 self that there was no vice or crime of which he could not 
 trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of 
 his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, 
 therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, 
 more varied man ; and a man is the closer to being a 
 genius the more men Jie has in hi'^ personalitv, and the 
 more really and strongly he has these others within himy 
 If comprehension of those about him only flickers in him 
 like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to 
 kindle a mighty flame in his heroes, to give distinction and 
 character to his creations. The ideal of an artistic genius 
 is to live in all men, to lose himself in all men, to reveal 
 himself in multitudes ; and so also the aim of the 
 philosopher is to discover all others in himself, to fuse 
 them into a unit which is his own unit. 
 
 This protean character of genius is no more simultaneous 
 than the bi-sexuality of which I have spoken. Even the 
 
TALENT AND GENIUS 107 
 
 greatest genius cannot understand the nature of all men at 
 the same time, on one and the same day. The compre- 
 hensive and manifold rudiments which a man possesses in 
 his mind can develop only slowly and by degrees with the 
 gradual unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost as if 
 there were a definite periodicity in his development. These 
 periods, v^'hen they recur, however, are not exactly alike ; 
 they are not mere repetitions, but are intensifications of 
 their predecessors, on a higher plane. No two moments in 
 the life of an individual are exactly alike ; there is between 
 the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of 
 the higher and lower parts of a spiral ascent. Thus 
 it has frequently happened that famous men have con- 
 ceived a piece of work in their early youth, laid it aside 
 during manhood, and resumed and completed it in old age. 
 Periods exist in every man, but in different degrees and 
 with varying "amplitude." Just as the genius is the man 
 who contains in himself the greatest number of others in 
 the most active way, so the amplitude of a man's periods 
 will be the greater the wider his mental relations may be. 
 Qllustrious men have often been told, by their teachers, in 
 their youth " that they were always in one extreme or 
 another." As if they could be anything else ! These 
 transitions in the case of unusual men often assume the 
 character of a crisis. Goethe once spoke of the " recurrence 
 of puberty" in an artist. The idea is obviously to be 
 associated with the matter under discussion/^ 
 
 It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, 
 sterile years precede productive years, these again to be 
 followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by 
 psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they 
 are less than other men ; times in which the remembrance 
 of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy 
 those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as 
 his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the 
 periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than 
 those of other men. Every great man has such periods, of 
 longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses self- 
 
io8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 confidence, in which he thinks of suicide ; times in which, 
 indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but 
 which are devoid of the stimulus to production ; times 
 which call forth the blind criticisms " How such a genius 
 is degenerating!" "How he has played himself out!" 
 " How he repeats himself ! " and so forth. 
 
 It is just the same with other characteristics of the man 
 of genius. Not only the material, but also the spirit, of his 
 work is subject to periodic change. At one time he is in- 
 clined to a philosophical and scientific view ; at another 
 time the artistic influence is strongest ; at one time his 
 intervals are altogether in the direction of history and the 
 growth of civilisation ; later on it is " nature " (compare 
 Nietzsche's "Studies in Infinity" with his "Zarathustra ") ; 
 at another time he is a mystic, at yet another simplicity 
 itself ! (Björnson and Maurice Maeterlinck are good modern 
 examples.) In fact, the " amplitude " of the periods of famous 
 men is so great, the different revelations of their nature so 
 various, so many different individuals appear in them, that 
 the periodicity of their mental life may be taken almost as 
 diagnostic. I must make a remark sufiiciently obvious 
 from all this, as to the existence of almost incredibly great 
 changes in the personal appearance of men of genius from 
 time to time. Comparison of the portraits at different 
 times of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, or Schopenhauer are 
 enough to establish this. The number of different aspects 
 that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as 
 a physiognomical measure of his talent.* 
 
 People with an unchanging expression are low in the 
 intellectual scale. Physiognomists, therefore, must not be 
 surprised that men of genius, in whose faces a new side of 
 their minds is continually being revealed, are difficult to 
 classify, and that their individualities leave little permanent 
 mark on their features. 
 
 * I cannot help using the word " talent " from time to time, 
 when I really mean genius ; but I wish it to be remembered that I 
 am convinced of the existence of a fundamental distinction between 
 " talent," or " giftedness," and " genius." 
 
TALENT AND GENIUS 109 
 
 It is possible that my introductory description of genius 
 will be repudiated indignantly, because it would imply that 
 a Shakespeare has the vulgarity of his Falstaff, the rascality 
 of his lago, the boorishness of his Caliban, and because it 
 identifies great men with all the low and contemptible 
 things that they have described. As a matter of fact, men 
 of genius do conform to my description, and as their 
 biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and 
 the most repulsive instincts. And yet the objection is 
 invalid, as the fuller exposition of the thesis will reveal. 
 Only the most superficial survey of the argument could 
 support it, whilst the exactly opposite conclusion is a much 
 more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully de- 
 scribed the impulse to commit murder, did not himself 
 commit a murder, because there were so many other 
 characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of 
 his own disposition : the author describing the murder is 
 swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would 
 know the desire for murder much better than the actual 
 murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, 
 if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be 
 prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great 
 men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as 
 in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with 
 Kant, but not to actual crime. 
 
 The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men 
 has important consequences connected with the theory of 
 henids that I elaborated in the last chapter. A man under- 
 stands what he already has within himself much more 
 quickly than what is foreign to him (were it otherwise there 
 would be no intercourse possible : as it is we do not realise 
 how often we fail to understand one another). To the 
 genius, who understands so much more than the average 
 man, much more will be apparent. 
 
 The schemer will readily recognise his fellow ; an im- 
 passioned player easily reads the same power in another 
 person ; whilst those with no special powers will observe 
 nothing. Art discerns itself best, as Wagner said. In the 
 
no SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 case of complex personalities the matter stands thus : one 
 of these can understand other men better than they can 
 understand themselves, because within himself he has nol 
 only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. 
 Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension ;/ii 
 we -inquire from psychology what is the most necessary 
 condition for becoming conscious of a thing, for grasping 
 it, we shall find the answer in " contrast." If everything 
 were a uniform grey we should have />^c )de^ of colour ; 
 absolute unison of sound would soon j^ /Ue^p in all 
 mankind ; duality, the power which can differentiate, is the 
 origin of the alert consciousness. Thus it happens that no 
 one can understand himself were he to think of nothing 
 else all his life, but he can understand another to whom he 
 is partly alike, and from whom he is also partly quite 
 different. Such a distribution of qualities is the condition 
 most favourable for understanding. In short, to under- 
 stand a man means to have equal parts of himself and of his 
 opposite in one. 
 
 ^hat things must be present in pairs of contrasts if we 
 are to be conscious of one member of the pair is shown by 
 the facts of colour-vision. Colour-blindness always extends 
 to the complementary colours. Those who are red blind 
 are also green blind ; those who are blind to blue have no 
 consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all 
 mental phenomena ; it is a fundamental condition of con- 
 sciousness. The most high-spirited people understand and 
 experience depression much more than those who are of 
 level disposition. Any one with so keen a sense of delicacy 
 and subtilty as Shakespeare must also be capable of ex- 
 treme grossness^ 
 
 The more types and their contrasts a man unites in his 
 own mind the less will escape him, since observation follows 
 comprehension, and the more he will see and understand 
 what other men feel, think, and wish. There has never 
 been a genius who was not a great discerner of men. The 
 great man sees through the simpler man often at a glance, 
 and would be able to characterise him completely. 
 
TALENT AND GENIUS iii 
 
 Most men have this, that, or the other faculty or sense 
 disproportionately developed. One man knows all the birds 
 and tells their different voices most accurately. Another 
 has a love for plants and is devoted to botany from his 
 childhood. One man pores lovingly into the many layered 
 rocks of the earth, and has only the vaguest appreciation of 
 the skies ; to aaiother the attraction of cold, star-sown 
 space is supreme. One man is repelled by the mountains 
 and seeks the restless sea ; another, like Nietzsche, gets no 
 help from the tossing waters and hungers for the peace of 
 the hills. Every man, however simple he may be, has some 
 side of nature with which he is in special sympathy and for 
 which his faculties are specially alert. And so the ideal 
 genius, who has all men within him, has also all their 
 preferences and all their dislikes. There is in him not only 
 the universality of men, but of all nature. He is the man to 
 whom all things tell their secrets, to whom most happens, 
 and whom least escapes. He understands most things, and 
 those most deeply, because he has the greatest number of 
 things to contrast and compare them with. The genius is 
 he who is conscious of most, and of that most acutely. And 
 so without doubt his sensations must be most acute ; but 
 this must not be understood as implying, say, in the artist 
 the keenest power of vision, in the composer the most 
 acute hearing ; the measure of genius is not to be taken 
 from the acuteness of the sense organ but from that of the 
 perceiving brain. 
 
 The consciousness of the genius is, then, the furthest 
 removed from the henid stage. It has the greatest, most 
 limpid clearness and distinctness. In this way genius 
 declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity, and thus 
 the female cannot be possessed of genius. The conclusion 
 of this chapter and the last is simply that the life of the 
 male is a more highly conscious life than that of the female, 
 and genius is identical with the highest and widest con- 
 sciousness. This extremely comprehensive consciousness 
 of the highest types of mankind is due to the enormous 
 number of contrasting elements in their natures. 
 
112 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There 
 is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathe- 
 matics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal 
 genius. The genius is a man who knows everything with- 
 out having learned it. 
 
 It stands to reason that this infinite knowledge does not 
 include theories and systems which have b^pn formulated 
 by science from facts, neither the history of the Spanish 
 war of succession nor experiments in dia-magnetism. 
 
 The artist does not acquire his knowledge of the colours 
 reflected on water by cloudy or sunny skies, by a course of 
 optics, any more than it requires a deep study of character- 
 ology to judge other men. But the more gifted a man is, 
 the more he has studied on his own account, and the more 
 subjects he has made his own. 
 
 The theory of special genius, according to which for 
 instance, it is supposed that a musical " genius " should be 
 a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. A 
 musician, if truly great, is just as well able to be universal 
 in his knowledge as a philosopher or a poet. Such an 
 one was Beethoven. On the other hand, a musician may 
 be as limited in the sphere of his activity as any average 
 man of science. Such an one was Johann Strauss, who, 
 in spite of his beautiful melodies, cannot be regarded 
 as a genius if only because of the absence of construc- 
 tive faculty in him. To come back to the main point ; 
 there are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, 
 and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it. 
 There is something in genius common to all those who 
 possess it ; however much difference there may seem to be 
 between the great philosopher, painter, musician, poet, or 
 religious teacher. The particular talent through the medium 
 of which the spirit of a man develops is of less importance 
 than has generally been thought. The limits of the 
 different arts can easily be passed, and much besides native 
 inborn gifts have to be taken into account. The history of 
 one art should be studied along with the history of other 
 arts, and in that way many obscure events might be ex- 
 
TALENT AND GENIUS 113 
 
 plained. It is outside my present purpose, however, to go 
 into the question of what determines a genius to become, 
 say^ a mystic, or, say, a great delineator. 
 
 From genius itself, the common quality of all the different 
 manifestations of genius, woman is debarred. I will discuss 
 later as to whether such things are possible as pure scientific 
 or technical genius as well as artistic and philosophical 
 genius. There is good reason for a greater exactness in the 
 use of the word. But that may come, and however clearly 
 we may yet be able to describe it woman will have to be 
 excluded from it. I am glad that the course of my inquiry 
 has been such as to make it impossible for me to be charged 
 with having framed such a definition of genius as necessarily 
 to exclude woman from it. 
 
 I may now sura up the conclusions of this chapter. 
 Whilst woman has no consciousness of genius, except as 
 manifested in one particular person, who imposes his 
 personality on her, man has a deep capacity for realising it, 
 a capacity which Carlyle, in his still little understood book I 
 on " Hero-Worship," has described so fully and perma- 
 nently. In " Hero- Worship," moreover, the idea is definitely I 
 insisted on that genius is linked with manhood, that it 
 represents an ideal masculinity in the highest form. Woman 
 has no direct consciousness of it ; she borrows a kind of , 
 imperfect consciousness from man. Woman, in short, has ^ x / 
 an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius j 
 the most conscious life. 
 
^CHAPTER V 
 
 TALENT AND MEMORY 
 
 The following observation bears on my henid theory : 
 
 I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical 
 work from which later on I was going to make an extract. 
 Something was in my mind in henid form. What I thought, 
 how I thought it, what was then knocking at the door of my 
 consciousness, I could not remember a minute afterwards, 
 in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a typical 
 example of the henid. 
 
 The more deeply impressed, the more detailed a complex 
 perception may he the more easily does it reproduce itself. 
 Clearness of the consciousness is the preliminary condition 
 for remembering, and the memory of the mental stimulation 
 is proportional to the intensity of the consciousness. " I 
 shall not forget that " ; " I shall remember that all my life " ; 
 "That will never escape my memory again." Such phrases 
 men use when things have made a deep impression on 
 them, of moments in which they have gained wisdom or 
 have become richer by an important experience. As the 
 power of being reproduced is directly proportionate to the 
 organisation of a mental impression, it is clear that there 
 can be no recollection of an absolute henid. 
 
 As the mental endowment of a man varies with the 
 organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better 
 endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember 
 his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, 
 seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact 
 will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal 
 remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest, 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 115 
 
 most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius. If 
 a common theory, especially popular with the philosophers 
 of the coffee-house, be true, that productive men (because 
 they are alway scovering new ground) have no memory, it 
 is often because they are productive only from being on 
 new ground. 
 
 The great extent and acuteness of the memory of men of 
 genius, which I propose to lay down dogmatically as a 
 necessary inference from my theory, without attempting to 
 prove it further, is not incompatible with their rapid loss of 
 the facts impressed on them in school, the tables of Greek 
 verbs, and so forth. Their memory is of what they have 
 experienced, not of what they have learned. Of all that 
 was acquired for examination purposes only so much will 
 be retained as was in harmony with the natural talent of 
 the pupil. Thus a house-painter may have a better memory 
 for colours than a great philosopher ; the most narrow 
 philologist may remember Greek aorists that he has learned 
 by heart better than his teacher, who may none the less be 
 a great poet. The uselessness of the experimental school of 
 psychology (notwithstanding their marvellous arsenal of 
 instruments of experimental precision) is shown by their 
 expectation of getting results as to memory from tests with 
 letters, unconnected words, long rows of figures. ^ These 
 experiments have so little bearing on the true memory of 
 man, on the memory by which he recalls the experiences of 
 his life, that one wonders if such psychologists have realised 
 that such a thing as the mind exists,' The customary 
 experiments place the most different subjects under the 
 same conditions, pay no attention to the individuality of 
 these subjects, and treat them merely as good or bad 
 registering apparatus. There is a parable in the fact that 
 the two German words ''bemerken" (take notice of) 
 and " merken " (remember) come from the same root. 
 Only what is harmonious with some inborn quality will be 
 retained. When a man remembers a thing, it is because he 
 was capable of taking some interest in the thing ; when he 
 forgets, it is because he was uninterested. The religious 
 
Ti6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 man will surely and exactly remember texts, the poet verses, 
 and the mathematician equations. 
 
 This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the 
 last chapter, and to another reason for the great memories 
 of genius. The more significant a man is, the more different 
 personalities he unites in himself, the more interests that 
 are contained in him, the more wide his memory must be. 
 All men have practically the same opportunities of per- 
 ception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an 
 infinitesimal part of what they have perceived. The ideal 
 genius is one in whom perception and apprehension are 
 identical in their field. Of course no such being actually 
 exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has ap- 
 prehended nothing that he has perceived. In this way we 
 may take it that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist ; no 
 male is quite without a trace of genius. Complete genius 
 is an ideal ; no man is absolutely without the quality, and 
 no man possesses it completely. Apprehension or absorp- 
 tion, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent 
 and their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation 
 from the man whose mentality is unconnected from moment 
 to moment, and to whom no incidents can signify anything 
 because there is within him nothing to compare them with 
 (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully 
 developed minds for which everything is unforgettable, 
 because of the firm impressions made and the sureness with 
 which they are absorbed. The extreme of genius also does 
 not exist, because even the greatest genius is not wholly a 
 genius at every moment of his life. 
 
 What is at once a deduction from the necessary connec- 
 tion between memory and genius, and a proof of the 
 actuality of the connection, lies in the extraordinary 
 memory for minute details shown by the man of genius. 
 Because of the universality of his mind, everything has 
 only one interpretation for him, an interpretation often 
 unsuspected at the time ; and so things cling obstinately 
 in his memory and remain there inextinguishably, although 
 he may have taken not the smallest trouble to take note of 
 
them.' f'AFidj so XDn&; may almost take as anothjern'mafk Q^aä^fti 
 genius that; thc: phrase,. "this is no {ongQvtnifJu-b^^jin^i 
 meaning for him. i..:Xhefe is .nothing itha^üi^I no.rk(ng€C(|:r/Ufö 
 for him, probably just because he hasj^a,cte2^6riici83itfe.ali»^ 
 other men of the changes that come witbitimet* c v/J sdi boß 
 
 The following appears to^he;t)neiofi(th^,[jbestifmiaii[§ jferfl 
 the objective examination of the endowment i3f;:a^-naa5i)ä) Ik 
 after a long separation from him we resume the new initeBf) 
 course with the circumstances of the last, then we shall 
 find that the highly endowed man has forgotten nothing, 
 that he vividly and completely takes up the subject from 
 where it was left off with the fullest recollection of the 
 details. How much ordinary men forget of their lives 
 any one can prove to his astonishment and horror. It may 
 happen that we have been for hours importantly engaged 
 with a man a few weeks before, and we may find that he 
 has forgotten all about it. It is true that if one recalls all 
 the circumstances to his mind, he begins to remember, and, 
 finally, with sufficient help, may remember almost com- 
 pletely. Such experience has made me think that there 
 may be an empirical proof of the hypothesis that no abso- 
 lute forgetting ever occurs ; that if the right method with 
 the individual be chosen recollection may always be 
 induced. 
 
 It follows also that from one's own experience, from 
 what one has thought or said, heard or read, felt or done, 
 one can give the smallest possible to another, that the other 
 does not already know. Consideration of the amount that 
 a man can take in from another would seem to serve as a 
 sort of objective measure of his genius, a measure that 
 does not have to wait for an estimation of his actual 
 creative efforts. I am not going to discuss the extent to 
 which this theory opposes current views on education, but 
 I recommend parents and teachers to pay attention to it. 
 The extent to which a man can detect differences and 
 resemblances must depend on his memories. This faculty 
 'yill be best developed in those whose past permeates their 
 present, all the moments of the life of whom are amalga- 
 
ir8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 mated. Such persons will have the greatest opportunities 
 of detecting resemblances and so finding the material for 
 comparisons. They will always seize hold of from the past 
 what has the greatest resemblance to the present experience, 
 and the two experiences will be combined in such a way 
 that no similarities or differences will be concealed. And 
 so they are able to maintain the past against the influence 
 of the present. It is not without reason that from time 
 immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered 
 to be its richness in beautiful comparisons and pictures, or 
 that we turn to again and again, or await our favourite 
 images with impatience when we read Homer or Shake- 
 speare or Kloppstock. <To-day when, for the first time for 
 a century and a half, Germany is without great poets or 
 painters, and when none the less it is impossible to find 
 any one who is not an " author," the power of clear and 
 beautiful comparison seems to have gone.. A period the 
 nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious 
 words, the philosophy of which has become in more than 
 one sense the philosophy ot the unconscious can contain 
 nothing great. ■(Consciousness is the mark of greatness,) and 
 befoie it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun disperses 
 a mist. If only consciousness were to come to this age, 
 how quickly voices that are now famous would become 
 silent. It is only in full consciousness, in which the 
 experience of the present assumes greater intensity by its 
 union with all the experiences of the past, that imagination, 
 the necessary quality tor all philosophical as for all artistic 
 effort, can find a place. It is untrue, therefore, that women 
 have more imagination than men. The experiences on 
 account of which men have assigned higher powers of 
 imagination to women come entirely from the imaginative 
 sexual life of women. The only inferences that can be 
 drawn from this do not belong to the present section of my 
 work. 
 
 \rhe absence of women from the history of music must 
 be referred to deeper causes ; but it also supports my con- 
 tention that women are devoid of imagination. To produce 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 119 
 
 music requires a great deal more imagination than the 
 malest woman possesses, and much more than is required 
 for other kinds of artistic or for scientific effort. ^There 
 is nothing in nature, nothing in the sphere of the senses, 
 corresponding directly with sound pictures. Music has no 
 relation to the world of experience ; there is no " music." 
 no chords or melodies in the natural world ; these have to 
 be evolved from the imagination of the composer. Every 
 other art has more definite relations to empirical art. Even 
 architecture, which has been compared with music, has 
 definite relations to matter, although, like music, it has no 
 anticipations in the senses. Architecture, too, is an entirely 
 masculine occupation. The very idea of a female architect 
 excites compassion.*) 
 
 The so-called stupefying effect of music on the creative 
 or practical musician (especially instrumental music) 
 depends on the fact that even the sense of smell is a 
 better guide to man in the world of experience than the 
 contents of a musical work. And it is just this complete 
 absence of all relation to the world of sight, taste, and smell, 
 that makes music specially unfitted to express the female 
 nature. It also explains why this peculiarity of his art 
 demands the highest grade of imagination from a musician, 
 and why those to whom musical compositions " come " 
 seem stranger to their fellow men than painters or sculptors. 
 The so-called " imagination " of women must be very 
 different from that of men, since there is no woman with 
 even the same position in the history of music that Angelica 
 Kaufmann had in art. 
 
 Where anything obviously depends on strong moulding 
 women have not the smallest leaning towards its production, 
 neither in philosophy nor in music, in the plastic arts nor in 
 architecture. Where, however, a weak and vague senti- 
 mentality can be expressed with little effort, as in painting 
 or verse-making, or in pseudo-mysticism and theosophy, 
 women have sought and found a suitable field for their 
 efforts. Their lack of productiveness in the former sphere 
 is in harmony with the vagueness of the psychical life of 
 
I20 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 women. Music is the nearest possible approach to the 
 organisation of a sensation. Nothing is more definite, 
 characteristic, and impressive than a melody, nothing that 
 will more strongly resist obliteration. One remembers 
 much longer what is sung than what is spoken, and the arias 
 belter than the recitatives. 
 
 Let us note specially here that the usual phrases of the 
 defenders of women do not apply to the case of women. 
 Music is not one of the arts to which women have had 
 access only so recently that it is too soon to expect fruits ; 
 from the remotest antiquity women have sung and played. 
 And yet . . . 
 
 It is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing 
 and painting women have now had opportunities for at 
 least two centuries. Every one knows how many girls learn 
 to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said that there has not 
 yet been time for results were results possible. As there are 
 so few female painters with the smallest importance in the 
 history of art, it must be that there is something in the 
 nature of things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting 
 and etching of women is no more than a sort of elegant, 
 luxurious handiwork. The sensuous, physical element of 
 colour is more suitable for them than the intellectual work 
 of formal line-drawing, and hence it is, that whereas women 
 have acquired some small distinction in painting they have 
 gained none in drawing. ^The power of giving form to 
 chaos is with those in whom the most universal memory 
 has made the widest comprehension possible ; it is a quality 
 of the masculine genius./ 
 
 I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as 
 if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those 
 below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word 
 genius was very probably invented by a man who had small 
 claims on it himself ; greater men would have understood 
 better what to be a genius really was, and probably they 
 would have come to see that the word could be applied to 
 most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able 
 to understand a genius. 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 121 
 
 VThere are probably very few people who have not at some 
 time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have 
 not had such, it is probable that they have also been without 
 great sorrow or great pain^ They would have needed only 
 to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to 
 reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, 
 and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that quite ordinary men in 
 moments of excitement, in anger at some underhanded deed, 
 have found words with which they never would have been 
 credited. sThe greater part of what is called expression in 
 art as in language depends (if the reader will remember what 
 I have said about the process of " clarification ") on the fact 
 that some individual more richly endowed clarifies, organises, 
 and exhibits some idea almost instantaneouly, an idea which 
 to a less endowed person was still in the henid form. The 
 course of clarification is much shortened in the mind of the 
 second person.) 
 
 If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to 
 establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men 
 by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, 
 then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be 
 denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make 
 any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on 
 this being untrue. And it is untrue. <^he difference be- 
 tween men of genius and the others is quantitative not 
 qualitative, of degree not of kind. 
 
 There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young 
 people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext 
 that they have less experience than have older persons. 
 There are many who may live a thousand years without 
 encountering experience of any value. It could only be in 
 a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could 
 have any meaning./ 
 
 Because the life of the genius is more intense even in his 
 earliest years than that of other children, his memory can 
 go further back. In extreme cases the memory may be 
 cor iplete and vivid back to the third year of life, whereas 
 
122 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 in most recollection begins much later. I know some 
 people whose earliest recollections date only from their 
 eighth year, and there are instances of an even later begin- 
 ning of the conscious life. I do not maintam that the date 
 at which active memory begins can be taken as a measure of 
 relative genius, that he who remembers from his second 
 year is so much the more of a genius than he who can go 
 back only to his fourth or fifth year. But in a general way, 
 I believe the parallel to hold good. 
 
 Even in the cases of the greatest men, some time, greater 
 or shorter, elapsed between the date of their earliest recol- 
 lection and the time from which onwards they remember 
 everything, from the time, in fact, in which their genius was 
 ripe. But in the case of most men there is forgetfulness of 
 the greater part of their lives ; they are conscious only that 
 they themselves and none other have lived their lives. Out 
 of their whole lives there only remain certain moments, and 
 scattered recollections, which serve as sign-posts. If they are 
 asked about any particular thing they can only tell, for in- 
 stance, because in such and such a month they were so old, 
 or they wore such and such clothes, they lived at this place, 
 or that their income was so much. 
 
 If one has lived with them in former years, it is only after 
 great trouble that the past can be brought to their mind. 
 In such cases one is surely justified in saying that such a 
 person is ungifted, or at least in not considering him con- 
 spicuously able. 
 
 The request for an autobiography would put most men 
 into a most painful position ; they could scarcely tell if they 
 were asked what they had done the day before. Memory 
 with most people is quite spasmodic and purely associative. 
 In the case of the man of genius every impression that he has 
 received endures ; he is always under the influence of 
 impressions ; and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer 
 from fixed ideas. The psychical condition of men's minds 
 may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so 
 arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when 
 one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 123 
 
 In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly 
 that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action 
 throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives 
 rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that 
 may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the 
 supposed kinship of genius with insanity. 
 
 For similar reasons gratitude is apparently the rarest 
 human virtue. People are often very conscious of how much 
 they have borrowed, but they neither can nor will try to 
 remember the necessity in which they stood, nor the free- 
 dom which that help brought them. Even if want of 
 memory were really the cause of ingratitude, it would not 
 be sufficient for a man to possess a marvellous memory to 
 have a like spirit of gratitude. A special condition is also 
 necessary, but its description cannot be undertaken here. 
 
 From the connection between giftedness and memory, 
 which is so often mistaken and denied because it is not 
 sought where it is to be found, from the power of self recol- 
 lection, a further fact is to be deduced. The poet who feels 
 urged to write without premeditation, without reflection, 
 without having willingly pressed the pedal ; the musician to 
 whom the desire to compose has come, so that he must 
 create whether he will or no, even if he feels more inclined 
 to sleep or to rest ; tnese, in such moments, will simply 
 reproduce thoughts they have carried in their heads all their 
 lives. A composer wno can remember none of his songs or 
 subjects by heart, or a poet who cannot recollect any of his 
 poems — without having carefully learned them — such men 
 are in no sense really great. 
 
 Before we apply these remarks to the consideration of the 
 mental differences of the sexes, we must make yet one 
 more distinction between different kinds of memory. The 
 individual moments in the life of a gifted man are not 
 remembered as disconnected points, not as different 
 particles of time, each one separated and defined from the 
 following one, as the numerals one, two, and so on. 
 
 The result of self-observation shows that sleep, the 
 limitations of consciousness, the gaps in memory, even 
 
124 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 special experiences, appear to be in some mysterious way 
 one great whole ; incidents do not follow each other like 
 the tickings of a watch, but they pass along in a single 
 unbroken stream. With ordinary men the moments which 
 are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete 
 multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives 
 resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more 
 like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from 
 afar ; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius 
 vibrates to no experience in which all the individual 
 moments have not been gathered up and stored. 
 ^This peculiar contmuity by which a man first realises that 
 he exists, that he is, and that he is in the world, is all 
 comprehensive in the genius, limited to a few important 
 moments in the mediocre, and altogether lacking in woman?) 
 When a woman looks back over her life and lives again her 
 experiences, there is presented no continuous, unbroken 
 stream, but only a few scattered points. And what kind of 
 points ? They are just those which accord with woman's 
 natural instincts. Of what these interests exclusively consist 
 the second chapter gave a preliminary idea ; and those who 
 remember the ideas in question will not be astonished at the 
 following facts : The female is concerned altogether with 
 one class of recollections — those connected with the sexual 
 impulse and reproduction. She thinks of her lovers and 
 proposals, of her marriage day, of every child as if it were 
 a doll ; of the flowers which she received at every ball, 
 the number, size, and price of the bouquets ; of every 
 serenade ; of every verse which (as she fondly imagines) was 
 written for her ; of every phrase by which a lover has im- 
 pressed her ; but above all — with an exactness which is as 
 contemptible as it is disquieting to herself — of every 
 compliment without exception that has ever been paid her. 
 
 That is all that the real woman recalls of her life. But 
 it is just those things which human beings never forget, and 
 those they cannot remember that give the clue to knowledge 
 of their life and character. It belongs to a later period of 
 the book to go more thoroughly into the reason why the 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 125 
 
 female has precisely the remembrances she has. Some 
 important conclusion may be expected from reflection on 
 the incredible memory with which women recall all the 
 adulation and flattery, all the proofs of gallantry, which 
 have happened to them since childhood. 
 
 Whatever may be urged against the present complete 
 limitation of the female memory to the sphere of sexuality 
 and conjugal life, it is to me quite evident. Various 
 arguments about girls' schools, and so forth, I am prepared 
 for. These difficulties will have to be cleared away later. 
 But I must just say again that all memory, which is to be 
 used as a means of psychological definition of the individual, 
 can include only the memory of what has been learnt when 
 learning means actual experience. 
 
 The explanation of the discontinuity in the psychical life 
 of women (reference to which is introduced here, only 
 because it is a necessary psychological factor in the problem 
 of memory, and without reference to its spiritualistic or 
 idealistic significance) can be reached only when the nature 
 of continuity is studied with reference to the deepest 
 problems of philosophy and psychology. 
 
 As a proof of the fact I will at present quote nothing more 
 than the statement of Lotze, which has so often caused 
 astonishment, that women much more readily submit them- 
 selves to new relationships and more easily accommodate 
 themselves to them than men, in whom the parvenu can be 
 seen much longer, whereas one might not be able to tell the 
 peasant from the peeress, the woman brought up in poor 
 surroundings from the patrician's daughter. Later on I 
 shall deal more exhaustively with this subject. 
 
 At any rate, it will now be seen why (if neither vanity, 
 desire for gossip, nor imitation drives them to it) only the 
 better men write down recollections of their lives, and how 
 I perceive in this a strong evidence of the connection 
 between memory and giftedness. It is not as if every man 
 of genius wished to write an autobiography : the incitement 
 to autobiography comes from special, very deep-seated 
 psychological conditions. But on the other hand, the 
 
126 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 writing of a full autobiography, if it is the oi.tcome of a 
 genuine desire, is always the sign of a superior man. For 
 real faithful memory is the source of reverence. The really 
 great would resist any temptation to give up his past in 
 exchange for material advantage or mental health ; the 
 greatest treasures of the world, even happiness itself, he 
 would not take in exchange for his memories. 
 
 ^he desire for a draught of the waters of Lethe is the 
 trait of mediocre or inferior natures. And however much a 
 really great man, as Goethe says, may condemn and abhor 
 his past failings, and although he sees others clinging fast to 
 theirs, he will never smile at those past actions and failings 
 of his own, or make merry over his early mode of life and 
 thoughty^ 
 
 The class of persons, now so much in evidence, who 
 claim to have " conquered " their pasts, have the smallest 
 possible claim to the word " conquer." They are those who 
 idly relate that they formerly believed this or the other, but 
 have now " overcome " their beliefs, whereas they are as 
 little in earnest about the present as they were about the 
 past. They see only the mechanism, not the soul of things, 
 and at no stage what they believe themselves to have 
 conquered was deep in their natures. 
 
 4n contrast with these it may be noticed with what painful 
 care great men render even the, apparently, most minute 
 details in their own biographies tjffor them the past and 
 present are equal ; with others neither of the two are real/ 
 
 The famous man realises how everything, even the 
 smallest, most secondary, matters played an important part 
 in his life, how they have helped his development, and to this 
 fact is due his extraordinary reverence for his own memoirs. 
 And such an autobiography is not written all at once, as it 
 were, with one event treated like another, and without 
 meditatio , ; nor does the idea of it suddenly occur to a 
 mnn ; the material for such a work by a great man, so to 
 speak, is always at hand. 
 
 <^is new experiences acquire a deeper significance because 
 of the past, which is always present to him, and hence the 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 127 
 
 great man, and only the great man, feels that he himself is in 
 very truth a " man of destiny. / And so it comes that great 
 men are always more " superstitious " than average men. 
 To sum up, I may say : 
 
 Y^ man is himself important precisely in proportion that 
 all things seem important to him./ 
 
 In the course of further investigation this dictum will be 
 seen to have a deep significance even apart from its bearing 
 on theuniversality, comprehension, and comparison exhibited 
 by the genius. 
 
 The position of woman in these matters is not difficult to 
 explain. A real woman never becomes conscious of a des- 
 tiny, of her own destiny ; she is not heroic ; she fights most 
 for her possessions, and there is nothing tragic in the struggle 
 as her own fate is decided with the fate of her possessions, 
 /inasmuch as woman is without continuity, she can have 
 no true reverence ; as a fact, reverence is a purely male 
 virtue. A man is first reverent about himself, and self- 
 respect is the first stage in reverence for all things^ But it 
 costs a woman very little to break off with her past ; if the 
 word irony could be fittingly used here, one might say that 
 a man does not easily regard his past with irony and 
 superiority as women appear to do — and not only after 
 marriage. 
 
 Later on I shall show how women are exactly the opposite 
 of that which reverence means. I would rather be silent 
 about the reverence of widows. 
 
 The superstition of women is psychologically absolutely 
 different from the superstitions of famous men. 
 
 The reverent relation to one's own past, which depends 
 on a real continuity of memory, and which is possible only 
 by comprehension, can be shown in relation to a still wider 
 and deeper subject. 
 
 Whether a man has a real relationship to his own past or 
 not, involves the question as to whether he has a desire for 
 immortality, or if the idea of death is indifferent to him. 
 
 The desire for immortality is to-day, as a rule, treated 
 shamefully, and in a very different spirit^ 
 
^28 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Not only is the problem treated as merely ontological, but 
 / the psychological side of it is only trifled with. It has been 
 held that it is connected, like the doctrine of the trans- 
 migration of souls, with the feeling that we have all experi- 
 enced, when, in doing something certainly for the first time, 
 we seem to remember having gone through the same 
 experience before. Another generally adopted view is to 
 derive the idea of immortality from the belief in spirits, as 
 has been done by Tylor, Spencer, Avenarius, and others, 
 although in any other age than this age of experimental 
 psychology it would have been dismissed a priori. ( I am 
 sure that it must seem impossible to the majority of 
 thinking men to regard a belief so important to man- 
 kind, about which there has been so much strife, as merely 
 the last stage in a syllogism of which the first premiss 
 is the midnight dream of a dead man. How can phe- 
 nomena of that kind explain the belief in the continuity of 
 their lives after death held so firmly by Goethe or Bach, or 
 the desire for immortality which speaks to us in Beethoven's 
 last sonatas ? The desire for the persistence of the con- 
 scious seit must spring from sources mightier than these 
 feeble rationalistic guesses^ 
 \The deeper source of the belief depends on the relation of 
 J a man to his own past. Our consciousness and vision of the 
 past is the strongest ground for our desire to be conscious 
 in the future. The man who values his past, who holds his 
 mental life in greater respect than his corporeal life, is not 
 willing to give up his consciousness at death. And so this 
 organic primary desire for immortality is strongest in men 
 of genius, in the men whose pasts are richest. This con- 
 nection between the desire for immortality and memory 
 receives strong support from what is related by those who 
 have been rescued from sudden death. > Even if they had 
 not thought it out before they relive their past in a few 
 moments, at once and with frantic rapidity. The feeling of 
 what is impending brings in violent contrast the intensity of 
 the present consciousness and the idea that it may cease for 
 ever. In reality we know very little of the mental state of 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 129 
 
 the dying. It takes more than an ordinary person to inter- 
 pret it, and for reasons connected with what I have been 
 saying men of genius usually avoid death-beds. But it is 
 quite wrong to ascribe the sudden appearance of religion in 
 so many people who are fatally ill, to a desire to make sure 
 of their future state. It is extremely superficial to assume 
 that the doctrine of hell can for the first time assume such 
 an importance to the dying as to make them afraid to pass 
 away "with a lie on their lips."* 
 
 The important point is this : Why do men who have 
 lived throughout a lying life feel towards the end a 
 sudden desire for truth ? And why are others so horrified, 
 although they do not believe in punishment in the next 
 world, when they hear of a man dying with a lie on his 
 lips or with an unrepented action ? And why have both 
 the hardness of heart until the end and the death-bed 
 repentance appealed so forcibly to the imagination of 
 poets ? The discussion as to the " euthanasia " of atheists, 
 which was so popular in the eighteenth century, is more 
 than a mere historical curiosity as F. A. Lange con- 
 sidered it. 
 
 I adduce these considerations not merely to suggest a 
 possibility which is hardly more than a guess. It seems 
 to be unthinkable that it is not the case that many more 
 people than actual geniuses have some trace of genius. 
 The quantitative difference in natural endowment will 
 be most marked at the moment when the endowrr'^nt 
 becomes active. And for most men this moment is the 
 point of dearh. If we were not accustomed to regard men 
 of genius as a separate class shut off from the others like the 
 payers of income-tax, we should find less difficulty in 
 grafting these new ideas on the old. And just as the earliest 
 recollections of childhood which a man has are not the 
 result of some external event breaking through the 
 
 * I venture to remind readers how often at the approach of 
 death those who have been occupied with purely scientific matters 
 have turned to religious problems, e.g., Newton, Gauss, Riemann, 
 Weber. 
 
 I 
 
I30 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 continuity of the past course of his life, but are the result 
 of his internal development, there comes to every one a day 
 on which his consciousness is so intensified that remem- 
 brance remains, and from that time onwards, according to 
 his endowment, more or fewer remembrances are formed 
 (a factor which by itself upsets the whole of modern 
 psychology), so in different men there are many different 
 stimulants of the consciousness of which the last is the 
 hour of death, and from the point of view of their de- 
 gree of genius men might almost be classified by the 
 number of things that excite their consciousness. I take 
 this opportunity of again urging the falseness of a doc- 
 trine of modern psychology (which treats men simply as 
 better or worse pieces of registering apparatus and takes 
 no notice of the internal, ontogenetic development of the 
 mind) ; I mean the idea that in youth we retain the greatest 
 number of impressions. We must not confuse really ex- 
 perienced impressions with the mere material on which to 
 exercise memorising. Such stuff a child learns more easily 
 simply because it is not weighted with mental impres- 
 sions. A psychology which is opposed to experience in 
 matters so fundamental must be rejected. What I am 
 attempting at present is no more than to give the faintest 
 indication of that ontogenetic psychology or theoretical 
 biography which sooner or later will replace what now 
 passes for the science of mind. Every programme repre- 
 sents some definite conviction ; before we wish to reach a 
 goal we have some definite conception of what the goal 
 is to be. The name " theoretical biography " will define 
 the new subject from philosophy and physiology, and the 
 biological method of treatment introduced by Darwin, 
 Spencer, and others will be widened until it becomes a 
 science capable of giving a rational orderly account of 
 the whole course of the mental life from the cradle to the 
 grave. It is to be called biography, not biology, because 
 it is to deal with the investigation of the permanent laws 
 that rule the mental development of an individual, whereas 
 biology itself concerns itself with individuals themselves. 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 131 
 
 The new knowledge will seek general points of view and 
 the establishment of types. Psychology must try to be- 
 come theoretical biography. Existing psychology would 
 find its place in the branches of the new science, and in 
 this way only would Wundt's desire to establish the founda- 
 tions of a science of the mind be fulfilled. It would be 
 absurd to despair of this simply because of the uselessness 
 of the existing science of the mind which has not yet even 
 grasped its own object. In this way a justification for 
 experimental psychology might yet be found, in spite of the 
 important results of the investigations by Windelband and 
 Rickert on the relation between natural and psychical 
 science, or the old dichotomy between the physical and 
 mental sciences. 
 
 The relation between the continuity of memory and the 
 desire for immortality is borne out by the fact that woman 
 is devoid of the desire for immortality. It is to be noted 
 that those persons are quite wrong who have attributed the 
 desire for immortality to the fear of death. Women are as 
 much afraid of death as are men, but they have not the 
 longing for immortality. 
 
 My attempted explanation of the psychological desire for 
 immortality is as yet more an indication of the connection 
 between the desire and memory than a deduction from a 
 higher natural law. It will always be found that the con- 
 nection actually exists ; the more a man lives in his past 
 (not, as a superficial reader might guess, in his future) the 
 more intense will be his longing for immortality. The lack 
 of the desire for immortality in women is to be associated 
 with the lack in them of reverence for their own personality. 
 It seems, however, that the absence of both reverence and 
 desire for immortality in woman is due to a more general 
 principle, and in the same fashion in the case of man the 
 co-existence of a higher form of memory and the desire for 
 immortality may be traced to some deeper root. So far, I 
 have attempted only to show the coincidence of the two, 
 how the deep respect for their own past and the deep desire 
 for their own future are to be found in the same individuals. 
 
132 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 It will now be my task to find the common origin of these 
 two factors of the mind. 
 
 Let us take as a starting-point what we were able to lay 
 down as to the universality of the memory of great men. 
 To such everything is equally real: what took place long ago 
 and the most recent experience. Thus it happens that a 
 single experience does not end with the moment of time in 
 which it happened, does not disappear as this moment of 
 time disappears, but through the memory is wrested from 
 the grasp of time. vM^^mory makes experience timeless ; the 
 essence of it is that it should transcend time. A man can 
 only remember the past because memory is free from the 
 control of time, because events which in nature are functions 
 of time, in the spirit have conquered time) 
 
 But here a difficulty crops up. How can memory be a 
 negation of time if, on the other hand, it is certain that if 
 we had no memory we should be unconscious of time ? It 
 is certainly true that we shall always be conscious of the 
 passing of time by our memory of the past. If the two are 
 in so intimate a relation how can the one be the negation of 
 the other ? 
 
 Vrhe difficulty is easy to resolve. It is just because a 
 living creature — not necessarily a human being — by being 
 endowed with memory is not wholly absorbed by the 
 experiences of the moment that it can, so to speak, oppose 
 itself to time, take cognisance of it, and make it the subject 
 of observation. Were the being wholly abandoned to the 
 experience of the moment and not saved from it by memory 
 then it would change with time and be a floating bubble in 
 the stream of events ; it could never be conscious of time, 
 for consciousness implies duality. The mind must have 
 transcended time to grasp it, it must have stood outside it 
 in order to be able to reflect upon it. This does not apply 
 merely to special moments of time, as, for instance, to the 
 case that we cannot be conscious of sorrow until the sorrow 
 is over, but it is a part of the conception of time. If we 
 could not free ourselves from time, we could have no 
 knowledge of time^ 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 133 
 
 In order to understand the condition of timelessness let 
 us reflect on what memory rescues from time. What tran- 
 scends time is only what is of interest to the individual, 
 what has meaning for him ; in fact, all that he assigns value 
 to. We remember only the things that have some value for 
 us even if we are unconscious of the value. It is the value 
 that creates the timelessness. We forget everything that has 
 no value for us even if we are unconscious of that absence 
 of value. 
 
 What has value, then, is timeless ; or, to put it the other 
 way, a thing has the more value the less it is a function 
 of time. In all the world value is in proportion to inde- 
 pendence of time ; only things that are timeless have a 
 positive value. Although this is not what I take to be the 
 deepest and fullest meaning of value, it is, at least, the first 
 special law of the theory of values. 
 
 A hasty survey of. common facts will suffice to prove this 
 relation between value and duration. We are always in- 
 clined to pay little attention to the views of those whom we 
 have known only for a short time, and, as a rule, we think 
 little of the hasty judgments of those who easily change their 
 ideas. On the other hand, uncompromising fixedness gains 
 respect, even if it assume the form of vindictiveness or 
 obstinacy. The cere perennins of the Roman poets and the 
 Egyptian pyramids lasting for forty centuries are favourite 
 images. The reputation a man leaves behind him would 
 soon be depreciated were it suspected that it would soon 
 disappear instead of being handed down the centuries. A 
 man dislikes to be told that he is always changing ; but let it 
 be put that he is simply showing new sides of his character 
 and he will be proud of the permanence through the 
 changes. He who is tired of life, for whom life has ceased 
 to be of interest, is interesting to no one. The fear of the 
 extinction of a name or of a family is well known. 
 
 So also statute laws and customs lose in value if their 
 validity is expressly limited in time ; and if two people are 
 making a bargain, they will be the more ready to distrust 
 one another if the bargain is to be only of short duration. 
 
134 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 In fact, the value that we attach to things depends to a large 
 extent on our estimate of their durability. 
 
 This law of values is the chief reason why men are inte- 
 rested in their death and their future. The desire for value 
 shows itself in the efforts to free things from time, and this 
 pressure is exerted even in the case of things which sooner 
 or later must change, as, for instance, riches and position 
 and everything that we call the goods of this world. Here 
 lies the psychological motive for the making of wills and the 
 bestowal of property. The motive is not care for relatives, 
 because a man without relatives very often is more anxious 
 to settle his goods, not feeling, perhaps, like the head of 
 a family, that in any event his existence will have some 
 kind of permanence, that traces of him will be left after his 
 own death. 
 
 The great politician or ruler, and especially the despot, 
 whose rule ends with his death, seeks to increase his own 
 value by making it independent of time. He may attempt 
 it through a code of laws or a biography like that of Julius 
 Caesar, by some great philosophical undertaking, by the 
 founding of museums or collections, or (and this perhaps is 
 the favourite way) by alterations of the calendar. And he 
 seeks to extend his power to the utmost during his life-time, 
 to preserve it and make it stable by enduring contracts and 
 diplomatic marriages, and most of all by attacking and re- 
 moving everything that could endanger the permanence of 
 his kingdom. And so the politician becomes a conqueror. 
 
 Psychological and philosophical investigations of the 
 theory of values have neglected the time element. Perhaps 
 this is because they have been very much under the influence 
 of political economy. I believe, however, that the appli- 
 cation of my principle to political economy would be of 
 considerable value. Very slight reflection will lead one to 
 see that in commercial affairs the time element is a most 
 important factor in estimating value. The common defini- 
 tion of value, that it is in proportion to the power of the 
 thing valued to relieve our wants, is quite incomplete with- 
 out the element of time. Such things as air and water have 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 135 
 
 no value only in so far as they are not localised and 
 individualised ; but as soon as they have been localised and 
 individualised, and so received form, they have received a 
 quality that may not last, and with the idea of duration 
 comes the idea of value. Form and timelessness, or indi- 
 viduation and duration, are the two factors which compose 
 value. 
 
 Thus it can be shown that the fundamental law of the 
 theory of value applies both to individual psychology and to 
 social psychology. And now I can return to what is, after 
 all, the special task of this chapter. 
 
 The first general conclusion to be made is that the desire 
 for timelessness, a craving for value, pervades ail spheres of 
 human activity. And this desire for real value, which is 
 deeply bound up with the desire for power, is completely 
 absent in the woman. It is only in comparatively rare cases 
 that old women trouble to make exact directious about the 
 disposition of their property, a fact in obvious relation with 
 the absence in them of the desire for immortality. 
 
 Over the dispositions of a man there is the weight of 
 something solemn and impressive — something which makes 
 him respected by other men. 
 
 The desire for immortality itself is merely a specific case 
 of the general law that only timeless thmgs have a positive 
 value. On this is founded its connection with memory. 
 The permanence with which experiences stay with a man is 
 proportional to the significance which they had for him. 
 Putting it in a paradoxical form, I may say : Value is 
 created by the past. Only that which has a positive value 
 remains protected by memory from the jaws of time ; and 
 so it may be with tlie individual psychical life as a whole. 
 If it is to have a positive value, it must not be a function 
 of time, but must subdue time by eternal duration after 
 physical death. This draws us incomparably nearer the 
 innermost motive of the desire for immortality. The com- 
 plete loss of significance which a rich, individual, fully-lived 
 life would suffer if it were all to end with death, and the 
 consequent senselessness of everything, as Goethe said, in 
 
136 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 other words, to Eckermann (February 14, 1829) lead to 
 the demand for immortality. The strongest craving for 
 immortality is possessed by the genius, and this is explained 
 by all the other facts which have been discussed as to his 
 nature. 
 
 Memory only fully vanquishes time when it appears in a 
 universal form, as in universal men. 
 
 The genius is thus the only timeless man — at least, this 
 and nothing else is his ideal of himself ; he is, as is proved 
 by his passionate and urgent desire for immortality, just the 
 man with the strongest demand for timeiessness, with the 
 greatest desire for value.* 
 
 <And now we are face to face with an almost astonishing 
 coincidence. The timeiessness of the genius will not only 
 be manifest in relation to the single moments of his life, but 
 also in his relation to what is known as " his generation," or, 
 in a narrower sense, " his time." As a matter of fact, he 
 has no relations at all with it. The age does not create the 
 genius it requires. The genius is not the product of his 
 age, is not to be explained by it, and we do him no honour 
 if we attempt to account for him by it.) 
 
 Carlyle justly noted how many epochs had called for 
 great men, how badly they had needed them, and how they 
 still did not obtain them. 
 
 The coming of genius remains a mystery, and men 
 reverently abandon their efforts to explain it. And as the 
 causes of its appearance do not lie in any one age, so also 
 the consequences are not limited by time. The achieve- 
 ments of genius live for ever, and time cannot change them, 
 By his works a man of genius is granted immortality on the 
 earth, and thus in a threefold manner he has transcended 
 time. His universal comprehension and memory forbid 
 the annihilation of his experiences with the passing of the 
 
 * It is often a cause for astonishment that men with quite ordi- 
 nary, even vulgar, natures experience no fear of death. But it is 
 quite explicable : it is not the fear of death which creates the desire 
 for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes fear of 
 death. 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 137 
 
 moment in which each occurred ; his birth is independent 
 of his age, and his work never dies. 
 
 Here is the best place to consider a question which, 
 strangely enough, appears to have received no attention. 
 The question is, if there be anything akin to genius in the 
 world of animals and plants ? Although it must be 
 admitted that exceptional forms occur amongst animals 
 and plants, these cannot be regarded as coming under our 
 definition of genius. Talent may exist amongst them as 
 amongst men below the standard of genius. But the 
 special gift, what Moreau, Lombroso, and others have called 
 the " divine spark," we must deny to animals. This limita- 
 tion is not jealousy nor the anxious guarding of a privilege, 
 but is founded on good grounds. 
 
 Is there anything unexplained by the assumption that the 
 first appearance of genius was in man ! In the first place, it 
 is because of this that the human race has an objective 
 mind ; in other words, that man is the only organism with a 
 history. 
 
 ^The history of the human race (naturally I mean the 
 history of its mind and not merely of its wars) is readily 
 intelligible on the theory of the appearance of genius, and 
 of the imitation by the more monkey-like individuals of the 
 conduct of those with genius. The chief stages, no doubt, 
 were house-building, agriculture, and, above all, speech. 
 Every single word has been the invention of a single man, 
 as, indeed, we still see, if we leave out of consideration the 
 merely technical terms. How else could language have 
 arisen ? The earliest words were " onomatopoetic " ; a 
 sound similar to the exciting cause was evolved almost 
 without the will of the speaker, in direct response to the 
 sensuous stimulation. All the other words were originally 
 metaphors, or comparisons, a kind of primitive poetry, for 
 all prose has come from poetry, f Many, perhaps the 
 majority of the greatest geniuses, have remained unknown. 
 Think of the proverbs, now almost commonplaces, such as 
 " one good turn deserves another." These were said for 
 the first time by some great man. How many quotations 
 
138 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 from the classics, or sayings of Christ, have passed into the 
 common language, so that we have to think twice before we 
 can remember who were the authors of them. Language 
 is as little the work of the multitude as our ballads. Every 
 form of speech owes much that is not acknowledged to 
 individuals of another language. Because of the universality 
 of genius, the words and phrases that he invents are useful 
 not only to those who use the language in which he wrote 
 them. /A nation orients itself by its own geniuses, and 
 derives from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding 
 star serves also as a light to other nations. As speech has 
 been created by a few great men, the most extraordinary 
 wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which reveals itself 
 to a few ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked 
 by the stupid professional philologists.^ 
 
 The genius is not a critic of language, but its creator, as 
 he is the creator of all the mental achievements which are 
 the material of culture and which make up the objective 
 mind, the spirit of the peoples. The "timeless" men are 
 those who make history, for history can be made only by 
 those who are not floating with the stream. It is only those 
 who are unconditioned by time who have real value, and 
 whose productions have an enduring force. And the 
 events that become forces of culture become so only because 
 they have an enduring value. 
 
 If we make a criterion of genius the exhibition of this 
 threefold " timelessness " we shall have a measure by which 
 it is easy to test all claimants. Lombroso and Türck have 
 expanded the popular view which ascribes genius to all 
 whose intellectual or practical achievements are much 
 above the average. Kant and Schelling have insisted on 
 the more exclusive doctrine that genius can be predicated 
 only of the great creative artists. The truth probably lies 
 between the two. I am inclined to think that only great 
 artists and great philosophers (amongst the latter, I include, 
 above all, the great religious teachers) have proved a claim 
 to genius. Neither the " man of action " nor " the man of 
 science " has any claim. 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 139 
 
 Men of action, famous politicians and generals, may 
 possess a few traits resembling genius (particularly a 
 specially good knowledge of men and an enormous capacity 
 for remembering people). The psychology of such traits 
 will be dealt with later ; they are confused with genius only 
 by those whom the externals of greatness dazzle. The man 
 of genius almost typically renounces such external greatness 
 because of the real greatness within him. The really great 
 man has the strongest sense of values ; the distinguished 
 general is absorbed by the desire for power. The former 
 seeks to link power with real value ; the latter desires that 
 power itself should be valued. Great generals and great 
 politicians, like the bird Phoenix, are born out of fiery chaos 
 and like it disappear again in chaos. The great emperor 
 or the great demagogue is the only man who lives entirely 
 in the present ; he does not dream of a more beautiful, 
 better future ; his mind does not dwell on his own past 
 which has already passed, and so in the two ways most 
 possible to man, he does not transcend time, but lives only 
 in the moment. The great genius does not let his work be 
 determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround 
 him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman 
 takes its direction and its termination. And so the great 
 emperor is no more than a phenomenon of nature, whereas 
 the genius is outside nature and is an incorporation of the 
 mind. The works of men of action crumble at the death of 
 their authors, if indeed they have not already decayed, or 
 they survive only a brief time leaving no traces behind 
 them except what the chronicles record as having been 
 done and later undone. The emperor creates no works 
 that survive time, passing into eternity ; such creations come 
 from genius. It is the genius in reality and not the other 
 who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who 
 is outside and unconditioned by history. The great man 
 has a history, the emperor is only a part of history. The 
 great man transcends time ; time creates and time destroys 
 the emperor. 
 
 The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher 
 
140 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 (I think of such names as Newton and Gauss, Linnasus 
 and Darwin, Copernicus and GaHleo), deserves the title of 
 genius as little as the man of action. Men of science are 
 not universal ; they deal only with a branch or branches of 
 knowledge. This is not due, as is sometimes said, merely to 
 the extreme modern specialisation that makes it impossible 
 to master everything. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth 
 centuries there are still amongst the learned men individuals 
 with a knowledge as many-sided as that of Aristotle or 
 Leibnitz ; the names of von Humboldt and William Wundt 
 at once come to my mind. The absence of genius comes 
 from something much more deeply seated in the men of 
 science, and in science itself, from a cause which I shall 
 explain in the eighth chapter. Probably some one may be 
 disposed to argue that if even the most distinguished men 
 of science have not a knowledge so universal as that of the 
 philosopher, there are some who stand on the outermost 
 fringes of philosophy, and to whom it is yet difficult to deny 
 the word genius. I think of such men as Fichte, Schleier- 
 macher, Carlyle, and Nietzsche. Which of the merely 
 scientitic has felt in himself an unconditioned comprehen- 
 sion of all men and of all things, or even the capacity to 
 verify any single thing in his mind and by his mind ? On 
 the contrary, has not the whole history of the science of the 
 last thousand years been directed against this ? This is the 
 reason why men of science are necessarily one-sided. No 
 man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, however 
 eminent his achievements, has that continuous unforgetting 
 life that the genius exhibits, and this is because of his want 
 of universality. 
 
 finally, it is to be observed that the investigations of the 
 scientific are always in definite relation to the knowledge of 
 their day. The scientific man takes possession of a definite 
 store of experimental or observed knowledge, increases or 
 alters it more or less, and then hands it on. And much will 
 be taken away from his achievements, much will silently 
 disappear ; his treatises may make a brave show in the 
 libraries, but they cease to be actively alive. On the other 
 
TALENT AND MEMORY 141 
 
 hand, we can ascribe to the work of the great philosopher, 
 as to that of the great artist, an imperishable, unchangeable 
 presentation of the world, not disappearing with time, and 
 which, because it was the expression of a great mind, will 
 always find a school of men to adhere to it. There still exist 
 disciples of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Berkeley 
 and Bruno, but there are now none who denote them- 
 selves as followers of Galileo or Helmholtz, of Ptolemy or 
 Copernicus. It is a misuse of terms, due to erroneous ideas, 
 to speak of the " classics " of science or of pedagogy in the 
 sense that we speak of the classics of philosophy and art.^ 
 
 The great philosopher bears the name of genius deservedly 
 and with honour. And if it will always be the greatest pain 
 to the philosopher that he is not an artist, so the artist envies 
 the philosopher his tenacious and controlled strength of 
 systematic thought, and it is not surprising that the artist has 
 taken pleasure in depicting Prometheus and Faust, Prospera 
 and Cyprian, Paul the Apostle and II Penseroso. The philo- 
 sopher and the artist are alternate sides of one another. 
 
 We must not be too lavish in attributing genius to those 
 who are philosophers or we shall not escape the reproach of 
 being merely partisans of philosophy against science. Such 
 a partisanship is foreign to my purpose, and, I hope, to this 
 book, ^t would only be absurd to discuss the claims 
 to genius of such men as Anaxagoras, Geulincx, Baader, or 
 Emerson. I deny genius either to such unoriginally pro- 
 found writers as Angelus Silesius, Philo and Jacobi, or to 
 original yet superficial persons such as Comte Feuerbach, 
 Hume, Herbart, Locke, and Karneades. The history of art 
 is equally full of preposterous valuations, whilst, on the 
 other hand, the history of science is extremely free from 
 false estimations./ The history of science busies itself very 
 little with the biographies of its protagonists ; its object is 
 a system of objective, collective knowledge in which the 
 individual is swept away. The service of science demands 
 the greatest sacrifice, for in it the individual human being 
 renounces all claim to eternity as such. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS 
 
 The title that I have given to this chapter at once opens the 
 way to misinterpretation. It might appear as if the author 
 supported the view that logical and ethical values were the 
 objects exclusively of empirical psychology, psychical 
 phenomena, like perception and sensation, and that logic 
 and ethics, therefore, were subsections of psychology and 
 based upon psychology. 
 
 I declare at once that I call this view, the so-called psy- 
 chologismus, at once false and injurious. It is false because 
 it can lead to nothing ; and injurious because, while it 
 hardly touches logic and ethics, it overthrows psychology 
 itself. The exclusion of logic and ethics from the foun- 
 dations of psychology, and the insertion of them in an 
 appendix, is one of the results of the overgrowth of the 
 doctrine of empirical perception, of that strange heap of 
 dead, fleshless bones which is known as empirical psycho- 
 logy, and from which all real experience has been excluded. 
 I have nothing to do with the empirical school, and in this 
 matter lean towards the transcendentalism of Kant. 
 
 As the object of my work, however, is to discover the 
 differences between different members of humanity, and not 
 to discuss categories that would hold good for the angels in 
 heaven, I shall not follow Kant closely, but remain more 
 directly in psychological paths. 
 
 The justification of the title of this chapter must be 
 reached along other Unes. The tedious, because entirely 
 new, demonstration of the earlier part of my work has 
 shown that the human memory stands in intimate relation 
 
MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS 145 
 
 with things hitherto supDOsed unconnected with it — such 
 things as time, value, genius, immortality. I have attempted 
 to show that memory stands in intimate connection with all 
 these. There must be some strong reason for the complete 
 absence of earlier allusions to this side of the subject. I 
 believe the reason to be no more than the inadequacy 
 and slovenliness which hitherto have spoiled theories of 
 memory. 
 
 I must here call attention to a theory first propounded by 
 Charles Bonnet in the middle of the eighteenth century and 
 towards the end of the nineteenth century, specially insisted 
 upon by Ewald Hering and E. Mach. This theory regarded 
 the human memory as being only a special case of a pro- 
 perty common to all organised matter, the property that 
 makes the path of new stimuli rather easier if these resemble 
 stimuli that have acted at some former time. The theory 
 really makes the human memory an adaptation in the 
 sense of Lamarck, the result on the living organism of 
 repeated stimulation. It is true that there is a point in 
 common between the human memory and the increase of 
 sensitiveness caused by the repeated application of a stimu- 
 lus ; that identical element consists in the permanence of 
 the effect of the first stimulation. There is, however, a 
 fundamental difference between the growth of a muscle 
 that is much used or the adaptation of the eater of arsenic 
 or morphia to increased doses, and the recollection of past 
 experiences by human beings. In the one case the trace of 
 the old is just to be felt in the new stimulation ; in the other 
 case, by means of the consciousness, the old situations are 
 actually reproduced with all their individuation. The iden- 
 tification of the two is so superficial that it is a waste of 
 time to dwell longer on it. 
 
 The doctrine of association as the theory of memory is 
 linked with the foregoing physiological theory as a matter 
 of history, through Hartley, and, as a matter of fact, 
 because the idea of habit is shared by the two. The asso- 
 ciation theory attributes memory to the mechanical play 
 of the linking of presentations according to four laws. It 
 
144 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 overlooks the fact that memory (the continuous memory of 
 man) is a function of the will. I can remember a thing if 
 I really will. In the case of hypnosis, when the recollec- 
 tion of all that has been forgotten is induced, an outside 
 will replaces the will of the subject. It is will that sets in 
 action the chains of association, and we have to deal here 
 with something deeper than a mechanical principle. 
 
 In the association psychology, which first splits up the 
 psychic life, and then vainly imagines that it can weld the 
 re-assorted pieces together again, there is another confusion, 
 the confusion between memory and recollection, which 
 has persisted in spite of the well-founded objections of 
 Avenarius and von Höffding. The recognition of a circum- 
 stance does not necessarily involve the special reproduction 
 of the former impression, even although there seems to be a 
 tendency for the new impression, at least, partly to recall the 
 old one. But there is another kind of recognition, perhaps 
 as common, in which the new impression does not appear 
 to be directly linked with an association, but in which it 
 comes, so to speak, "coloured" (James would say "tinged") 
 with that character that would be called by von Höffding 
 the "familiarity quality." To him who returns to his native 
 place the roads and streets seem familiar, even although he 
 has forgotten the names, has to ask his way, and can think 
 of no special occasion on which he went along them. A 
 melody may seem " familiar " and yet I may be unable to 
 say where I heard it. /The " character " (in the sense of 
 Avenarius) of familiarity, of intimacy, hovers over the sense- 
 impression itself, and analysis can detect no associations, 
 none of the fusing of the old and new, which, according to 
 the assertion of a presumptuous pseudo-psychology, produces 
 the feeling ; these cases are quite easy to distinguish from 
 cases in which there is a real although vague association 
 with an older experience in henid formj 
 
 In individual psychology this distinction is of great 
 importance. In the highest types of mankind the conscious- 
 ness of the continuous past is present in so active a form 
 that the moment such a one sees a acquaintance in the 
 
MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS 145 
 
 street he is at once able to reproduce the last meeting as a 
 complete experience, whereas in the case of the less gifted 
 person, the feeling of familiarity that makes recognition 
 possible, occurs when he is able to recall the past connection 
 in all its details. 
 
 If we now, in conclusion, ask whether or no other animals 
 than man possess a similar faculty for remembering and 
 reviving their earlier lives in their entirety it is most probable 
 that the answer must be in the negative. Animals could 
 not, as they do, remain for hours at a time, motionless and 
 peaceful on one spot, if they were capable of thinking of the 
 future or of remembering the past. Animals have the feeling 
 of familiarity and the sense of expectation (as we find from 
 the recognition of his master by a dog after twenty years' 
 absence) ; but they possess no memory and no hope. They 
 are capable of recognition through the sense of familiarity, 
 but they have no memory. 
 
 As memory has been shown to be a special character 
 unconnected with the lower spheres of psychical life, and 
 the exclusive property of human beings, it is not surprising 
 that it is closely related to such higher things as the idea of 
 value and of time, and the craving for immortality, which 
 is absent in animals, and possible to men only in so far as 
 they possess the quality of genius. If memory be an essen- 
 tially human thing, part of the deepest being of humanity, 
 finding expression in mankind's most peculiar qualities, 
 then it will not be surprising if memory be also related to 
 the phenomena of logic and ethics. I have now to explore 
 this relationship. 
 
 I may set out from the old proverb that liars have bad 
 memories. It is certain that the pathological liar has prac- 
 tically no memory. About male liars I shall have more to 
 say ; they are not common, however. But if we remember 
 what was said as to the absence of memory amongst women 
 we shall not be surprised at the existence of the numerous 
 proverbs and common sayings about the untruthfulness of 
 women. It is evident that a being whose memory is very, 
 slight, and who can recall only in the most imperfect fashion 
 
 K 
 
146 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 \vhat it has said or done, or suffered, must lie easily if it has 
 the gift of speech. The impulse to untruthfulness will be 
 hard to resist if there is a practical object to be gained, and 
 if the influence that comes from a full conscious reality of 
 the past be not present. The impulse to lie is stronger in 
 woman, because, unlike that of man, her memory is not 
 continuous, whilst her life is discrete, unconnected, dis- 
 continuous, swayed by the sensations and perceptions of 
 the moment instead of dominating them. Unlike man, her 
 experiences float past without being referred, so to speak, 
 to a definite, permanent centre ; she does not feel herself, 
 past and present, to be one and the same throughout all her 
 life. It happens almost to every man that sometimes he 
 "does not understand himself"; indeed, wilh very many 
 men, it happens (leaving out of the question the facts of 
 psychical periodicity) that if they think over their pasts in 
 their minds they find it very difficult to refer all the events 
 to a single conscious personality ; they do not grasp how 
 it could have been that they, being what they feel themselves 
 at the time to be, could ever have done or felt or thought 
 this, that, or the other. And yet in spite of the difficulty, 
 they know that they had gone through these experiences. 
 The feeling of identity in all circumstances of life is quite 
 wanting in the true woman, because her memory, even if 
 exceptionally good, is devoid of continuity. The conscious- 
 ness of identity of the male, even although he may fail to 
 understand his own past, manifests itself in the very desire 
 to understand that past. Women, if they look back on 
 their earlier lives, never understand themselves, and do not 
 even wish to understand themselves, and this reveals itself 
 in the scanty interest they give to the attempts of man to 
 understand them, u he woman does not interest herself about 
 herself, and hence there have been no female psychologists, 
 no psychology of women written by a woman, and she is 
 incapable of grasping the anxious desire of the man to 
 understand the beginning, middle, and end of his individual 
 life in their relation to each other, and to interpret the 
 whole as a continual, logical, necessary sequence.) 
 
MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS 147 
 
 At this point there is a natural transition to logic. A 
 creature like woman, the absolute woman, who is not con- 
 scious of her own identity at different stages of her life, has 
 no evidence of the identity of the subject-matter of thought 
 at different times. \If in her mind the two stages of a change 
 cannot be present simultaneously by means of memory, it 
 is impossible for her to make the comparison and note the 
 change.) A being whose memory is never sufficiently good 
 as to make it psychologically possible to perceive identity 
 through the lapse of time, so as to enable her, for instance, 
 to pursue a quantity through a long mathematical reckoning ; 
 such a creature in the extreme case would be unable to 
 control her memory for even the moment of time required 
 to say that A will be still A in the next moment, to pronounce 
 judgment on the identity A = A, or on the opposite propo- 
 sition that A is not equal to A, for that proposition also 
 requires a continuous memory of A to make the comparison 
 possible. 
 
 I have been making no mere joke, no facetious sophism 
 or paradoxical proposition. I assert that the judgment of 
 identity depends on conceptions, never on mere perceptions 
 and complexes of perceptions, and the conceptions, as 
 logical conceptions, are independent of time, retaining their 
 constancy, whether I, as a psychological entity, think them 
 constant or not. But man never has a conception in the 
 purely logical form, for he is a psychological being, affected 
 by the condition of sensations ; he is able only to form a 
 general idea (a typical, connotative, representative concep- 
 tion) out of his individual experiences by a reciprocal 
 effacing of the differences and strengthening of the simi- 
 larities, thus, however, very closely approximating to an 
 abstract conception, and in a most wonderful fashion using 
 it as such. He must also be able to preserve this idea 
 which he thinks clear, although in reality it is confused, and 
 it is memory alone that brings about the possibility of that 
 Were he deprived of memory he would lose the possibility 
 of thinking logically, for this possibility is incarnated, so to 
 speak, only in a psychological medium. 
 
148 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. 
 The propositions of logic are not conditioned by the exist- 
 ence of memory, but only the power to use them. The 
 proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to 
 time, otherwise it would be Ati = At2. Of course this is not 
 the case in pure logic, but man has no special faculty of 
 pure logic, and must act as a psychological being. 
 
 I have already shown that the continuous memory is the 
 vanquisher of time, and, indeed, is necessary even for the 
 idea of time to be formed. And so the continuous memory 
 is the psychological expression of the logical proposition of 
 identity. The absolute woman, in whom memory is absent, 
 cannot take the proposition of identity, or its contradictory, 
 or the exclusion of the alternative, as axiomatic. 
 
 Besides these three conditions of logical thought, the 
 fourth condition, the containing of the conclusion in the 
 major premiss, is possible only through memory. That 
 proposition is the groundwork of the syllogism. The pre- 
 misses psychologically precede the conclusion, and must be 
 retained by the thinking person whilst the minor premiss 
 applies the law of identity or of non-identity. The grounds 
 for the conclusion must lie in the past. And for this reason 
 continuity which dominates the mental processes of man is 
 bound up with causality. Every psychological application 
 of the relation of a conclusion to its premisses implies the 
 continuity of memory to guarantee the identity of the propo- 
 sitions. As woman has no continuous memory she can 
 have no principium rationis sufficientis. 
 
 And so it appears that woman is without logic. 
 
 George Simmel has held this familiar statement to be 
 erroneous, inasmuch as women have been known to draw 
 conclusions with the strongest consistency. That a woman 
 in a concrete case can unrelentingly pursue a given course 
 at the stimulation of some object is no more a proof that 
 she understands the syllogism, than is her habit of perpetually 
 recurring to disproved arguments a proof that the law of 
 identity is an axiom for her. ^he point at issue is whether 
 or no they recognise the logical axioms as the criteria of 
 
MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS 149 
 
 the validity of their thoughts, as the directors of their process 
 of thinking, whether they make or do not make these the 
 rule of conduct and the principle of judgment. A woman 
 cannot grasp that one must act from principle ; as she has 
 no continuity she does not experience the necessity for 
 logical support of her mental processes. Hence the ease 
 with which women assume opinions. If a woman gives vent 
 to an opinion, or statement, and a man is so foolish as 
 to take it seriously and to ask her for the proof of it, 
 she regards the request as unkind and offensive, and as 
 impugning her character. A man feels ashamed of himself, 
 feels himself guilty if he has neglected to verify a thought, 
 whether or no that thought has been uttered by him ; he 
 feels the obligation to keep to the logical standard which he 
 has set up for himself. Woman resents any attempt to 
 require from her that her thoughts should be logical. <^he 
 may be regarded as " logically insane."/ 
 
 The most common defect which one could discover in the 
 conversation of a woman, if one really wished to apply to it 
 the standard of logic (a feat that man habitually shuns, so 
 showing his contempt for a woman's logic) is the quaternio 
 terminorum, that form of equivocation which is the result of 
 an incapacity to retain definite presentations; in other words, 
 the result of a failure to grasp the law of identity. Woman is 
 unaware of this ; she does not realise the law nor make it a 
 criterion of thought. <^Man feels himself bound to logic ; the 
 woman is without this feeling. It is only this feeling of guilt 
 that guarantees man's efforts to think logically. Probably 
 the most profound saying of Descartes, and yet one that 
 has been widely misunderstood, is that all errors are crimes) 
 
 (The source of all error in life is failure of memory. Thus 
 logic and ethics, both of which deal with the furtherance of 
 truth and join in its highest service, are dependent on 
 memory. The conception dawns on us that Plato was not 
 so far wrong when he connected discernment with memory. 
 Memory, it is true, is not a logical and ethical act, but it is a 
 logical and ethical phenomenon) <^A man who has had a 
 vivid and deep perception regards it as a fault, if some half- 
 
I50 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 hour afterwards he is thinking of something different, even 
 if external influences have intervened. A man thinks him- 
 self unconscientious and blameworthy if he notices that he 
 has not thought of a particular portion of his life for a long 
 time. Memory, moreover, is linked with morality, because 
 it is only through memory that repentance is possible. All 
 forgetfulness is in itself immoral. And so reverence ps a 
 moral exercise ; it is a duty to forget nothing, and for this 
 reason we should reverence the dead.) Equally from logical 
 and ethical motives, man tries to carry logic into his past, in 
 order that past and present may become one. 
 
 \It is with something of a shock that we realise here*that 
 we approach the deep connection between logic and ethics, 
 long ago suggested by Socrates and Plato, discovered anew 
 by Kant and Fichte, but lost sight of by living workers. 
 
 A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of 
 A and not A has no difficulty in lying ; more than that, 
 such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, 
 being without a standard of truth. Such a creature if 
 endowed with speech will lie without knowing it, without 
 the possibility of knowing it; Veritas norma sui et falsa est. 
 There is nothing more upsetting to a man than to find, when 
 he has discovered a woman in a lie, and has asked her, 
 " Why did you lie about it ? " that she simply does not 
 understand the question, but simply looks at him and 
 laughingly tries to soothe him, or bursts into tearsi 
 
 The subject does not end with the part played by memory. 
 Lying is common enough amongst men. And lies can be 
 told in spite of a full remembrance of the subject which for 
 some purpose some one wishes to be informed about. 
 Indeed, it might almost be said that the only persons who 
 can lie are those who misrepresent facts in spite of a 
 superior knowledge and consciousness of them. 
 
 -(Truth must first be regarded as the real value of logic and 
 ethics before it is correct to speak of deviations from truth 
 for special motives as lies from the moral point of view. 
 Those who have not this high conception should be 
 adjudged as guilty rather of vagueness and exaggeration 
 
MEMORY, LOGIC, AND ETHICS 151 
 
 than of lying : they are not immoral but non-moral. And 
 in this sense the woman is non-moral.) 
 
 The root of such an absolute misconception of truth must 
 lie deep. The continuous memory against which alone a 
 man can be false, is not the real source of the effort for 
 truth, the desire for truth, the basal ethical-logical 
 phenomenon, but only stands in intimate relation with it, 
 
 (That which enables man to have a real relation to truth 
 and which removes his temptation to lie, must be some- 
 thing independent of all time, something absolutely 
 unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces the old as if it 
 were new, because it is permanent itself ; it can only be 
 that source in which all discrete experiences unite and 
 which creates from the first a continuous existence. It is 
 what produces the feehng of responsibility which oppresses 
 all men, young and old, as to their actions, which makes 
 them know that they are responsible, which leads to the 
 phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which 
 calls to account before an eternal and ever present self 
 things that are long past, its judgment being subtler and 
 more comprehensive than that of any court of law or of the 
 laws of society, and which is exerted by the individual him- 
 self quite independently of all social codes (so condemning 
 the moral psychology which would derive morality from 
 the social life of man). Society recognises the idea of 
 illegality, but not of sin ; it presses for punishment without 
 wishing to produce repentance ; lying is punished by the 
 law only in its ceremonious form of perjury, and error has 
 never been placed under its ban.) Social ethics with its 
 conception of duty to our neighbour and to society, and 
 practical exclusion from consideration of the other fifteen 
 hundred million human beings, cannot extend the realm 
 of morality, when it begins by limiting it in this arbitrary 
 fashion. 
 
 What is this " centre of apperception " that is superior to 
 time and change ? 
 
 It can be nothing less than what raises man above himself 
 (as a part of the world of sense) which joins him to an 
 
152 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 order of things that only the reason can grasp, and that 
 puts the whole world of sense at his feet. It is nothing else 
 than personality. 
 
 The most sublime book in the world, the " Criticism of 
 Practical Reason," has referred morality to an intelli.^ent 
 ego, distinct from all empirical consciousness. I must now 
 turn to that side of my subject. 
 
CHAPTER Vir 
 
 LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO 
 
 (PAVID Hume is well known to have abolished the concep- 
 tion of the ego by seeing in it only a bundle of different 
 perceptions in continual ebb and flow. However completely 
 Hume thought himself to have compromised the ego, at 
 least he explained his view relatively moderately. He 
 proposed to say nothing about a few metaphysicians who 
 appeared to rejoice in another kind of ego ; for himself he 
 was quite certain that he had none, and he dared to suppose 
 that the majority of mankind, leaving the few peculiar 
 metaphysicians out of the question, were, like himself, mere 
 bundles. So the polite man expressed himself. In the 
 next chapter I shall show how his irony recoils on himself. 
 That his view became so famous depends partly on the 
 over-estimation in which Hume is held and which is largely 
 due to Kant. Hume was a most distinguished empirical 
 psychologist, but he cannot be regarded as a genius, the 
 popular view notwithstanding.) It is not very much to be 
 the first of English philosophers, but Hume has not even a 
 claim to that position. I do not think that Kant would 
 have given so much praise to Hume if he had been fully 
 acquainted with all Hume's work and not merely with the 
 " Enquiry," as he certainly rejected the position of Spinoza, 
 according to which men were not " substances," but merely 
 accidents. 
 
 -Lichtenberg, who took the field against the ego later than 
 Hume, was still bolder. He is the philosopher of imperson- 
 ality, and calmly corrects the conversational " I think" mto 
 an actual " it thinks " ; he regards the ego as a creation of 
 
154 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the grammarian. In this Hume had anticipated him, inas- 
 much as he also had declared, at the end of his analysis, all 
 disputes as to the identity of the person to be merely a 
 battle of words.) 
 
 E. Mach has recently represented the universe as a 
 coherent mass, and the egos as points in which the coherent 
 mass has greater consistency. The only realities are the 
 perceptions, which are connected in one individual strongly, 
 but which are weaker in another individual who is thus 
 differentiated from the first. 
 
 The contents of the perceptions are the realities, and they 
 persist externally to the worthless personal recollections. 
 The ego is not a real but only a practical entity and cannot 
 be isolated, and, therefore, the idea of individual immortality 
 must be rejected. None the less the idea of an ego is not 
 wholly to be rejected ; here and there, as, for instance, in 
 Darwin's struggle for existence, it appears to have some 
 validity. 
 
 It is extraordinary how an investigator who has accom- 
 plished so much, not only as a historian of his special branch 
 and as a critic of ideas, but who is also fully equipped 
 with knowledge of biology, should have paid no heed to the 
 fact that every organic being is indivisible from the first, 
 and is not composed of anything like atoms, monads, &c. 
 The first distinctive mark of the living as opposed to 
 inorganic matter is that the former is always differentiated 
 into dissimilar, mutually dependent parts, and is not 
 homogeneous like a crystal. And so it should have been 
 borne in mind that it was at least possible that individuation» 
 the fact that organic beings are not united, like Siamese 
 twins, would prove to have importance in psychical matters, 
 and the ego, therefore, was more than Mach's idea of it as 
 a mere waiting-hall of perceptions. 
 
 It may be that there exists a psychical correlation even 
 amongst animals. Everythmg that an animal feels and 
 perceives has a different " note " or " colour " in every 
 individual. This individual quality is not only characteristic 
 of the class, genus, species, race, and family, but also is 
 
LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO 155 
 
 different in every individual of the same family, &c. The 
 idioplasm is the physiological equivalent of this specific 
 individual quality of the sensations and perceptions, and 
 there are reasons analogous with those in favour of the 
 supposition of an idioplasm for the supposition of an 
 individual character amongst animals. The sportsman 
 who has to do with dogs, the trainer with horses, and the 
 keeper with animals will readily admit the existence of this 
 individuality as a constant element. It is clear that we have 
 to do here with something more than a mere rendezvous of 
 perceptions. 
 
 But even if this psychical analogue of the idioplasm were 
 proved to exist in the case of animals, it could not be 
 ranked with the intelligible character, the existence of which 
 in any living creature except man cannot be maintained. 
 The intelligible character of men, their individuation, has 
 the same relation to empirical character that memory has 
 to the simple power of recognition. And finally we come 
 to identity, by which the structure, form, law, and cosmos 
 persist even through the change of contents. \The conside- 
 rations from which is drawn the proof of the existence in 
 man of such a noumenal, trans-empirical subject must now 
 be stated briefly./ They come from logic and ethics. 
 
 Logic deals with the true significance of the principle of 
 identity (also with that of contradiction ; the exact relation 
 of these two, and the various modes of stating it are con- 
 troversial matters outside the present subject). The propo- 
 sition A = A is axiomatic and self-evident. It is the primi- 
 tive measure of truth for all other propositions ; however 
 much we may think over it we must return to this funda- 
 mental proposition. It is the principle of the distinction 
 between truth and error ; and he who regards it as meaning- 
 less tautology, as was the case with Hegel and many of the 
 later empiricists (this being not the only surprising point of 
 contact between two schools apparently so different) is 
 right in a fashion, but has misunderstood the nature of the 
 proposition. A = A, the principle of all truth, cannot itself 
 be a special truth. He who finds the proposition of identity 
 
156 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 or that of non-identity meaningless does so by his own 
 fault. He must have expected to find in these propositions 
 special ideas, a source of positive knowledge. ''^But they 
 are not in themselves knowledge, separate acts of thought, 
 but the common standard for all acts of thought^ And so 
 they cannot be compared with other acts of thought. <(The 
 rule of the process of thought must be outside thought. 
 The proposition of identity does not add to our knowledge ; 
 it does not increase but rather founds a kingdom. The 
 proposition of identity is either meaningless or means 
 everything. Upon what do the propositions of identity 
 and of non-identity depend ? The common view is that 
 they are judgments. Sigwart, for instance, who has recently 
 discussed the matter, puts it as follows : The two judgments 
 A is B and A is not B cannot be true at the same time 
 because the judgment "An unlearned man is learned" 
 would involve a contradiction because the predicate 
 "learned" is affirmed of a subject of which the judg- 
 ment has been made implicitly that he is unlearned, so 
 that in reality two judgments are made, X is learned and 
 X is unlearned. The " psychologismus " of this method of 
 argument is plain. It has recourse to a temporary judg- 
 ment preceding the formation of the conception "unlearned 
 man." The proposition, however, A is not A claims validity 
 quite apart from the past, present, or future existence of 
 other judgments. It depends on the conception " unlearned 
 man." It makes the conception more certain by excluding 
 contradictory instances. 
 
 ^ This, then, gives us the true function of the principles of 
 identity and non-identity. They are materials for concep- 
 tions^ 
 
 This function concerns only logical conceptions, but not 
 what have been called psychological conceptions. The 
 conception is always represented psychologically by a 
 generalisation ; and this presentation in a certain fashion is 
 included in the conception. The generalisation represents 
 the conception psychologically, but is not identical with it. 
 It can, so to speak, be richer (as when I think of a triangle) 
 
LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO 157 
 
 or it can be poorer (the conception of a lion contains more 
 than my generaUsation of Hons). The logical conception 
 is the plumb-line which the attention tries to follow ; it is 
 the goal and pole-star of the psychological generalisation. 
 
 \Pure logical thought cannot occur in the case of men ; 
 it would be an attribute of deity. A human being must 
 always think partly psychologically because he possesses 
 not only reason but also senses, and his thought cannot free 
 itself from temporal experiences but must remain bound by 
 them. Logic, however, is the supreme standard by which 
 the individual can test his own psychological ideas and 
 those of others. When two men are discussing anything 
 it is the conception and not the varying individual pre- 
 sentations of it that they aim at. ) The conception, then, is 
 the standard of value for the individual presentations. The 
 mode in which the psychological generalisation comes into 
 existence is quite independent of the conception and has 
 no significance in respect to it. The logical character 
 which invests the conception with dignity and power is 
 not derived from experience, for experience can give only 
 vague and wavering generalisations. Absolute constancy 
 and absolute coherence which cannot come from ex- 
 perience are the essence of the conception of that power 
 concealed in the depths of the human mind whose handi- 
 work we try hard but in vain to see in nature. Concep- 
 tions are the only true realities, and the conception is not 
 in nature ; it is the rule of the essence not of the actual 
 existence. 
 
 \When I enunciate the proposition A = A, the meaning 
 of the proposition is not that a special individual A of 
 experience or of thought is like itself. The judgment of 
 identity does not depend on the existence of an A. It 
 means only that if an A exists, or even if it does not exist, 
 then A = A. Something is posited, the existence of A = A 
 whether or no A itself exists. It cannot be the result of 
 experience, as Mill supposed, for it is independent of the 
 existence of A. But an existence has been posited ; it is 
 not the existence of the object ; it must be the existence of 
 
158 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the subject. "sThe reality of the existence is not in the first 
 A or the second A, but in the simultaneous identity of the 
 two. And so the proposition A = A is no other than the 
 proposition " I am."^ 
 
 /From the psychological point of view, the real meaning 
 oT^the proposition of identity is not so difficult to interpret. 
 It is clear that to be able to say A = A, to establish the per- 
 manence of the conception through the changes of ex- 
 perience, there must be something unchangeable, and this 
 can be only the subject. Were I part of the stream of 
 change I could not verify that the A had remained 
 unchanged, had remained itself. Were I part of the 
 change, I could not recognise the change. Fichte was 
 right when he stated that the existence of the ego was to 
 be found concealed in pure logic, inasmuch as the ego is 
 the condition of intelligible existence. 
 / The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These 
 I posit an existence towards which all cognition serves. 
 ) Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realises 
 / himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself 
 j in cognition.^ 
 
 \ All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must 
 not err. He must find the truth, and so he can find it. 
 The duty of cognition involves the possibility of cognition, 
 the freedom of thought, and the hope of ascertaining 
 truth. In the fact that logic is the condition of the mind 
 lies the proof that thought is free and can reach its goal. 
 
 O can treat ethics briefly and in another fashion, inas- 
 much as what I have to say is founded on Kant's moral 
 philosophy. The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature 
 of man is that part which does not take refuge in 
 causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the 
 bad.^ This is manifest in consciousness of sin and in 
 repentance. No one has attempted to explain these facts 
 otherwise ; and no one allows himself to be persuaded 
 that he must commit this or that act. In the shall there 
 lies the possibility of the can. The causal determining 
 factors, the lower motives that act upon him, he is fully 
 
LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO 159 
 
 aware of, but he remains conscious of an intelligible ego 
 free to act in a different way from other egos. 
 
 Truth, purity, faithfulness, uprightness, with reference to 
 oneself ; these give the only conceivable ethics. Duty is 
 only duty to oneself, duty of the empirical ego to the 
 intelligible ego. These appear in the form of two impera- 
 tives that will always put to shame every kind of psych o- 
 logismus — the logical law and the moral law. The internal 
 direction, the categorical imperatives of logic and morality 
 which dominate all the codes of social util'tarianism are 
 factors that no empiricism can explain. All empiricism 
 and scepticism, positivism and relativism, instinctively feel 
 that their principal difficulties lie in logic and ethics. And 
 so perpetually renewed and fruitless efforts are made to 
 explain this inward discipline empirically and psychologi- 
 cally. 
 
 Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are 
 no more than duty to oneself. They celebrate their union 
 by the highest service of truth, which is overshadowed in 
 the one case by error, in the other by untruth. <A11 ethics 
 are possible only by the laws of logic, and logic is no more 
 than the ethical side of law. Not only virtue, but also 
 insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties 
 and tasks of mankind. Through the union of these alone 
 comes perfection. \ 
 
 Ethics, however, the laws of which are postulates, cannot 
 be made the basis of a logical proof of existence. Ethics are 
 not logical in the same sense that logic is ethical. Logic 
 proves the absolute actual existence of the ego ; ethics con- 
 trol the form which the actuality assumes. Ethics dominate 
 logic and make logic part of their contents. 
 
 In thinking of the famous passage in the "Critique of 
 Practical Reason," where Kant introduces man as a part of 
 the intelligible cosmos, it may be asked how Kant assured 
 himself that the moral law was inherent in personality. 
 The answer Kant gave was simply that no other and no 
 nobler origin could be found for it. He goes no further 
 than to say that the categorical imperative is the law of 
 
i6o SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the noumenon, belonging to it and inherent in it from the 
 beginning. That, however, is the nature of ethics. / Ethics 
 make it possible for the intelligible ego to act free from 
 the shackles of empiricism, and so through ethics, the 
 existence of whose possibilities logic assures us, is able to 
 become actual in all its purit3^| 
 
 There remains a most important point in which the 
 Kantian system is often misunderstood. It reveals itself 
 plainly in every case of wrong-doing. 
 
 Duty is only towards oneself ; Kant must have realised 
 this in his earlier days when first he felt an impulse to lie. 
 Except for a few indications in Nietzsche, and in Stirner, 
 and a few others, Ibsen alone seems to have grasped the 
 principle of the Kantian ethics (notably in " Brand " and 
 " Peer Gvnt "). The following two quotations also give 
 the Kantian view in a general way : 
 
 First Nebbel's epigram, " Lies and Truth." 
 
 " Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth ? The 
 former costs you yourself, the latter at most your happiness." ) 
 
 Next, the well-known words of Sleika from the "Wes- 
 töstlichen Diwan " : 
 
 (All sorts go to make a world, 
 The crowd and the rogue and the hero; 
 But the highest fortune of earth's children 
 Is always in their own personality. 
 
 It matters little how a man lives 
 
 If only he is true to himself; 
 
 It matters nothing what a man may lose 
 
 If he remains what he really is.) 
 
 It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a 
 God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow 
 to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and 
 misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the mental 
 side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God 
 of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human 
 being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives 
 under the social law. 
 
LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO i6i 
 
 Kant was permeated with his conviction, as is con- 
 spicuous in the minutest details of his chosen Hfe-work, 
 that man was responsible only to himself, to such an 
 extent that he regarded this side of his theory as self- 
 evident and least likely to be disputed. This silence of Kant 
 has brought about a misunderstanding of his ethics — the 
 only ethics tenable from the psychologically introspective 
 standpoint, the only system according to which the insistent 
 strong inner voice of the one is to be heard through the 
 noise of the many. 
 
 ■■ I gather from a passage in his " Anthropology " that even 
 in the case of Kant some incident in his actual earthly life 
 preceded the " formation of his character." The birth of 
 the Kantian ethics, the noblest event in the history of the 
 world, was the moment when for the first time the dazzling 
 awful conception came to him, " I am responsible only to 
 myself ; I must follow none other ; I must not forget 
 myself even in my work ; I am alone ; I am free ; I am lord 
 of myself." ; 
 
 " Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder 
 and awe the more often and the deeper I dwell on them — 
 the starry vault above me and the moral law within me. I 
 must not look on them both as veiled in mystery or think 
 that their majesty places them beyond me. I see them 
 before me, and they are part of the consciousness of my 
 existence. The first arises from my position in the outer 
 world of the senses, and links me with the immeasurable 
 space in which worlds and worlds and systems and systems, 
 although in immeasurable time, have their ebbs and flows, 
 their beginnings and ends. The second arises from my 
 invisible self, my personality, and places me in a world that 
 has true infinity, but which is evident only to the reason 
 and with which I recognise myself as being bound, not 
 accidentally as in the other case but in a universal and 
 necessary union. On the one hand, the consciousness of 
 an endless series of worlds destroys my sense of importance, 
 making me only one of the animal creatures which must 
 return its substance again to the planet (that, too, being nc 
 
 L 
 
i62 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 more than a point in space) from whence it came, after 
 having been in some unknown way endowed with life for a 
 brief space. The second point of view enhances my im- 
 portance, makes me an intelHgence, infinite and uncon- 
 ditioned through my personaHty, the moral law in which 
 separates me from the animals and from the world of sense, 
 removes me from the limits of time and space, and links 
 me with infinity." 
 
 The secret of the critique of practical reason is that man 
 is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. 
 
 He has no object outside himself ; lives for nothing else ; 
 he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his 
 abilities, of his necessities ; he stands far above social 
 ethics ; he is alone. 
 
 \rhus he becomes one and all ; he has the law in him, 
 and so he himself is the law, and no mere changing caprice. 
 The desire is in him to be only the law, to be the law that 
 is ihimself, without afterthought or forethought. This is 
 the awful conclusion, he has no longer the sense that there 
 can be duty for him. Nothing is superior to him, to the 
 isolated absolute unity. But there are no alternatives for 
 him ; he must respond to his own categorical imperatives, 
 absolutely, impartially. " Freedom," he cries (for instance, 
 Wagner, or Schopenhauer), " rest, peace from the enemy ; 
 peace, not this endless striving " ; and he is terrified. Even 
 in this wish for freedom there is cowardice ; in the igno- 
 minious lament there is desertion as if he were too small 
 for the fight. What is the use of it all, he cries to the 
 universe ; and is at once ashamed, for he is demanding 
 happiness, and that his own burden should rest on other 
 shoulders. Kant's lonely man does not dance or laugh ; 
 he neither brawls nor makes merry ; he feels no need to 
 make a noise, because the universe is so silent around him. 
 To acquiesce in his loneliness is the splendid supremacy of 
 the Kantian.) 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 
 
 •' In the beginning the world was nothing but the 
 Atman, in the form of a man. It looked around and 
 saw nothing different to itself. Then it cried out once, 
 It is L' That is how the word ' I ' came to be. That 
 is why even at the present day, if any one is called, he 
 answers, 'It is I,' and then recalls his other name, the 
 one he bears." — (Brihadaranyata-Upanishad.) 
 
 Many disputations about principles in psychology arise 
 from individual characterological differences in the dis- 
 putants. Thus, in the mode that I have already suggested, 
 charactero)ogy might play an important part. When one 
 person thinks to have discovered this, the other that, by 
 introspection, characterology would have to show why the 
 results in the one case should differ from those in the other, 
 or, at least, to point out in what other respects the persons in 
 question were unlike. I see no other possible way of clear- 
 ing up the disputed points of psychology. Psychology is a 
 science of experiences, and, therefore, it must proceed from 
 the individual to the general, and not, as in the supra-indi- 
 vidualistic laws of logic and ethics, proceed from the uni- 
 versal to the individual case. There is no such thing as an 
 empirical general psychology ; and it would be a mistake 
 to approach such without having fully reckoned with 
 differential psychology. 
 
 It is a great pity that psychology has been placed between 
 philosophy and the analysis of perceptions. From which- 
 ever side psychologists approached the subject, they have 
 always been assured of the general validity of their results. 
 
1 64 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Perhaps even so fundamental a question as to whether or 
 no perception itself implies an actual and spontaneous act 
 of consciousness cannot be solved without a consideration 
 of characterological differences. 
 
 The purpose of this work is to apply characterology to 
 the solution of a few of these doubtful matters, with special 
 reference to the distinctions between the sexes. The different 
 conceptions of the I-problem, however, depend not so much 
 on differences of sex as on differences in giftedness. The 
 dispute between Hume and Kant receives its characterolo- 
 gical explanation much in the same way as if 1 were to dis- 
 tinguish two men in so far as the one held in the highest 
 esteem the works of Makart and Gounod, the other those 
 of Rembrandt and Beethoven. I would simply distinguish 
 the two by their giftedness. So also the judgments about 
 the " I " must be very different in the cases of differently 
 gifted men. There have been no truly great men who were 
 not persuaded of the existence of the " I " ; a man who 
 denies it cannot be a great man. 
 
 In the course of the following pages this proposition will 
 be taken as absolutely binding, and will be used really as a 
 means of valuing genius. 
 
 There has been no famous man who, at least some time 
 in the course of his life, and generally earlier in proportion 
 to his greatness, has not had a moment in which he was 
 absolutely convinced of the possession of an ego in the 
 highest sense. 
 
 Let us compare the following utterances of three very 
 great geniuses. 
 
 Jean Paul relates in his autobiographical sketch, " Truths 
 from my own Life " : 
 
 ** I can never forget a circumstance which, so far, has 
 been related by no one — the birth of my own self-conscious- 
 ness, the time and place of which I can tell. One morning 
 I was standing, as a very young child, at the front door, and 
 looking towards the wood-shed I suddenly saw, all at once, 
 my inner likeness. ' I ' am ' I' flashed like lightning from 
 the skies across me, and since then has remained. I saw 
 
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 165 
 
 myself then for the first time and for ever. This cannot be 
 explained as a confusion of memory, for no alien narrative 
 could have blended itself with this sacred event, preserved 
 permanently in my memory by its vividness and novelty." 
 
 Novalis, in his " Miscellaneous Fragments," refers to an 
 identical experience : 
 
 "This factor every one must experience for himself. It 
 is a factor of the higher order, and reveals itself only to 
 higher men ; but men should strive to induce it in them- 
 selves. Philosophy is the exercise of this factor, it is a 
 true self-revelation, the stimulation of the real ego by the 
 ideal ego. It is the foundation of all other revelations ; 
 the resolution to philosophise is a challenge to the actual 
 ego, to become conscious of itself, to grow and to become 
 a soul." 
 
 ^Schelling discusses the same phenomenon in his "Philoso- 
 phical Letters upon Dogmatism and Criticism," a little 
 known early work, in which occurs the following beautiful 
 words : 
 
 " In all of us there dwells a secret marvellous power of 
 freeing ourselves from the changes of time, of withdrawing to 
 our secret selves away from external things, and of so discover- 
 ing to ourselves the eternal in us in the form of unchange- 
 ability. This presentation of ourselves to ourselves is the most 
 truly personal experience upon which depends everything 
 that we know of the supra-sensual world. This presenta- 
 tion shows us for the first time what real existence is, whilst 
 all else only appears to be. It differs from every presenta- 
 tion of the sense in its perfect freedom, whilst all other 
 presentations are bound, being overweighted by the burden 
 of the object. Still there exists for those who have not 
 this perfect freedom of the inner sense some approach to 
 it, experiences approaching it from which they may gain 
 some faint idea of it. . . . )This intellectual presentation 
 occurs when we cease to be our own object, when, with- 
 drawing into ourselves, the perceiving self merges in the 
 self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and 
 duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time, or 
 
i66 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 rather eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no 
 longer an object for us, but is lost in us." 
 
 The positivist will perhaps only laugh at the self-deceived 
 deceiver, the philosopher who asserts that he has had such 
 experiences. Well, it is not easy to prevent it. It is also 
 unnecessary. But I am by no means of the opinion that 
 this " factor of a higher order " plays the same part in all 
 men of genius of a mystical identity of subject and object 
 as Schelling describes it. 
 
 Whether there are undivided experiences in which the 
 dualism of actual life is overcome, as is indicated by Plotin 
 and the Indian Mahatmas, or whether this is only the 
 highest intensification of experience, but in principle similar 
 to all others — does not signify here, the coincidence of sub- 
 ject and object, of time and eternity, the representing of 
 God through living men, will neither be demonstrated as 
 possible nor denied as impossible. The experiencing of 
 one's own " I " is not to be begun by theoretical knowledge, 
 and no one has ever, so far, tried to put it in the position of 
 a systematic philosophy. I shall, therefore, not call this 
 factor of a higher order, which manifests itself in some men 
 in one way and in other men in another way, an essential 
 manifestation of the true ego, but only a phase of it. 
 '(^Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may 
 become conscious of it first through the love of a woman, 
 for the great man loves more intensely than the ordinary 
 man ; or it may be from the contrast given by a sense of 
 guilt or the knowledge of having failed ; these, too, the 
 great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded people. 
 It may lead him to a sense of unity with the all, to the 
 seeing of all things in God, or, and this is more likely, it 
 may reveal to him the frightful dualism of nature and spirit 
 in the universe, and produce in him the need, the craving, 
 for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder) But always 
 it leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of 
 the world for himself and by himself, without the help of 
 the thought of others. 
 
 This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis 
 
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 167 
 
 elaborated at his writing-table in his library from all the 
 books that have been written ; it is something that has been 
 experienced, and as a whole it is clear and intelligible, 
 although details may still be obscure and contradictory. 
 The excitation of the ego is the only source of this intuitive 
 vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in 
 that of the philosopher. And, however different they may 
 be, if they are really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they 
 have this in common, something that comes only from the 
 excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man pos-> 
 sesses, the conviction of his possession of an " I " or soul, 
 which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe 
 and comprehends it.- 
 
 From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great 
 man, in spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the 
 feeling of mortality, will live in and by his soul. 
 ,(And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his 
 creative powers, that the great man has so intense a self- 
 consciousness. Nothing can be more unintelligent than to 
 talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recog- 
 nise what is within them. There is no great man who does 
 not well know how far he differs from others (except during 
 these periodical fits of depression to which I have already 
 alluded). Every great man feels himself to be great as soon 
 as he has created something ; his vanity and ambition are, 
 in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself. 
 Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. 
 Nietzsche declared that " Thus spake Zarathustra " was the 
 greatest book in the world. 
 
 There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that 
 great men are m^,dest. They are never arrogant. Arro- 
 gance and self-realisation are contradictories, and should 
 never be confui^ed although this is often done. A man has 
 just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation, and 
 uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially 
 lowering his estimation of others. Of course the fore- 
 going holds true only of what may be called physiological, 
 unconscious arrogance ; the great man must occasionally 
 
1 68 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 comport himself with what seems rudeness to contemptible 
 persons. 
 
 ^All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent 
 of external proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear 
 must be laid aside that the soul is a hyperempirical reality 
 and that belief in it leads us to the position of the the- 
 ologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather than a supersti- 
 tion and is no mere handmaid of religious systems. Artists 
 speak of their souls although they have not studied 
 philosophy or theology ; atheists like Shelley use the ex- 
 pression and know very well what they mean by it)- 
 
 Others have suggested that the " soul " is only a beautiful 
 empty word, which people ascribe to others without having 
 felt its need for themselves. This is like saying that great 
 artists use symbols to express the highest form of reality 
 without being assured as to the existence of that reality. 
 The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist no doubt 
 will consider that ail this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is 
 the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse 
 of the word, but if great artists speak of their soul they 
 know what they are about. Artists, like philosophers, know 
 well when they approach the greatest possible reality, but 
 Hume had no sense of this. 
 
 ^The scientific man ranks, as 1 have already said, and as I 
 shall presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. 
 The two latter may earn the title of genius which must 
 always be denied to the scientific man^ Without any good 
 reason having been assigned for it, it has usually been the 
 case that the voice of genius on any particular problem is 
 listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in 
 this preference ? Can the genius explain things as to which 
 the man of science, as such, can say nothing ? Can he 
 peer into depths where the man of science is blind ? 
 
 The conception genius concludes universality. If theie 
 were an absolute genius (a convenient fiction) there would 
 be nothing to which he could not have a vivid, intimate, 
 and complete relation. Genius, as I have already shown, 
 would have universal comprehension, and through its 
 
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 
 only those things with which he has some kinship. The 
 genius is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most 
 conscious, most continuous, and most individual ego. The 
 ego is the central point, the unit of comprehension, the 
 synthesis of all manifoldness.) 
 
 (^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. 
 For the genius the ego is the all, lives as the all ; the genius 
 sees nature and all existences as whole ; the relations of 
 things flash on him intuitively ; he has not to build bridges 
 of stones between them. And so the genius cannot be an 
 empirical psychologist slowly collecting details and linking 
 them by associations ; he cannot be a physicist, envisaging 
 the world as a compound of atoms and molecules. 
 
 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. That is why his views are more valuable than those 
 of all others. He constructs from everything his ego that 
 holds the universe, whilst others never reach a full 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 
 
lyo 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 Müller 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 
 his inner life ; the universe and the ego have become one in 
 him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together 
 piece by piece according to rule.^ The greatest poly- 
 historian, on the contrary, does 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 
 
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 
 modern thinkers since the death of Leibnitz. It has hitherto 
 been held as only holding good for genius, as the 
 prerogative of those masters of men. 
 
 But the incongruity is only apparent. All mankind have 
 some of the quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. 
 Genius is a condition to which one man draws close whilst 
 another is further away, which is attained by some in early 
 days, but with others only at the end of life. 
 
 The man to whom we have accorded the possession of 
 genius, is only he who has begun to see, and to open the 
 eyes of others. That they then can see with their own eyes 
 proves that they were only standing before the door. 
 
 Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an 
 indirect relationship to everything : his idea of the " whole " 
 is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in identifying himself 
 with it. But he is not without the possibility of following 
 this identification in another, and so attaining a composite 
 image. Through some vision of the world he can bind 
 himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can 
 make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite 
 strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between 
 him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants 
 or animals. They are limited, they do not know the whole, 
 but only one element ; they do not populate the whole 
 earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the 
 service of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the 
 same task. They may have a relation to the sun or to the 
 moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the 
 " starry vault " and " the moral law." For the latter 
 
172 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- 
 tally one and the same. The universalism of the categorical 
 imperative is the universalism of the universe. 
 
 The infinity of the universe is only the "thought-picture" 
 of the infinity of the moral volition. 
 
 This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles, 
 that mighty magician. 
 
 Fa/p /Jiv yap yatav OTrwTrajntv, vSari S'uow/o, 
 AlBepi S'aWepa Slov, drap irvpX irvp äihrtXov, 
 ^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 könnt' es nie erblicken ; 
 Lag' nicht in uns des Gottes eig'ne Kraft, 
 Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken ? " 
 
 Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, 
 that has in himself a relation to every thing. 
 
 He to whom this relationship brings understanding and 
 the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to 
 few things, but to all things, the man who of his own 
 individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius. 
 He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an 
 interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of 
 his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely 
 a man. 
 
 The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, 
 that the lower monads are a mirror of the world without 
 being conscious of this capacity of theirs, expresses the same 
 idea. The man of genius lives in a state of complete under- 
 standing, an understanding of the whole ; the whole world 
 
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 173 
 
 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 ; 
 
174 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 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 
 Nörgler, who never grasped Schopenhauer's doctrine of 
 detachment and the meaning of his Nirwana, throws the 
 reproach at the latter that he got the last value out of his 
 property, such a mean yelping requires no answer. 
 
 /The statement that a great man is most moral towards 
 himself stands on sure ground ; he will not allow alien 
 views to be imposed on him, so obscuring the judgment of 
 his own ego ; he will not passively accept the interpretation 
 of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his own, 
 and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the 
 thought will always be painful to him. A conscious lie that he 
 has told will harass him throughout his life, and he will be 
 unable to shake off the memory in Dionysian 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 175 
 
 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- 
 passionate disposition is developed. From the philosophi- 
 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 
 
176 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 
 
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 177 
 
 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 
 opposed to worthlessness. Socrates was right in this, and 
 Kant is the only modern philosopher who has followed 
 him. Sympathy is a non-logical sensation, and has no 
 claim to respect. 
 
 The question now before us is to consider how far a man 
 can act morally with regard to his fellow men. 
 
 It is certainly not by unsolicited help which obtrudes 
 itself on the solitude of another and pierces the limits that 
 he has set for himself ; not by compassion but rather by 
 respect. This respect we owe only to man, as Kant 
 showed ; for man is the only creature in the universe who 
 is a purpose to himself. 
 
 But how can I show a man my contempt, and how 
 
178 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 prove to him my respect ? The first by ignoring him, the 
 second by being friendly with him. 
 
 How can I use him as a means to an end, and how can 
 I honour him by regarding him himself as an end ? In the 
 first case, by looking upon him as a link in the chain of 
 circumstances with which I have to deal ; in the second, by 
 endeavouring to understand him. It is only by interesting 
 oneself in a man, without exactly telling him so, by 
 thinking of him, by grasping his work, by sympathising 
 with his fate, and by seeking to understand him, that one 
 can respect one's neighbour. Only he who, through his 
 own afflictions, has become unselfish, who forgets small 
 wranglings with his fellow man, who can repress his 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 
 is he whose ego has acquired consciousness. He is enabled 
 by it to distinguish the fact that others are different, to 
 perceive the " ego " of other men, even when it is not 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 
 his being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not 
 a man and had no personality of his own. "I " and "thou" 
 are complementary terms. A man soonest gains conscious- 
 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 
 
 dualism is the highest universaHsm. Ernest Mack is in great 
 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 " Götterdämmerung " over Siegfried's dead 
 body : " Ha, ha, I have slain him ; I, Hagen, gave him his 
 death blow." 
 
 Napoleon and Bacon, who are given as counter-instances, 
 were intellectually much over-rated or wrongly represented. 
 And Nietzsche is the least reliable in these matters, when he 
 begins to discuss the Borgia type. The conception of the 
 
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 
 
1 84 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 fall ; ^11 genius is a conquering of chaos, mystery, and 
 darkness") and if it degenerates and goes to pieces, the ruin 
 is greater in proportion to the success. The genius which 
 runs to madness is no longer genius ; it has chosen 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 
 
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 f actus f 
 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 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 
 shared their view. At the Renaissance the Aristotelian con- 
 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 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 
 female is lower in grade than that of the male. 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 
 theory of knowledge. From the point of view of the theory 
 of knowledge, consciousness and the possession of a con- 
 tinuous ego, of a transcendental subjective soul, are identical 
 conceptions. Every ego exists only so far as it is self-con- 
 scious, conscious of the contents of its own thoughts ; all 
 real existence is conscious existence. I can now make an 
 important addition to the theory of henids. The organised 
 contents of the thoughts of the male are not merely those of 
 the female articulated and formed, they are not what was 
 potential in the female becoming actual ; from the very first 
 there is a qualitative difference. The psychical contents of 
 the male, even whilst they are still in the henid stage that 
 they always try to emerge from, are already partly 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- 
 ception by using the principle of contradictories. This want 
 of definiteness in the ideas of women is the source of that 
 "sensitiveness" which gives the widest scope to vague 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- 
 tion with their want of the power to form concepts. This 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 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's thought is a sliding and gliding through 
 subjects, a superficial tasting of things that a man, who 
 studies the depths, would scarcely notice; it is an extravagant 
 and dainty method of skimming which has no grasp of 
 accuracy. (A woman's thought is superficial, and touch 
 is the 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 
 vague similarity of perceptions. The incongruity between 
 the man and woman depends, in a special measure, on the 
 fact that the contents of the thoughts of the man are not 
 merely those of the woman in a higher state of 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 
 independently of the presence of an actual perception. The 
 existence of the complex of perceptions is dependent on the 
 will ; the will can shut the eyes and stop the ears so that the 
 person no longer sees nor hears, but may get drunk or go to 
 sleep and forget. It is the conception which brings freedom 
 from the eternally subjective, eternally psychological rela- 
 tivity of the actual perceptions, and which creates the 
 things in themselves. By its power of forming conceptions 
 the intellect can spontaneously separate itself from the 
 object ; conversely, it is only when there is a comprehending 
 function that subject and object can be separated and so 
 distinguished ; in all other cases there is only a mass of like 
 and unlike images present mingling together v/ithout law 
 and order. The conception creates definite realities from the 
 floating images, the object from the perception, the object 
 which stands like an enemy opposite the subject that the 
 subject may measure its strength upon it. The conception 
 is thus the creator of reality; it is the "transcendental 
 object " of Kant's " Critique of Reason," but it always 
 involves a transcendental "subject." 
 
 It is impossible to say of a mere complex of perceptions 
 that it is like itself ; in the moment that I have made the 
 judgment of identity, the complex of perceptions has 
 become a concept. And so the conception gives their 
 value to all processes of verification and all syllogisms ; 
 the conception makes the contents of thought free by bind- 
 ing them. It gives freedom both to the subject and object ; 
 for the two freedoms involve each other. All freedom is 
 in reality self-binding, both in logic and in ethics. Man is 
 free only when he himself is the law. And so the function 
 of making concepts is the power by which man gives him- 
 self dignity ; he honours himself by giving freedom to the 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 193 
 
 objective world, by making it part of the objective body of 
 knowledge to which recourse may be had when two men 
 differ. The woman cannot in this way set herself over 
 against realities, she and they swing together capriciously ; 
 she cannot give freedom to her objects as she herself is not 
 free. 
 
 The mode in which perceptions acquire independence in 
 conceptions is the means of getting free from subjectivity. 
 The conception is that about which I think, write, and 
 speak. And in this way there comes the belief that I can 
 make judgments concerning it. Hume, Huxley, and other 
 "immanent" psychologists, tried to identify the 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 
 judgments are conceptions ; the conception is what we know. 
 The conception places a subject and an object against one 
 another, and the judgment then creates a relation between 
 the two. The attainment of truth simply means that the 
 subject can judge rightly of the object, and so the function 
 of making judgments is what places the ego in relation to 
 
194 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 
 as to whether conception or judgment has precedence ; the 
 answer is that the two are necessary to one another. The 
 faculty of making conceptions cleaves subject and object 
 and unites them again. 
 
 A being like the female, without the power of making 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 
 of the contrary opinion, i^ith women the pursuit of know- 
 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 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 
 name for judgment. Deduction is the necessary process in 
 making judgments, and involves the propositions of identity 
 and of contradictories, and, as I have shown, these 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 
 his manliness. It is true that woman has the gift of speech, 
 but she has not the art of talking ; she converses (flirts) or 
 chatters, but she does not talk. She is most dangerous, 
 however, when she is dumb, for men are only too inclined 
 to take her quiescence for 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 must add to the exposition of the non-logical nature ot 
 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 
 
196 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. 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 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 
 her accuser, and if she does not wish to be convinced of it, 
 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 
 of lengthy attendance on them. Any one who has watched 
 nursing sisters is astounded at their equanimity and " sweet- 
 
198 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- 
 ing and death, would make a very bad nurse. A man would 
 want to assuage the pain and ward off death ; in a word, he 
 would want to help; where there is nothing to be done he is 
 better away; it is only then that nursing is justified and that 
 woman offers herself for it. But it would be quite wrong 
 to regard this capacity of women in an ethical aspect. 
 
 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. The woman does not respect the sorrow of her 
 neighbour by silence ; she tries to raise him from his grief 
 by speech, feeling that she must be in physical, rather than 
 spiritual, contact with hini> 
 
 This diffused life, one of the most fundamental qualities 
 of the female nature, is the cause of the impressibility of all 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 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. 
 
 tit is only women who demand pity from other people, 
 who weep before them and claim their sympathy. This is 
 one of the strongest pieces of eLvidence for the psychical 
 shamelessness of women.) A woman provokes the compas- 
 sion of strangers in order to weep with them and be able to 
 pity herself more than she already does. It is not too much 
 to say that even when a woman weeps alone she is weeping 
 with those that she knows would pity her and so intensify- 
 ing her self-pity by the thought of the pity of others. (Self- 
 pity is eminently a female characteristic ; a woman will 
 associate herself with others, make herself the object of 
 pity for these others, and then at once, deeply stirred, 
 begin to weep with them about herself, the poor thing. 
 Perhaps nothing so stirs the feeling of shame in a man 
 as to detect in himself the impulse towards this self- 
 pity, this state of mind in which the subject becomes the 
 objectJ^ 
 
 As Schopenhauer put it, female sympathy is a matter of 
 sobbing and wailing on the slightest provocation, without 
 the smallest attempt to control the emotion ;/on the other 
 hand, all true sorrow, like true sympathy, just because it is 
 real sorrow, must be reserved ; no sorrow can really be so 
 reserved as sympathy and love, for these make us most 
 fully conscious of the limits of each personality.) Love 
 and its bashfulness will be considered later on ; in the 
 meantime let us be assured that in sympathy, in genuine 
 masculine sympathy, there is always a strong feeling of 
 reserve, a sense almost of guilt, because one's friend is 
 worse off than oneself, because I am not he, but a being 
 separated from his being by extraneous circumstances. A 
 man's sympathy is the principle of individuality blushing for 
 
200 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 itself ; and hence man's sympathy is reserved whilst that 
 of woman is aggressive. 
 
 The existence of modesty in women has been discussed 
 already to a certain extent ; I shall have more to say about 
 it in relation with hysteria. But it is difficult to see how it 
 can be maintained that this is a female virtue, if one reflect 
 on the readiness with which women accept the habit of 
 wearing low-necked dresses wherever custom prescribes it. 
 A person is either modest or immodest, and modesty is not 
 a quality which can be assumed or discarded from hour to 
 hour. 
 
 Strong evidence of the want of modesty in woman is to 
 be derived from the fact that women dress and undress in 
 the presence of one another with the greatest freedom, 
 whilst men try to avoid similar circumstances. Moreover, 
 when women are alone together, they are very ready to 
 discuss their physical qualities, especially with regard to 
 their attractiveness for men ; whilst men, practically 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. One must be fully conscious of a thing before 
 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 201 
 
 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 
 of herself only in relation to others. The other side of the 
 vanity of women is the desire to feel that her body is 
 admired, or, rather, sexually coveted, by a man.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 
 at the rate of the man who has fixed his choice on her ; if it 
 is only through her husband or lover that she can attain to 
 a value not only in social and material things, but also in 
 her innermost nature, it follows that she possesses no 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 203 
 
 attention to her (Goethe gave this as a practical receipt), the 
 whole life of a woman, in fact, being an expression of this 
 side of her nature, a man, if a woman treats him rudely or 
 indifferently, feels repelled by her. Nothing makes a man 
 so happy as the love of a girl ; even if he did not at first 
 return her love, there is a great probability of love being 
 aroused in him. The love of a man for whom she does not 
 care is only a gratification of the vanity of a woman, or an 
 awakening and rousing of slumbering desires. A woman 
 extends her claims equally to all men on earth.> 
 
 The shamelessness and heartlessness of women are shown 
 in the way in which they talk of being loved. A man feels 
 ashamed of being loved, because he is always in the position 
 of being the active, free agent, and because he knows that 
 he can never give himself entirely to love, and there is 
 nothing about which he is so silent, even when there is no 
 special reason for him to fear that he might compromise 
 the lady by talking. A woman boasts about her love affairs, 
 and parades them before other women in order to make 
 them envious of her. Woman does not look upon a man's 
 inclination for her so much as a tribute to her actual worth, 
 or a deep insight into her nature, as the bestowing a value 
 on her which she otherwise would not have, as the gift to 
 her of an existence and essence with which she justifies 
 herself before others. 
 
 The remark in an earlier chapter about the unfailing 
 memory of woman for all the compliments she has ever 
 received since childhood is explained by the foregoing facts. 
 ^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 
 
204 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. It is almost characteristic of a woman that she 
 cannot believe that she has done wrong, and so is able to 
 deceive both herself and her husband. Men, on the other 
 hand, remember nothing so well as the guilty episodes of 
 their lives. Here memory reveals itself as eminently a 
 moral phenomenon. Forgiving and forgetting, not forgiving 
 and understanding, go together. When one remembers a 
 lie, one reproaches oneself afresh about it. A woman 
 forgets, because she does not blame herself for an act of 
 meanness, because she does not understand it, having no 
 relation to the moral idea. It is not surprismg that she is 
 ready to lie. Women have been regarded as virtuous, 
 simply because the problem of morality has not presented 
 itself to them ; they have been held to be even more moral 
 than man ; this is simply because they do not understand 
 immorality. The innocence of a child is not meritorious ; 
 if a patriarch could be innocent he might be praised for it. 
 
 Introspection is an attribute confined to males, if we leave 
 out of account the hysterical self-reproaches of certain 
 women — and consciousness of guilt and repentance are 
 equally male. The penances that women lay on themselves, 
 remarkable imitations of the sense of guilt, will be discussed 
 when I come to deal with what passes for introspection in 
 the female sex. The " subject " of introspection is the moral 
 agent ; it has a relation to psychical phenomena only in so 
 far as it sits in judgment on them. 
 
 It is quite in the nature of positivism that Comte denies 
 the possibility of introspection, and throws ridicule on 
 it. For certainly it is absurd that a psychical event and a 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 205 
 
 judgment of it could coincide if the interpretations of the 
 positivists be accepted. It is only on the assumption that 
 there exists an ego unconditioned by time and intrinsically 
 capable of moral judgments, endowed with memory and 
 with the power of making comparisons, that we can justify 
 the belief in the possibility of introspection. 
 
 If woman had a sense of her personal value and the will 
 to defend it against all external attacks she could not be 
 jealous. Apparently all women are jealous, and jealousy 
 depends on the failure to recognise the rights of others. 
 Even the jealousy of a mother when she sees another 
 woman's daughters married before her own depends simply 
 on her want of the sense of justice. 
 
 Without justice there can be no society, so that jealousy 
 is an absolutely unsocial quality. The formation of societies 
 in reality presupposes the existence of true individuality. 
 Woman has no faculty for the affairs of State or politics, as 
 she has no social inclinations ; and women's societies, from 
 which men are excluded, are certain to break up after a 
 short time. The family itself is not really a social structure ; 
 it is essentially unsocial, and men who give up their clubs 
 and societies after marriage soon rejoin them. I had 
 written this before the appearance of Heinrich Schurtz' 
 valuable ethnological work, in which he shows that 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 
 
2o6 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- 
 guishing individuals from the general stock is not felt. The 
 fundamental namelessness of the woman is simply a sign of 
 her undifferentiated personality. 
 
 An important observation may be mentioned here and 
 may be confirmed by every one. Whenever a man enters 
 a place where a woman is, and she observes him, or hears 
 his step, or even only guesses he is near, she becomes 
 another person. Her expression and her pose change with 
 incredible swiftness; she "arranges her fringe" and her 
 bodice, and rises, or pretends to be engrossed in her work. 
 She is full of a half shameless, half-nervous expectation. 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 207 
 
 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- 
 able to understand Protestantism. Christians are Catholics 
 or Protestants before they are baptized, but, none the less, 
 it would be unfair to describe Catholicism as feminine 
 simply because it suits women better. The distinction 
 between the Catholic and Protestant dispositions is a side 
 of characterology that would require separate treatment. 
 
 It has been exhaustively proved that the female is soulless 
 and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor 
 freedom, character nor will. This conclusion is of the 
 highest significance in psychology. It implies that the 
 psychology of the male and of the female must be treated 
 
2o8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 separately. A purely empirical representation of the psychic 
 life of the female is possible ; in the case of the male, all the 
 psychic life must be considered with reference to the ego, 
 as Kant foresaw. 
 
 The view of Hume (and Mach), which only admits that 
 there are " impressions " and " thoughts " (ABC and 
 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 209 
 
 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. 
 
 o 
 
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, must be wholly unsatisfying.). It is extraordinary 
 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 
 taste of a peach. How can Mach and Hume account for 
 such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist ? Or 
 again, consider this : no animal is made afraid by seeing its 
 reflection in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend 
 his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Can this fear, 
 the fear of the doppelganger,* be explained on Darwinian 
 principles. The word doppelganger has only to be men- 
 tioned to raise a deep dread in the mind of any man. Em- 
 pirical psychology cannot explain this ; it reaches the depths. 
 It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of 
 little children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less 
 secure stage of society. I have taken this example only to 
 remind the empirical psychologists that there are many 
 things inexplicable on their hypotheses. 
 
 Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a 
 Wagnerite, a Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth ? He 
 objects to be thought a mere echo. Even Ernst Mach is 
 angry in anticipation at the thought that some friend will 
 
 * It is notable that women are devoid of this fear ; female dop- 
 pelgangers are not heard of. 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 211 
 
 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. The man is conscious that his agreement is in 
 reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a 
 man will say much about himself that he would not permit 
 another to say of hun. As Cyrano de Bergerac put it : 
 
 " 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 
 the present generation have long overcome. Is the present 
 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 
 
212 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 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- 
 action between mind and body. In the case of the female, 
 psycho-physical parallelism exists in the form of a complete 
 co-ordination between the mental and the physical ; in 
 women the capacity for mental exertion ceases with senile 
 involution, just as it developed in connection with and in 
 subservience to the sexual instincts. The intelligence of 
 man never grows as old as that of the woman, and it is 
 only in isolated cases that degeneration of the mind is 
 linked with degeneration of the body. Least of all does 
 mental degeneration accompany the bodily weakness of old 
 age in those who have genius, the highest development of 
 mental masculinity. 
 
 It is only to be expected that the philosophers who most 
 strongly argued in favour of parallelism, such as Spinoza 
 and Fechner, were also determinists. In the case of the 
 male, the free intelligible agent who by his own will can 
 distinguish between good and evil, the existence of parallelism 
 between mind and body must be rejected. 
 
 The question, then, as to the proper view of the 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 
 
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY 213 
 
 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 
 he female must be characteristic of the male. Firmness in 
 ■ 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- 
 pose as a masculine body or a well-trimmed moustache. 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 
 raculty for perceiving whether a man's " I will " means mere 
 bombast or actual decision. In the latter case the effect on 
 her is prodigious^ 
 
 How is it that woman, who is soulless herself, can discern 
 the soul in man ? How can she judge about his morality 
 who is herself non-moral ? How can she grasp his character 
 when she has no character herself ? How appreciate his 
 will when she is herself without will ? 
 
 These difficult problems lie before us, and their solutions 
 must be placed on strong foundations, for there will be 
 many attempts to destroy them. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 
 
 The chief objection that will be urged against my views is 
 that they cannot possibly be valid for all women. For 
 some, or even for the majority, they will be accepted as true, 
 but for the rest 
 
 It was not my original intention to deal with the different 
 kinds of women. Women may be regarded from many 
 different points of view, and, of course, care must be taken 
 not to press too hardly what is true for one extreme type. 
 If the word character be accepted in its common, empirical 
 signification, then there are differences in women's 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. The characterological differences amongst women 
 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 215 
 
 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 
 the prostitute. The contrast is not any more mevitable than 
 the contrast between man and woman, and certain limits 
 and restrictions will have to be made. But allowing for 
 these, women will now be treated as falling into two types, 
 sometimes having in them more of the one type, sometimes 
 more of the other. 
 
 This dichotomy may be misunderstood if I do not 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. The condition of being loved, whether as mother or 
 
 mistress, is a merely accidental, external designation of the 
 
2i6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 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 
 men have seduced women. The man may occasionally be 
 to blame, as, for instance, when a servant is discharged and 
 finds herself deserted. But where there is no inclination 
 for a certain course, the course will not be adopted. 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 Müller, Th. Bischof, and Darwin have 
 been completely opposed, for the last sixty years, to the 
 theory of " impression." I may later attempt to develop 
 
21 8 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 
 as being opposed to all experience and so rejecting 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, 
 
MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 219 
 
 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 
 to the daughter. It is only when there is no jealousy about 
 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's admirers as if they were her own, that a woman has 
 a claim to the title of perfect mother. 
 
 The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only 
 about the child, would become a mother by any man. It 
 will be found that women who were devoted to dolls when 
 they were children, and were kind and attentive to children 
 in their own childhood, are least particular about their 
 husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match 
 who takes any notice of them and who satisfies their 
 parents and relatives. When such a maiden has become a 
 mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to pay any 
 attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on 
 the other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes 
 children ; later on, she may pretend to care for them as 
 
220 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 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. The desire for this demands to be satisfied, but does 
 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 
 the Catholic Church. I am not going to discuss the question 
 of marriage or free-love. Marriage in its existing form is 
 as incompatible as free-love with the highest interpretations 
 of the moral law. And so divorce came into the world 
 with marriage. 
 
 None the less marriage could have been invented only by 
 
222 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 man. No proprietary institution originated with women. 
 The introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations 
 could have come only through man's desire for it, and his 
 power to establish it. There have been periods in the 
 history of many primitive races in which women had great 
 influence; but the period of matriarchy was a period of 
 polyandry. 
 
 The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute 
 to their child is rich in important conclusions. A woman 
 in whom the prostitute element is strong will perceive her 
 son's manhood and always stand in a sexual relation to him. 
 But as no woman is the perfect type of mother, there is 
 something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. 
 For this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her 
 daughter and not to her son, as the best measure of her 
 type. There are many well-known physiological parallels 
 between the relations of a mother to her children and of a 
 wife to her husband. 
 
 Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. 
 When a woman is motherly the quality will be exercised 
 not only on the child of her own body, but towards all men, 
 although later on her interest in her own child may become 
 all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and unjust in 
 the event of a quarrel. 
 
 \The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. 
 Such a girl is inclined to be motherly towards the man 
 she loves, especially towards that man who will afterwards 
 become the father of her child ; in fact, in a certain sense 
 the man is her child. The deepest nature of the mother- 
 type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving 
 wife ; the mothers form the enduring root-stock of our race 
 from which the individual man arises, and in the face of 
 which he recognises his own impermanence.'\^It is this idea 
 which enables the man to see in the mother, even while 
 she is still a girl, something eternal, and which gives the 
 pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring 
 security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the 
 presence of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence./' 
 
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 Brünn- 
 hilde, Act III.). But this does not last long. (Siegfried 
 tears himself from Brünnhilde). For a man only comes to 
 his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he 
 raises himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the 
 deepest longings of a man, and the idea that he is to be lost 
 in the race is repellent to him. The most terrible chapter 
 in the most comfortless of all the great books that have 
 been written, the chapter on " Death and its Relation to 
 the Indestructibility of our Nature," in Schopenhauer's 
 "The World as Will and Idea," is where the permanence of 
 the will to maintain the species is set down as the only real 
 permanence. 
 
 ■(it IS the permanence of the race that gives the mother 
 her courage and fearlessness in contrast with the 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 
 relation to hope ; as she lives on through the race, she does 
 not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting 
 fear of it. 
 
 The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man ; 
 she knows herself to be his anchor ; as she is in a secure 
 place, linked in the chain of the generations, she may be 
 likened to a harbour 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- 
 cally ready to feed and protect her child. And this protective 
 
224 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 
 receive everything from him. The mother as the upholder 
 of the race is friendly to all its members ; it is only when 
 there is an exclusive choice to be made between her child 
 and others that she becomes hard and relentless ; and so 
 she can be both more full of love and more bitter than 
 the prostitute.'> 
 
 The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of 
 the race ; the prostitute is completely outside it. ^The 
 mother is the sole advocate and priestess of the race^ The 
 will of the race to live is embodied in her, whilst the exist- 
 ence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was pushing 
 a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality 
 had relation only to the future generation. That the mother 
 cares only for the life of her own race is plain from the absence 
 of consideration for animals shown by the best of mothers. 
 A good mother, with the greatest peace of mind and content, 
 will slaughter fowl after fowl for her family. The mother of 
 children is a cruel step-mother to all other living things. 
 
 Another striking aspect of the mother's relation to the 
 preservation of the race reveals itself in the matter of food. 
 She cannot bear to see food wasted, however little may be 
 left over ; whilst the prostitute wilfully squanders the 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. 
 And so she becomes the good housekeeper. Ceres was a 
 good mother, a fact expressed in her Greek name, Demeter. 
 The mother takes care of the body, but does not trouble 
 about the mind.* The relation between mother and child 
 
 (*^^ 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 
 the individual ; a mother's love extends itself indifferently to 
 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 
 mother and child is always a kind of physical reflex. If the 
 little one suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in 
 the next room, she will at once rush to it as if she herself 
 had been hurt ; and, as the children grow up, every wish or 
 trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared by the 
 mother as if they were her own. There is an unbreakable 
 link between the mother and child, physical, like the cord 
 that united the two before childbirth. This is the real 
 nature of the maternal relation ; and, for my part, I protest 
 
 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." 
 
226 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 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-Böhmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling. 
 
 It coincides with what has been said that only those men 
 are sexually attracted by the mother-type who have no desire 
 for mental productivity. The man whose fatherhood is con- 
 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.* 
 Their choice falls on the sterile woman, and, if there is 
 
 * Wherever I am using this term I refer, of course, not merely 
 to mercenary women of the streets. 
 
MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 227 
 
 issue, it is unfit and soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood 
 has as little do do with morality as motherhood. It is 
 non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv. ; and it is illo- 
 gical, because it deals with illusions. ;^o man ever knows 
 to what extent he is the father of his own child. And its 
 duration is short and fleeting ; every generation and every 
 race of human beings soon disappear^> 
 
 The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the' motherly 
 woman, the type most upheld as the one and only possible 
 one for women, is accordingly quite unjustified. Although 
 most men are certain that every woman can have her con- 
 summation only in motherhood, I must confess that the 
 prostitute — not as a person, but as a phenomenon — is much 
 more estimable in my opinion. 
 
 There are various causes of this universal reverence for 
 the mother. 
 
 One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother 
 seems to the man nearer his ideal of chastity ; but the 
 woman who desires children is no more chaste than the 
 man-coveting prostitute. 
 
 The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in 
 the maternal type by raising her morally (although with no 
 reason) and socially over the prostitute type. The latter 
 does not submit to any valuations of the man nor to the 
 ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman ; secretly, 
 as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or 
 flagrantly as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in 
 opposition to them. This is the explanation of the social 
 ostracisms, the practical outlawry which is the present 
 almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother readily 
 submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because 
 she is interested only in the child and the preservation of 
 the race. 
 
 \It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her 
 own life exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring 
 with it the punishment of exclusion from society. She is 
 not so brave as the mother, it is true, being thoroughly 
 cowardly ; but she has the correlative of cowardice, impu- 
 
228 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 dence, and she is not ashamed of her shamelessness.' She 
 is naturally inclined to polygamy, and always ready to 
 attract more men than the one who would suffice as the 
 founder of a family. She gives free play to the fulfilment 
 of her desire, and feels a queen, and her most ardent 
 wish is for more power. Ut is easy to grieve or shock the 
 motherly woman ; no one can injure or offend the pros- 
 titute ; for the mother has her honour to defend as the 
 guardian of the species, whilst the prostitute has forsworn 
 all social respect, and prides herself in her freedony The 
 qiilyjihought- that disturbs her is_the possibility of losing 
 her power. She expects, and cannot think otherwise than 
 that every man wishes to possess her, that they think of 
 nothing but her, and live for her. And certainly she 
 possesses the greatest power over men, the only influence 
 that has a strong effect on the life of humanity that is not 
 ordered by the regulations of men. 
 
 In this lies the analogy between the prostitute and men 
 who have been famous in politics. As it is only once in 
 many centuries that a great conqueror arises, like Napoleon 
 or Alexander, so it is with the great courtesan ; but when she 
 does appear she marches triumphantly across the world. 
 
 There is a relationship between such men and courtesans 
 (every politician is to a certain extent a tribune of the 
 people, and that in itself implies a kind of prostitution). 
 They have the same feeling for power, the same demand to 
 be in relations with all men, even the humblest. Just as 
 the great conqueror believes that he confers a favour on 
 any one to whom he talks, so also with the prostitute. 
 Observe her as she talks to a policeman, or buys something 
 in a shop, you see the sense of conferring a favour explicit 
 in her. And men most readily accept this view that they 
 are receiving favours from the politician or prostitute (one 
 may recall how a great genius like Goethe regarded his 
 meeting with Napoleon at Erfurt ; and on the other side we 
 have the myth of Pandora, and the story of the birth of 
 Venus). 
 
 1 may now return to the subject of great men of action 
 
MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 229 
 
 which I opened in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man 
 as Carlyle has exalted the man of action, as, for instance, 
 in his chapter on "The Hero as King." I have already 
 shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here 
 that all great men of action, even the greatest of them, such 
 as Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, have not hesitated to em- 
 ploy falsehood ; that Alexander the Great did not hesitate 
 to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But untruth- 
 fulness is incompatible with genius. The "Memoirs of 
 Napoleon," written at St. Helena, are full of mistatements 
 and watery sophistry, and his last words, that " he had 
 loved only France," were an altruistic pose. Napoleon, the 
 greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great 
 men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses. 
 One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous 
 intensity with which he tried to escape from himself. 
 There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. 
 Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any 
 emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the 
 disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition 
 was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man 
 may honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame 
 but personal ambition will not be his aim. He will not try 
 to knit the whole world to himself by superficial, transitory 
 bonds, to heap up all the things of the world in a pyramid 
 over his name. The man of action shares with the epileptic 
 the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around 
 him, to make them appanages of his petty self. (The great 
 man feels himself defined and separate from the world, a 
 monad amongst monads, and, as a true microcosm, he feels 
 the world already within him ; he realises in the fullest sense 
 of personal experience that he has a definite, assured, intelli- 
 gible relation to the world whole. The great tribune and 
 the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off 
 from the world ; they merge with it, and demand it all as 
 decoration or adornment of their empirical persons, and 
 th^y^are jiTcapa ble of lov e,^ff^ectic)n^_Qrjfrie.ndshi^. 
 
 The kmg of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the 
 
230 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 stars is the perfect image of the conqueror. The great 
 genius honours himself, and has not to hve in a condition 
 of give and take with the populace, as is necessary for the 
 politician. The great politician makes his voice resound in 
 the world, but he has also to sing in the streets ; he may 
 make the world his chessboard, but he has also to strut in a 
 booth ; he is no more a despot than he is a beggar for alms. 
 He has to court the populace, and here he joins with the 
 prostitute. The politician is a man of the streets. He must 
 be completed by the public. It is the masses that he re- 
 quires, not real individualities. If he is not clever he tries 
 to be rid of the great men, or if, like Napoleon, he is 
 cunning, he pretends to honour them in order that he may 
 make them harmless. His dependence on the public makes 
 some such course necessary. A politician cannot do all 
 that he wishes, even if he is a Napoleon, and if, unlike 
 Napoleon, he actually wished to realise ideals, he would 
 soon be taught better by the public, his real master. The 
 will of him who covets power is bound. 
 
 Every emperor is conscious of this relation between him- 
 self ind the masses, and has an almost instinctive love of 
 great assemblages of his people, or his army, or of his 
 electors. Not Marcus Aurelius or Diocletian, but Kleo, 
 Mark Antony, Themistocles, and Mirabeau are the em- 
 bodiments of the real politician. Ambition means going 
 amongst the people. The tribune has to follow the prosti- 
 tute in this respect. According to Emerson, Napoleon 
 used to go incognito amongst the people to excite their 
 hurrahs and praise. Schiller imagined the same course for 
 his Wallenstein. 
 
 Hitherto the phenomena of the great man of action have 
 been regarded even by artists and philosophers as unique. 
 I think that my analysis has shown that there is the strongest 
 resemblance between them and prostitutes. To see an 
 analogy between Antonius (Caesar) and Cleopatra may 
 appear at first far-fetched, but none the less it exists. The 
 great man of action has to despise his inner life, in order 
 that he may live altogether " in the world," and he must 
 
MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 231 
 
 perish, like the things of the world. The prostitute abandons 
 the lasting purpose of her sex, to live in the instincts of the 
 moment. The great prostitute and the great tribune are 
 firebrands causing destruction all around them, leaving 
 death and devastation in their paths, and pass like meteors 
 unconnected with the course of human life, indifferent to 
 its objects, and soon disappearing, whilst the genius and the 
 mother work for the future in silence. ^The prostitute and 
 the tribune may be called the enemies of God • they are 
 both anti-moral phenomena^ 
 
 Great men of action, then, must be excluded from the 
 category of genius. The true genius, whether he be an 
 artist or a philosopher, is always strongly marked by his 
 relation to the constructive side of the world. 
 
 The motive that actuates the prostitute requires further 
 investigation. The purpose of the motherly woman was 
 easy to understand ; she is the upholder of the race. But 
 the fundamental idea of prostitution is much more mys- 
 terious, and no one can have meditated long on the subject 
 without often doubting if it were possible to get an explana- 
 tion. Perhaps the relation of the two types to the sexual 
 act may assist the inquiry. I hope that no one will consider 
 such a subject below the dignity of a philosopher. The 
 spirit in which the inquiry is made is the chief matter. It 
 is at least clear that the painters of Leda and Danäe have 
 pondered over the problem, and many great writers — I 
 have in mind Zola's "Confession of Claude," his "Hortense," 
 "Renee," and "Nana," Tolstoi's "Resurrection," Ibsen's 
 "Hedda Gabler," and " Rita," and above all the "Sonja" of 
 that great soul Dostoyevski — must have been thinking of the 
 general problem rather than merely wishing to describe 
 particular cases. 
 
 The maternal woman regards the sexual relations as 
 means to an end ; the prostitute considers them as the end 
 itself. That sexual congress may have another purpose 
 than mere reproduction is plain, as many animals and plants 
 are devoid of it. On the other hand, in the animal kingdom, 
 sexual congress is always in connection with reproduction, 
 
232 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 and is never simply lust ; and, moreover, takes place only 
 at times suitable for breeding. Desire is simply the means 
 employed by nature to secure the contmuity of the species. 
 
 Although sexual congress is an end in itself for the 
 prostitute, it must not be assumed that it is meaningless in 
 the mother-type. Women who are sexually anaesthetic no 
 doubt exist in both classes, but they are very rare, and 
 many apparent cases may really be phenomena of hysteria. 
 
 The final importance attached by the prostitute to the 
 sexual act is made plain by the fact that it is only that type 
 in which coquetry occurs. Coquetry has invariably a sexual 
 significance. Its purpose is to picture to the man the 
 .f?Q0Jä9if:s.t_oi _the woman before it has_ occurred, in o rder to 
 induce him to make the conquest an actual fact. The 
 readiness of the type to coquet with every man is an expres- 
 sion of her nature ; whether it proceeds further depends on 
 mprely accidental circumstances. 
 
 [The maternal type regards the sexual act as the beginning 
 of a series of important events, and so attaches value to it 
 equally with the prostitute, although in a different fashion/ 
 The one is contented, completed, satisfied ; her life is made 
 richer and of fuller meaning to her by it. The other, for 
 whom the act is everything, the compression and end of 
 all life, is never satisfied, never to be satisfied, were she 
 visited by all the men in the world. 
 
 ' The body of a woman, as I have already shown, is sexual 
 'throughout, and the special sexual acts are only intensifica- 
 tions of a distributed sensation. Here, also, the difference 
 between the two types displays itself. The prostiiute type 
 ' in coquetting is merely using the general sexuality of her 
 body as an end in itself ; for her there is a difference only 
 in degree between flirtation and sexual congress. The 
 maternal type is equally sexual, but with a different purpose; 
 all her life, through all her body, she is being impregnated. 
 In this fact lies the explanation of the "impression " which 
 I referred to as being indubitable, although it is denied by 
 men of science and physicians^ 
 
 Paternity is a diffused relation. Many instances, disputed 
 
MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 233 
 
 by men of science, point to an influence not brought about 
 directly by the reproductive cells. White women who 
 have borne a child to a black man, are said if they bear 
 children afterwards to white men, to have retained enough 
 impression from the first mate to show an effect on the 
 subsequent children. All such facts, grouped under the 
 names of " telegony," ** germinal infection," and so. on, 
 although disputed by scientists, speak for my view. (And 
 so also the motherly woman, throughout her whole lire, is 
 impressed by lovers, by voices, by words, by inanimate 
 things. All the influences that come to her she turns to the 
 purpose of her being, to the shaping of her child, and the 
 " actual " father has to share his paternity with perhaps 
 other men and many other things.) 
 
 The woman is impregnated not only through the genital 
 tract but through every fibre of her being. All life makes 
 an impression on her and throws its image on her child. 
 This universality, in the purely physical sphere, is analagous 
 to genius. 
 <Jt is quite different with the prostitute. Whilst the 
 maternal woman turns the whole world, the love of her 
 lover, and all the impressions that she receives to the pur- 
 poses of the child, the prostitute absorbs everything for 
 herself^ But just as she has this absorbing need of the 
 man, so the man can get something from her which he fails 
 to find in the badly dressed, tasteless, pre-occupied maternal 
 type. Something within him requires pleasure, and this he 
 gets from the daughters of joy. Unlike the mother, these 
 think of the pleasures of the world, of dancing, of dressing, 
 of theatres and concerts, of pleasure-resorts. They know 
 the use of gold, turning it to luxury instead of to comfort, 
 they flame through the world, making all its ways a 
 triumphant march for their beautiful bodies. 
 
 The prostitute is the great seductress of the world, the 
 female Don Juan, the being in the woman that knows the 
 art of love, that cultivates it, teaches it, and enjoys it. 
 
 Very deep-seated differences are linked with what I have 
 been describing. The mother-woman craves for respect- 
 
234 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 ability in the man, not because she grasps its value as an 
 idea, but because it is the supporter of the life of the world. 
 She herself works, and is not idle like the prostitute ; she is 
 tilled with care for the future, and so requires from the man 
 a corresponding practical responsibility, and will not seduce 
 him to pleasure. (The prostitute, on the other hand, is 
 most attracted by a careless, idle, dissipated man. A man 
 that has lost self-restraint repels the mother-woman, is 
 attractive to the prostitute. There are women who are 
 dissatisfied with a son that is idle at school ; there are others 
 who encourage him^ The diligent boy pleases the mother- 
 woman, the idle and careless boy wins approval from the 
 prostitute type. This distinction reaches high up amongst 
 the respectable classes of society, but a salient example of 
 it is seen in the fact that the " bullies " loved by women of 
 the streets are usually criminals. The souteneur is always 
 a criminal, a thief, a fraudulent person, or sometimes even 
 a murderer. 
 
 I am almost on the point of saymg that, however little 
 woman is to be regarded as immoral (she is only non- 
 moral), prostitution stands in some deep relation with 
 crime, whilst motherhood is equally bound with the oppo- 
 site tendency. We must avoid regarding the prostitute as 
 the female analogue of the criminal ; women, as I have 
 already pointed out, are not criminals ; they are too low in 
 the moral scale for that designation. None the less, there 
 is a constant connection between the prostitute type and 
 crime. The great courtesan is comparable with that great 
 criminal, the conqueror, and readily enters into actual rela- 
 tions with him ; the petty courtesan entertains the thief and 
 / the pickpocket. 'vThe mother type is in fact the guardian of 
 the life of the world, the prostitute type is its enemy^ But 
 just as the mother is in harmony, not with the soul but with 
 the body, so the prostitute is no diabolic destroyer of the 
 idea, but only a corrupter of empirical phenomena. Physi- 
 / cal life and physical death, both of which are in intimate 
 connection with the sexual act, are displayed by the woman 
 ,in her two capacities of mother and prostitute./ 
 
MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 235 
 
 It is siill impossible to give a clearer solution than that 
 which I h:ive attempted, of the real significance of mother- 
 hood and prostitution. I am on an unfamiliar path, almost 
 untrodden by any earlier wayfarer. Religious myths and 
 plilosophy alike have been unable to propound solutions. 
 I have found some clues however. The anti-moral signi- 
 ficance of prostitution is in harmony with the fact that it 
 appears only amongst mankind. In all the animal kingdom 
 the females are used only for reproduction ; there are no 
 true females that are sterile. There are analogies to prosti- 
 tution, however, amongst male animals ; one has only to 
 think of the display and decoration of the peacock, of tne 
 shining glow-worm, of singing birds, of the love dances of 
 many male birds. These secondary sexual manifestations, 
 however, are mere advertisements of sexuality. 
 
 Prostitution is a human phenomenon ; animals and 
 plants are non-moral ; they are never disposed to immo- 
 rality and possess only motherhood. Here is a deep secret, 
 hidden in the nature and origin of mankind. I ought to 
 correct my earlier exposition by insisting that I have come 
 to regard the prostitute element as a possibility in all 
 women just as much as the merely animal capacity for 
 motherhood. It is something which penetrates the nature 
 of the human female, something with which the most 
 animal-like mother is tinged, something which corresponds 
 in the human female, to the characters that separate the 
 human male from the animal male. ^Just as the immoral, 
 possibility of man is something that distinguishes him from 
 the male animal/so the quality of the prostitute distinguishes 
 the human female from the animal female. I shall have 
 something to say as to the general relation of man to this 
 element in woman, towards the end of my investigation, 
 but possibly the ultimate origin of prostitution is a deep 
 mystery into which none can penetrate. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 EROTICS AND ESTHETICS 
 
 The arguments which are in common use to justify a high 
 opinion of woman have now been examined in all except a 
 few points to which I shall recur, from the point of view of 
 critical philosophy, and have been controverted. I hope 
 that I have justified my deliberate choice of ground, 
 although, indeed, Schopenhauer's fate should have been a 
 warning to me. His depreciation of women in his philo- 
 sophical work "On Women," has been frequently attributed 
 to the circumstance that a beautiful Venetian girl, in whose 
 company he was, fell in love with the extremely handsome 
 personal appearance of Byron ; as if a low opinion of 
 women were not more likely to come to him who had had 
 the best not the worst fortune with them. 
 
 The practice of merely calling any one who assails 
 woman a misogynist, instead of refuting argument by 
 argument, has much to commend it. Hatred is never 
 impartial, and, therefore, to describe a man as having an 
 animus against the object of his criticism, is at once to lay 
 him open to the charge of insincerity, immorality, and 
 partiality, and one that can be made with a hyperbole of 
 accusation and evasion of the point, which only equal its 
 lack of justification. This sort of answer never fails in its 
 object, which is to exempt the vindicator from refuting the 
 actual statements. It is the oldest and handiest weapon of 
 the large majority of men, who never wish to see woman 
 as she is. No men who really think deeply about women 
 retain a high opinion of them ; men either despise women 
 or they have never thought seriously about them. 
 
EROTICS AND ^ESTHETICS 237 
 
 Nähere is no doubt that it is a fallacious method in a 
 theoretical argument to refer to one's opponent's psycho- 
 logical motives instead of bringing forward proofs to 
 controvert his statements^ 
 
 It is not necessary for me to say that in logical contro- 
 versy the adversaries should place themselves under an 
 impersonal conception of truth, and their aim should be to 
 reach a result, irrespective of their own concrete opinions. 
 If, however, in an argument, one side has come to a certain 
 conclusion by a logical chain of reasoning, and the other 
 side merely opposes the conclusion without having followed 
 the reasoning process, it is at once fair and appropriate to 
 examine the psychological motives which have induced the 
 adversaries to abandon argument for abuse. I shall now 
 put the champions of women to the test and see how much 
 of their attitude is due to sentimentality, how much of it is 
 disinterested, and how much due to selfish motives. 
 
 All objections raised against those who despise women 
 arise from the erotic relations in which man stands to 
 woman. This relationship is absolutely different from the 
 purely sexual attraction which occurs in the animal world, 
 and plays a most important part in human affairs. It is 
 quite erroneous to say that sexuality and eroticism, sexual 
 impulse and love, are fundamentally one and the same 
 thing, the second an embellishing, refining, spiritualising 
 sublimation of the first ; although practically all medical 
 men hold this view, and even such men as Kam and 
 Schopenhauer thought so. Before I go into the reasons 
 for maintaining the existence of this great distinction, I 
 should like to say something about the views of these two 
 men. 
 
 Kant's opinion is not of much weight, because love as 
 sexual impulse must have been as little known to him as 
 possible, probably less than in the case of any other man. 
 He was so little erotic that he never felt the kindred desire 
 to travel.* He represents too lofty and pure a type to speak 
 
 * The association of these two desires may surprise readers. It 
 rests on a metaphysical ground, much of which will be more 
 
238 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 with authority on this matter : his one passion was meta- 
 physics. 
 
 As for Schopenhauer, he had just as Httle idea of the 
 higher form of eroticism ; his sexuality was of the gross 
 order. This can be seen from the following : Schopen- 
 hauer's countenance shows very little kindliness and a 
 good deal of fierceness (a circumstance which must have 
 caused him great sorrow. There is no exhibition of ethical 
 sympathy if one is very sorry for oneself. The most sym- 
 pathetic persons are those who, like Kant and Nietzsche, 
 have no particle of self-pity). 
 
 But it may be said with safety that only those who are most 
 sympathetic are capable of a strong passion : those " who 
 take no interest in things " are incapable of love. This does 
 not imply that they have diabolical natures. They may, on 
 the contrary, stand very high morally without knowmg 
 what their neighbours are thinking or doing,<and without 
 having a sense for other than sexual relations with women, 
 as was the case with Schopenhauer. He was a man who 
 knew only too well what the sexual impulse was, but he 
 never was in love ; if that were not so, the bias in his famous 
 work, " The Metaphysics of Sexual Love," would be inex- 
 plicable ; in it the most important doctrine is that the uncon- 
 scious goal of all love is nothing more than "the formation 
 of the next generation.y 
 
 This view, as I hope to prove, is false. It is true that a 
 love entirely without sexuality has never been known. 
 However high a man may stand he is still a being with 
 
 apparent when I have developed my theory of eroticism further. 
 Time, like space, is conceived of as unlimited, and man, in his desire 
 for freedom, in his efforts stimulated by his power of free will to 
 transcend his limits, has the craving for unlimited time and unlimited 
 space. The desire for travel is simply an expression of this rest- 
 lessness, this fundamental chafing of the spirit against its bonds. 
 But just as eternity is not prolonged time, but the negation of time, 
 so however far a man wanders, he can extend his area but cannot 
 abolish space. And so his efforts to transcend space must always 
 be heroic failures : I shall show that his eroticism is a similar 
 notable failure. 
 
EROTICS AND ESTHETICS 239 
 
 senses, ^hat absolutely disposes of the opposite view is this : 
 all love, as such — without going into aesthetic principles of 
 love — is antagonistic to those elements (of the relationship) 
 which press towards sexual union ; in fact, such elements 
 tend to negate love. Love and desire are two unlike, 
 mutually exclusive, opposing conditions, and during the 
 time a man really loves, the thought of physical union with 
 the object of his love is insupportable.) because there is 
 no hope which is entirely free from fear does not alter the 
 fact that hope and fear are utterly opposite principles. It 
 is just the same m the case of sexual impulse and love. 
 The more erotic a man is the less he will be troubled with 
 his sexuality, and vice versag 
 
 If it be the case that there is no adoration utterly free 
 from desire, there is no reason why the two should be 
 identified, since it might be possible for a superior being to 
 attain the highest phases of both. That person lies, or has 
 never known what love is, who says he loves a woman 
 whom he desires ; so much difference is there between 
 sexual impulse and love. This is what makes talk of love 
 after marriage seem, in most cases, make-believe. 
 
 ,^he following will show how obtuse the view of those is 
 who persist, with unconscious cynicism, in maintaining the 
 identity of love and sexual impulse. Sexual attraction 
 increases with physical proximity ; love is strongest in the 
 absence of the loved one ; it needs separation, a certain 
 distance, to preserve it. In fact, what all the travels in the 
 world could not achieve, what time could not accomplish, 
 may be brought about by accidental, unintentional, physical 
 contact with the beloved object, in which the sexual im- 
 pulse is awakened, and which suffices to kill love on the 
 spot.^Then, again, in the case of more highly differentiated, 
 great men, the type of girl desired, and the type of girl 
 loved but never desired, are always totally different in face, 
 form, and disposition ; they are two different beings. 
 
 Then there is the " platonic love," which professors of psy- 
 chiatry have such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, 
 there is only " platonic " love, because any other so-called 
 
240 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 ' love belongs to the kingdom of the senses :At is the love of 
 Beatrice, the worship of Madpnna ; the Babylonian woman 
 is the symbol of sexual desire.) 
 
 Kant's enumeration of th6 transcendental ideas of love 
 would have to be extended if it is to be held. For the 
 purely spiritual love, the love of Plato and Bruno, which is 
 absolutely free from desire, is none the less a transcendental 
 concept ; nor is its significance as a concept impaired, 
 because such a love has never been fully realised. 
 
 It is the problem put forward in " Tannhäuser." We 
 have Tannhäuser, Wolfram, Venus, and Maria. The fact 
 that two lovers, who have found each other once for all — 
 Tristan and Isolde — choose death instead of the bridal bed, 
 is just as absolute a proof of a higher, maybe metaphysical, 
 something in mankind, as the martyrdom of a Giordano 
 
 Bruno. 
 
 " Dir, hohe Liebe, töne 
 Begeistert mein Gesang, 
 Die mir in Engelschöne 
 Tief in die Seele drang ! 
 Du nahst als Gott gesandte : 
 Ich folg' aus holder Fern', — 
 So führst du in die Lande, 
 Wo ewig strahlt dein Stern." 
 
 Who is the object of such love ? Is it woman, as she has 
 been represented in this work, who lacks all higher quali- 
 ties who gets her value from another, who has no power to 
 attain value on her own account ? Impossible. It is the 
 ideally beautiful, the immaculate woman, who is loved in 
 such high fashion. The source of this beauty and chastity 
 in women must now be found. 
 
 The question as to whether the female sex is the more 
 beautiful, and as to whether it deserves the title of " the " 
 beautiful, has been much disputed. 
 
 It may be well to consider by whom and how far woman 
 is considered beautiful. 
 
 It is well known that woman is not most beautiful m the 
 nude. I admit that in pictures or statues the nude female 
 may look well. But the sexual impulse makes it impossible 
 
EROTICS AND .ESTHETICS 241 
 
 to look at a living woman in a nude condition with the 
 purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an essential feature 
 in judging any object of beauty. But apart from this, an 
 absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression 
 of something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incom- 
 patible with beauty. 
 
 A nude woman may be beautiful in details, but the general 
 effect is not beautiful ; she inevitably creates the feeling 
 that she is looking for something, and this induces disin- 
 clination rather than desire in the spectator. / The sight of 
 an upright female form, in the nude, makes most patent 
 her purposelessness, the sense of her purpose in life being 
 derived from something outside herself ; in the recumbent 
 position this feeling is greatly diminished. It is evident 
 that artists have perceived this in reproducing the nude) 
 
 But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly 
 beautiful, not even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her 
 sex. The genitalia are the chief difficulty in the way of 
 regarding her as theoretically beautiful. If the idea were 
 justified that man's love for woman is the direct result of his 
 sexual impulse ; if we could agree with Schopenhauer that 
 " the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and 
 short-limbed sex is called beautiful only because the male 
 intellect is befogged by the sexual impulse, that impulse 
 being the creator of the conception of the beauty of woman," 
 it would follow that the genitalia could not be excluded from 
 the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy exposition 
 to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and 
 that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as 
 due to the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is m 
 reality opposed to the conception of beauty. The man who 
 is most under its influence has least sense of female beauty, 
 and desires any woman merely because she is a woman. •. 
 
 A woman's nude body is distasteful to man because it 
 offends his sense of shame. The easy superficiality of our 
 day has given colour to the statement that the sense of 
 shame has arisen from the wearing of clothes, and it has 
 been urged that the objection to the nude arises from those 
 
242 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a 
 man who has become immorally-minded no longer is 
 interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its in- 
 fluence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. 
 AW true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only 
 one case of shamelessness — a declaration of love the 
 sincerity of which a man is convinced of in the moment 
 he makes itk This would represent the conceivable maxi- 
 mum of shamelessness ; but there is no declaration of love 
 which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by 
 their readiness to believe such protestations. 
 ■\ The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is 
 /beautiful and what is hateful in woman./ The conditions 
 are quite different in aesthetics from those in logic or ethics. 
 In logic there is an abstract truth which is the standard of 
 thought ; in ethics there is an ideal good which furnishes 
 the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of the 
 good is established by the determination to link the will with 
 the good, (in aesthetics beauty is created by love ; there is 
 no determining law to love what is beautiful, and the beauti- 
 ful does not present itself to human beings with any im- 
 perative command to love it. (And so there is no abstract, 
 no super-individual "right " taste) J 
 
 All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the 
 requirements of love ; and so the beauty of woman is not 
 apart from love, it is not an objective to which love is 
 directedA)ut woman's beauty is the love of man ; they are 
 not two things, but one and the same thing^ 
 
 Just as hatefulness comes from hating, so love creates 
 beauty. This is only another way of expressing the fact 
 that beauty has as little to do with the sexual impulse as the 
 sexual impulse has to do with love. Beauty is something 
 that can neither be felt, touched, nor mixed with other 
 things ; it is only at a distance that it can be plainly dis- 
 cerned, and when it is approached it withdraws itself. The 
 sexual impulse which seeks for sexual union with woman is 
 a denial of such beauty ; the woman who has been possessed 
 and enjoyed, will never again be worshipped for her beauty. 
 
EROTICS AND ^STHETICS^ 243 
 
 I now come to the second question : what are the inno- 
 cence and morality of a woman ? 
 
 It will be convenient to start with a few facts that concern 
 the origin of all love. /'-Bodily cleanliness, as has often been 
 remarked, is in men a general indication of morality and 
 rectitude ; or at least it m^ be said that uncleanly men are 
 seldom of high character.) It may be noticed that when 
 men, who formerly paid little attention to bodily cleanliness, 
 begin to strive for a higher perfection of character, they at 
 the same time take more trouble with the care of the body. 
 In the same way, when men suddenly become imbued with 
 passion they experience a simultaneous desire for bodily 
 cleanliness, and it may almost be said of them that only at 
 such a time do they wash themselves thoroughly. Uf we 
 now turn to gifted men, we shall see that in their case love 
 frequently begins with self-mortification, humiliation, and 
 restraint. A moral change sets in, a process of purification 
 seems to emanate from the object loved, even if her lover 
 has never spoken to her, or only seen her a few times in the 
 distance. It is, then, impossible that this process should 
 have its origin in that person : very often it may be a 
 bread-and-butter miss, a stolid lump, more often a sensuous 
 coquette, in whom no one can see the marvellous charac- 
 teristics with which his love endows her, save her lover. 
 Can any one believe that it is a concrete person who is 
 loved ? Does she not in reality serve as the starting point 
 for incomparably greater emotions than she could inspire ? 
 
 In love, man is only loving himself. Not his empirical 
 self, not the weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and 
 smallnesses which he outwardly exhibits ; but all that he 
 wants to be, all that he ought to be, his truest, deepest, in- 
 telligible nature, free from all fetters of necessity, from all 
 taint of earthy 
 
 In his actual physical existence, this being is limited by 
 space and time and by the shackles of the senses ; however 
 deep he may look into himself, he finds himself damaged 
 and spotted, and sees nowhere the image of speckless purity 
 for which he seeks. And yet there is nothing he covets so 
 
244 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 much as to realise his own ideal, to find his real higher self. 
 M.nd as he cannot find this true self within himself, he has 
 to seek it without himself. He projects his ideal of an abso- 
 lutely worthy existence, the ideal that he is unable to isolate 
 within himself, upon another human being, and this act, and 
 this alone, is none other than love and the significance of love. 
 Only a person who has done wrong and is conscious of it 
 can love, and so a child can never love. It is only because 
 love represents the highest, most unattainable goal of all 
 longing, because it cannot be realised in experience but 
 must remain an idea ; only because it is localised on some 
 other human being, and yet remains at a distance, so that 
 the ideal never attains its realisation ; only because of such 
 conditions can love be associated with the awakening of the 
 desire for piirification, with the reaching after a goal that is 
 purely spiritual, and so cannot be blemished by physical 
 union with the beloved person ; only thus, is love the 
 highest and strongest effort of the will towards the supreme 
 good ; only thus does it bring the true being of man to a 
 state between body and spirit, between the senses and the 
 moral nature, between God and the beasts./ < A human being 
 only finds himself when, in this fashion, he loves. And 
 thus it comes about that only when they love do many men 
 realise the existence of their own personality and of the 
 personality of another, that " I " and '* thou " become for 
 them more than grammatical expressions. And so also 
 comes about the great part played in their love story by the 
 names of the two lovers. There is no doubt but that it is 
 through love that many men first come to know of their own 
 real nature, and to be convinced that they possess a soul. 
 
 It is this which makes a lover desire to keep his beloved 
 at a distance — on no account to injure her purity by contact 
 with him — in order to assure himself of her and of his own 
 existence. Many an inflexible empiricist, coming under the 
 influence of love, becomes an enthusiastic mystic ; the most 
 striking example being Auguste Comte, the founder of 
 positivism, whose whole theories were revolutionised by his 
 feelings for Clotilde de Vaux. 
 
EROTICS AND ESTHETICS 245 
 
 It is not only for the artist, but for the whol^ of mankind 
 that Arno, ergo sum holds good psychologically/ 
 
 Love is a phenomenon of projection just as' hate is, not a 
 phenomenon of equation as friendship is. The latter pre- 
 supposes an equality of both individuals : ^ove always 
 implies inequality, disproportion/ To endow an individual 
 with all that one might be and yet never can be, to make 
 her ideal — that is love. Beauty is the symbol of this act 
 of worship. It is this that so often surprises and angers a 
 lover when he is convinced that beauty does not imply 
 morality in a woman. He feels that the nature of the 
 offence is increased by " such depravity " being possible in 
 conjunction with such " beauty." He is not aware that 
 the woman in question seems beautiful to him because he 
 still loves her ; otherwise the incongruity between the ex- 
 ternal and internal would no longer pain him. 
 
 The reason an ordinary prostitute can never seem 
 beautiful is because it is naturally impossible to endow her 
 with the projection of value ; she can satisfy only the taste 
 of vulgar minds. She is the mate of the worst sort of men. 
 In this we have the explanation of a relation utterly opposed 
 to morality : woman in general is simply indifferent to 
 ethics, she is non-moral, and, therefore, unlike the anti- 
 moral criminal, who is instinctively disliked, or the devil 
 who is hideous in every one's imagination, serves as a 
 receptacle for projected worthiness ; as she neither does 
 good nor evil, she neither resists nor resents this imposition 
 of the ideal on her personality. It is patent that woman's 
 morality is acquired ; but this morality is man's, which he 
 in an access of supreme love and devotion has conveyed 
 to her. 
 
 (^ince all beauty is always only the constantly renewed 
 endeavour to embody the highest form of value, there is a 
 pre-eminently satisfymg element in it, in the face of which 
 all desire, all self-seeking fade away. 
 
 All forms of beauty whfch appeal to man, by reason of 
 the aesthetic function, are in reality also attempts on 
 his part to realise the ideab Beauty is the symbol of 
 
246 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 perfection in being) Therefore beauty is inviolable ; it is 
 static and not dynamic ; so that any alteration with regard 
 to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of 
 personal worthiness, the lo^^e of perfection, materialise in 
 the idea of beauty. And so the beauty of nature is born, a 
 beauty that the criminal can never know, as ethics first 
 create nature. Thus it is that nature always and every- 
 where, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impres- 
 sion of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal 
 symbol of the moral law, as natural beauty is the mani- 
 festation of nobility of the soul ; logic thus becomes the 
 embodiment of ethics ! Just as loves creates a new woman 
 for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of 
 the All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the 
 universe ; and just as there is no natural beauty without 
 form, without a law of nature, so also there is no art without 
 form, no artistic beauty which does not conform to the 
 laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a realisation of 
 artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of the 
 moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose 
 image is enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which 
 the artist regards as his teacher, is the law which he creates 
 out of his own being^ 
 
 I return to my own theme from these analyses of art, 
 which are no more than elaborations of the thoughts of 
 Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller writing under their 
 influence). The main proposition for which I have argued 
 is that man's belief m the morality of woman, his projection 
 of his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman 
 as beautiful, are one and the same thing, the second being 
 the sensuous side of the first. 
 
 jit is thus intelligible, although an inversion of the truth, 
 when, in morality, a beautiful soul is spoken of, or when, 
 following Shaftesbury and Herbart, ethics are subordinated 
 to aesthetics ; following Socrates and Plato we may identify 
 the good and the beautiful, but we must not forget that 
 beauty is only a bodily image in which morality tries to 
 represent itself, that all aesthetics are created by ethics.J 
 
EROTICS AND .ESTHETICS 247 
 
 Every individual and temporal presentation of this 
 attempted incarnation must necessarily be illusory, and can 
 have no more than a fictitious reality. And so all indi- 
 vidual cases of beauty are impermanent ; the love that is 
 directed to a woman must perish with the age of the woman. 
 The idea of beauty is the idea of nature and is permanent, 
 whilst every beautiful thing, every part of nature, is perish- 
 able. /The eternal can realise itself in the limited and the 
 concrete only by an illusion ; it is self-deception to seek the 
 fulness of love in a woman. As all love that attaches itself 
 to a person must be impermanent, the love of woman is 
 doomed to unhappiness. All such love has this source of 
 failure inherent in it. It is an heroic attempt to seek for 
 permanent worth where there is no worth. The love that 
 is attached to enduring worth is attached to the absolute, 
 to the idea of God, whether that idea be a pantheistic con- 
 ception of enduring nature, or remain transcendental ; the 
 love that attaches itself to an individual thmg, as to a 
 woman, must fail.A 
 
 /I have already partly explained why man takes this 
 burden on himself. Just as hatred is a projection of our 
 own evil qualities on other persons in order that we may 
 stand apart from them and hate them ; just as the devil 
 was invented to serve as a vehicle of all the evil impulses in 
 man ; so love has the purpose of helping man in his battle 
 for good, when he feels that he himself is not strong 
 enough. Love and hate are alike forms of cowardice. In 
 hate we picture to ourselves that our own hateful qualities 
 exist in another, and by so doing we feel ourselves partly 
 freed from them. In love we project what is good in us, 
 and so having created a good and an evil image we are 
 more able to compare and value themy 
 
 Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so 
 love is free from the limits I described in the first part of 
 this book, not being bound down by the conditions of 
 merely sexual attraction. In spite of their real opposition, 
 there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality. Sexuality 
 uses the woman as the means to produce pleasure and 
 
248 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 children of the body ; -erotics use her as the means to create 
 worth and children of the soul. A little understood con- 
 ception of Plato is full of the deepest meaning : that love is 
 not directed towards beauty, but towards the procreation of 
 beauty ; that it seeks to win immortality for the things of 
 the mind, just as the lower sexual impulse is directed 
 towards the perpetuation of the species/ 
 
 It is more than a merely formal analogy, a superficial, 
 verbal resemblance, to speak of the fruitfulness of the mind, 
 of its conception and reproduction, or, in the words of 
 Plato, to speak of the children of the soul. As bodily sexu- 
 ality is the effort of an organic being to perpetuate its own 
 form, so love is the attempt to make permanent one's own 
 soul or individuality. Sexuality and love are alike the 
 effort to realise oneself, the one by a bodily image, the 
 other by an image of the soul. <But it is only the man of 
 genius who can approach this entirely unsensuous love, and 
 it is only he who seeks to produce eternal children in whom 
 his deepest nature shall live for eve^'^ 
 
 The parallel may be carried further. Since Novalis first 
 called attention to it, many have insisted on the association 
 between sexual desire and cruelty. All that" is born of 
 woman must die. Reproduction, birth, and death are indis- 
 solubly associated ; the thought of untimely death awakens 
 sexual desire in its fiercest form, as the determination to 
 reproduce oneself. And so sexual union, considered ethi- 
 cally, psychologically, and biologically, is allied to murder ; 
 it is the negation of the woman and the man ; in its extreme 
 case it robs them of their consciousness to give life to the 
 child. The highest form of eroticism, as much as the lowest 
 form of sexuality, uses the woman not for herself but as 
 means to an end — to preserve the individuality of the artist. 
 (ij'he artist has used the woman merely as the screen on 
 which to project his own idea\ 
 
 The real psychology of the loved woman is always a 
 matter of indifference. In the moment when a man loves 
 a woman, he neither understands her nor wishes to under- 
 stand her, although understanding is the only moral basis 
 
EROTICS AND ^ESTHETICS 249 
 
 of association in mankind. A human being cannot love 
 another that he fully understands, because he would then 
 necessarily see the imperfections which are an inevitable 
 part of the human individual, and love can attach itself 
 only to perfection/) Love of a woman is possible only 
 when it does not consider her real qualities, and so is able 
 to replace the actual psychical reality by a different and 
 quite imaginary reality, ^he attempt to realise one's ideal 
 in a woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary 
 destruction of the empirical personality of the woman. And 
 so the attempt is cruel to the woman ; it is the egoism of 
 love that disregards the woman, and cares nothing for her 
 real inner life^> 
 
 Thus the parallel between sexuality and love is complete. 
 Love is murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and 
 mind of the woman, and the psychical eroticism destroys 
 her psychical existence. Ordinary sexuality regards the 
 woman only as a means of gratifying passion or of begetting 
 children. The higher eroticism is merciless to the woman, 
 requiring her to be merely the vehicle of a projected per- 
 sonaHty, or the mother of psychical children. Love is not 
 only anti-logical, as it denies the objective truth of the 
 woman and requires only an illusory image of her, but it 
 is anti-ethical with regard to her. 
 
 I am far from despising the heights to which this 
 eroticism may reach, as, for instance, in Madonna worship. 
 Who could blind his eyes to the amazing phenomenon 
 presented by Dante ? It was an extraordinary transference 
 of his own ideal to the person of a concrete woman whom 
 the artist had seen only once and when she was a young 
 girl, and who for all he knew might have grown up into a 
 Xantippe. (The complete neglect of whatever worth the 
 woman herself might have had, in order that she might 
 better serve as the vehicle of his projected conception of 
 worthiness, was never more clearly exhibitecjf^ And the 
 three-fold immorality of this higher eroticism becomes more 
 plain than ever. It is an unlimited selfishness with regard 
 to the actual woman, as she is wholly" rejected for the ideal 
 
250 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 woman. It is a felony towards the lover himself, inasmuch 
 as he detaches virtue and worthiness from himself ; and it 
 is a deliberate turning away from the truth, a preferring of 
 sham to reality. 
 
 The last form in which the immorality reveals itself is that 
 love prevents the worthlessness of woman from being 
 realised, inasmuch as it always replaced her by an imaginary 
 projection. Madonna worship itself is fundamentally im- 
 moral, inasmuch as it is a shutting of the eyes to truth. 
 The Madonna worship of the great artists is a destruction 
 of woman, and is possible only by a complete neglect of 
 the women as they exist in experience, a replacement of 
 actuality by a symbol, a re-creation of woman to serve the 
 purposes of man, and a murder of woman as she exists. 
 ^' When a particular man attracts a particular woman the 
 ir^fluence is not his beauty. Only man has an instinct for 
 beauty, and the ideals of both manly beauty and of womanly 
 beauty have been created by man, not by woman.N The 
 qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of developed 
 sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the 
 higher mind. Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper, 
 and her worship is permeated with a fear like that of a bird 
 for a snake, of a man for the fabled Medusa head, as she 
 feels that the object of her adoration is the power that will 
 destroy herj 
 
 The course of my argument is now apparent. As logic 
 and ethics have a relation only to man, it was not to be 
 expected that woman would stand in any better position 
 with regard to aesthetics. Esthetics and logic are closely 
 interconnected, as is apparent in philosophy, in mathe- 
 matics, in artistic work, and in music. I have now shown 
 the intimate relation of aesthetics to ethics. As Kant 
 showed, aesthetics, just as much as ethics and logic, depend 
 on the free will of the subject. As the woman has not 
 free will, she cannot have the faculty of projecting beauty 
 outside herself. 
 
 The foregoing involves the proposition that woman 
 cannot love. Women have made no ideal of man to 
 
EROTICS AND iESTHETICS 251 
 
 correspond with the male conception of the Madonna. 
 What woman requires from man is not purity, chastity, 
 morahty, but something else, -d^oman is incapable of 
 desiring virtue in a man^ 
 
 It is almost an insoluble riddle that woman, herself 
 incapable of love, should attract the love of man. It has 
 seemed to me a possible myth or parable, that in the begin- 
 ning, when men became men by some miraculous act of 
 God, a soul was bestowed only on them. Men, when they 
 love, are partly conscious of this deep injustice to woman, 
 and make the fruitless but heroic effort to give her their 
 own soul. But such a speculation is outside the limits of 
 either science or philosophy. 
 
 [l have now shown what woman does not wish ; there 
 remains to show what she does wish, and how this wi^h is 
 diametrically opposed to the will of man} 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 The nature of woman and her significance 
 in the universe 
 
 ** Erst Mann und Weib zusammen 
 Machen den Menschen aus," — Kant. 
 
 The further we go in the analysis of woman's claim to 
 esteem the more we must deny her of what is lofty and 
 noble, great and beautiful. As this chapter is about to take 
 the deciding and most extreme step in that direction, I 
 should like to make a few remarks as to my position. The 
 last thing I wish to advocate is the Asiatic standpoint with 
 regard to the treatment of women. Those who have care- 
 fully followed my remarks as to the injustice that all forms 
 of sexuality and erotics visit on woman will surely see that 
 this work is not meant to plead for the harem. But it 
 is quite possible to desire the legal equality of men and 
 women without believing in their moral and intellectual 
 equality, just as in condemning to the utmost any harsh- 
 ness in the male treatment of the female sex, one does not 
 overlook the tremendous, cosmic, contrast and organic 
 differences between them. There are no men in whom 
 there is no trace of the transcendent, who are altogether 
 bad ; and there is no woman of whom that could truly be 
 said. However degraded a man may be, he is immeasur- 
 ably above the most superior woman, so much so that 
 comparison and classification of the two are impossible ; 
 but even so, no one has any right to denounce or defame 
 woman, however inferior she must be considered. A 
 true adjustment of the claims for legal equality can be 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 253 
 
 undertaken on no other basis than the recognition of a 
 complete, deep-seated polar opposition of the sexes. I trust 
 that I may escape confusion of my views as to woman with 
 the superficial doctrine of P. J. Möbius — a doctrine only 
 interesting as a brave reaction against the general tendency. 
 Women are not " physiologically weak-minded," and I 
 cannot share the view that women of conspicuous ability 
 are to be regarded as morbid specimens. 
 
 From a moral point of view one should only be glad to 
 recognise in these women (who are always more masculine 
 than the rest) the exact opposite of degeneration, that is to 
 say, it must be acknowledged that they have made a step 
 forward and gained a victory over themselves ; from the 
 biological standpoint they are just as little or as much 
 phenomena of degeneration as are womanish men (unethi- 
 cally considered). Intermediate sexual forms are normal, 
 not pathological phenomena, in all classes of organisms, 
 and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence. 
 
 /Woman is neither high-minded nor low-minded, strong- 
 minded nor weak-minded. She is the opposite of all these. 
 Mind cannot be predicated of her at all ; she is mindless. 
 That, however, does not imply weak-mmdedness in the 
 ordinary sense of the term, the absence of the capacity to 
 "get her bearings" in ordinary everyday life. Cunning, 
 calculation, "cleverness," are much more usual and con- 
 stant in the woman than in the man, if there be a personal 
 selfish end in view. A woman is never so stupid as a man 
 can be.\ 
 
 But has woman no meaning at all ? Has she no general 
 purpose in the scheme of the world ? Has she not a 
 destiny ; and, in spite of all her senselessness and emptiness, 
 a significance in the universe ? 
 
 Has she a mission, or is her existence an accident and 
 an absurdity ? 
 
 In order to understand her meaning, it is necessary to 
 start from a phenomenon which, although old and well 
 recognised, has never received its proper meed of con- 
 sideration. It is from nothing more nor less than the 
 
254 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 phenomenon of match-making from which we may be able 
 to infer most correctly the real nature of woman. 
 
 Its analysis shows it to be the force which brings together 
 and helps forward two people in their knowledge of one 
 another, which helps them to a sexual union, whether in the 
 form of marriage or not. This desire to brmg about an 
 understanding between two people is possessed by all women 
 from their earliest childhood ; the very youngest girls are 
 always ready to act as messengers for their sisters' lovers. 
 And if tlie instinct of match-making can be indulged in only 
 after the particular woman in question has brought about 
 her own consummation in marriage, it is none the less 
 present before that time, and the only things which are at 
 work against it are her jealousy of her contemporaries, and 
 her anxiety about their chances with regard to her lover, 
 until she has finally secured him by reason of her money,, 
 her social position, and so forth. 
 
 As soon as women have got rid of their own case by 
 their own marriage, they hasten to help the sons and 
 daughters of their acquaintances to marry. The fact that 
 older women, in whom the desire for sexual satisfaction 
 has died out, are such match-makers is so fully recog- 
 nised that the idea has wrongly spread that they are the 
 only real match-makers. 
 
 They urge not only women but men to marry, a man's 
 own mother often being the most active and persistent 
 advocate of his marriage. It is the desire and purpose of 
 every mother to see her son married, without any thought 
 of his individual taste ; a wish which some have been 
 blind enough to regard as another charm in maternal 
 love, of which such a poor account was given in an earlier 
 chapter. It is possible that many mothers may hope that 
 their sons should obtain permanent happiness through 
 marriage, however unfit they may be for it ; but un- 
 doubtedly this hope is absent with the majority, and in 
 any case it is the match-making instinct, the sheer objection 
 to bachelordom, which is the strongest motive of all. 
 
 It is clear that women obey a purely instinctive, 
 
! WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 255 
 
 inherent impulse, when they try to get their daughters 
 married. 
 
 It is certainly not for logical, and only in a small degree 
 for material reasons, that they go to such lengths to attain 
 their ends, and it is certainly not because of any desire ex- 
 pressed by their daughters (very often it is in direct opposi- 
 tion to the girl's choice) ; and since the match-making instinct 
 is not confined to the members of a woman's own family, 
 it is impossible to speak of it as being part of the '* altruistic " 
 or " moral " attitude of maternal love ; although most 
 women if they were charged with match-making projects 
 would undoubtedly answer " that it is their duty to think 
 of the future welfare of their dear children." 
 
 A mother makes no difference in arranging a marriage 
 for her own daughter and for any other girl, and is just as 
 glad to do it for the latter if it does not mterfere with the 
 interests of her own family ; it is the same thing, match- 
 making throughout, and there is no psychological difference 
 in making a match for her own daughter and doing the 
 same thing for a stranger. I would even go so far as to say 
 that a mother is not inconsolable if a «stranger, however 
 common and undesirable, desires and seduces her daughter. 
 
 The attitude of one sex to certain traits of the other can 
 often be applied as a criterion as to how far certain pecu- 
 liarities of character are exclusively the property of the one 
 sex or are shared by the other. So far, we have had to deny 
 to women many characters which they would gladly claim, 
 but which are exclusively masculine ; in match-making^ 
 however, we have a characteristic which is really and ex- 
 clusively feminine, the exceptions being either in the case 
 of very womanish men or else special instances which will 
 be fully dealt with later on, in chap. xiii. Every real man 
 will have nothing to do with this instinct in his wife, even 
 when his own daughters, whom he would gladly see settled 
 in life, are concerned ; he dislikes and despises the whole 
 business, and leaves it entirely to his wife, as being altogether 
 in her province. This is a striking instance of a purely 
 feminine psychical characteristic, being not only unattractive 
 
256 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 to a man, but even repulsive to him when he is aware of it : 
 while the male characteristics in themselves are sufficient 
 to please the female, man has to denude woman of hers 
 before he can love her. 
 
 But the match-making instinct exerts a much deeper and 
 more important influence on the nature of woman than can 
 be gathered from the little I have said on this subject. I 
 wish now to draw attention to woman's attitude at a play : 
 she is always waiting to see if the hero and heroine, the 
 lovers in the piece, will quarrel. This is nothing but match- 
 making, and psychologically does not differ a hair from it : 
 it is the ever present desire to see the man and woman 
 united. But that is not all ; the tremendous excitement 
 with which women await the crucial point in a decent or 
 indecent book is due to nothing less than the desire to see 
 the sexual union of the principal characters, and is coupled 
 with an actual excitation at the thought, and positive 
 appreciation of the force which is behind sexual union. It 
 is not possible to state this formally and logically, the only 
 thing is to try and understand how it is that the two things 
 are psychologically one with women. The mother's ex- 
 citement on her daughter's wedding-day is of the same 
 quality as that engendered by reading a story by Prevost, or 
 Sudermann's ** Katzensteg." It is quite true that men are 
 very interested by novels which end in sexual union, but 
 in quite a different way from women ; they thoroughly 
 appreciate the sexual act in imagination, but they do not 
 follow the gradual approach of the two people concerned 
 from the very beginning ; and their interest does not grow, 
 as woman's does, in constant proportion to the reciprocal 
 value which the two people have for one another. 
 
 The breathless pleasure with which the various obstacles 
 are overcome, the feeling of disappointment at each 
 thwarting of the sexual purpose, is altogether womanish 
 and unmanly ; but it is always present with woman. She 
 is continually on the watch for sexual developments, whether 
 in real life or in literature. Has no one ever wondered 
 why women are so keen and " disinterested " about bringing 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 257 
 
 other men and women together ? 'QThe satisfaction they 
 derive from it arises from a personal stimulus at the thought 
 of the sexual union of others> 
 
 But the full extent to which match-making influences the 
 point of view of all women is not yet fully grasped. On 
 a summer evening when lovers may be seen in dark 
 corners of public places, or on the seats and banks round 
 about, it is always the women who wilfully and curiously 
 try to see what is happening, whilst men who have to pass 
 that way do so unwillingly, looking the other way, because 
 of a sense of intrusion. Just in the same way it is women 
 who turn in the streets to look at nearly every couple they 
 meet, and gaze after them. This espionage and turning 
 round are none the less " match-making," because they are 
 sub-conscious acts. If a man does not want to see a thing 
 he turns his back on it, and does not look round ; but 
 women are glad to see two people in love with one another, 
 and take pleasure in surprising them in their love-making, 
 because of their innate and super-personal desire that sexual 
 union should occur. 
 
 But man, as was seen much further back, only cares for 
 that which has a positive value. A woman when she sees 
 two lovers together is always awaiting developments, that 
 is to say, she expects, anticipates, hopes, and desires an 
 outcome. I know an elderly married woman who listened 
 expectantly at the door for some time, when a servant of 
 hers had allowed her sweetheart to come into her room, 
 before ?he walked in and gave her notice. 
 
 The idea of union is always eagerly grasped and never 
 repelled whatever form it may take (even where animals are 
 concerned).* She experiences no disgust at the nauseating 
 details of the subject, and makes no attempt to think of 
 anything pleasanter. This accounts for a great deal of 
 what is so apparently mysterious in the psychic life of 
 woman. Her wish for the activity of her own sexual life is 
 her strongest impulse, but it is only a special case of her 
 
 * The one apparent exception to this rule is fully discussed in 
 this chapter. 
 
 R 
 
258 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 deep, her only vital interest, the interest that sexual unions 
 shall take place ; the wish that as much of it as possible 
 shall occur, in all cases, places, and times. 
 
 This universal desire may either be concentrated on the 
 act itself or on the (possible) child ; in the first case, the 
 woman is of the prostitute type and participates merely for 
 the sake of the act ; in the second, she is of the mother type, 
 but not merely with the idea of bearing children herself ; 
 she desires that every marriage she knows of or has helped 
 to bring about should be fruitful, and the nearer she is to 
 the absolute mother the more conspicuous is this idea ; the 
 real mother is also the real grandmother (even if she remains 
 a virgin ; Johann Tesman's marvellous portrayal of " Tante 
 Jule" in Ibsen's " Hedda Gabler" is an example of what I 
 mean). Every real mother has the same purpose, that of 
 helping on matrimony ; she is the mother of all mankind ; 
 she welcomes every pregnancy. 
 
 The prostitute does not want other women to be with 
 child, but to be prostitutes like herself. 
 
 A woman's relations with married men show how she 
 subordinates her own sexuality to her match-making in- 
 stinct, the latter being the dominant power. 
 
 Woman objects more strongly to bachelordom than any- 
 thing else, because she is altogether a match-maker, and this 
 makes her try to get men to marry ; but if a man is already 
 married she at once loses most of her interest in him, how- 
 ever much she liked him before. If the woman herself is 
 already married, that is to say, when each man she meets is 
 not a possible solution to her own fate, one would not 
 imagine that a married man would find less favour with her 
 because he was married than when he was a bachelor if 
 the woman herself is unfaithful ; but women seldom carry 
 on an intrigue with another woman's husband, except 
 when they wish to triumph over her by making him neglect 
 her. This shows that the disposition of woman is towards 
 the fact of pairing ; when men are already paired she 
 seldom attempts to make them unfaithful, for the fact of their 
 being paired has satisfied her instinct. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 259 
 
 V^This match-making is the most common characteristic of 
 the human female ; the wish to become a mother-in-law is 
 much more general than even the desire to become a mother, 
 the intensity and extent of which is usually over-rate(5i 
 
 My readers may possibly not understand the emphasis I 
 have laid on a phenomenon which is usually looked upon 
 as amusing as it is disgusting ; and it may be thought that 
 I have given undue importance to it. 
 
 But let us see why I have done so. Match-making is 
 essentially the phenomenon of all others which gives us the 
 key to the nature of woman, and we must not, as has always 
 been the case, merely acknowledge the fact and pass on, 
 but we should try to analyse and explain it. One of our 
 commonest phrases runs : " Every woman is a bit of a 
 match-maker." 
 
 But we must remember that in this, and nothing else, lies 
 the actual essence of woman. After mature consideration 
 of the most varied types of women and with due regard 
 to the special classes besides those which I have dis- 
 cussed, I am of opinion that the only positively general 
 female characteristic is that of match-making,<^that is, her 
 uniform willingness to further the idea of sexual unior^. 
 
 Any definition of the nature of woman which goes no 
 further than to declare that she has the strong instinct for 
 her own union would be too narrow ; any definition that 
 would link her instincts to the child or to the husband, or 
 to both, would be too wide. The most general and com- 
 prehensive statement of the nature of woman is that it is 
 completely adapted and disposed for the special mission of 
 aiding and abetting the bodily union of the sexes. All 
 women are match-makers, and this property of the woman 
 to be the advocate of the idea of pairing is the only one 
 which is found in women of all ages, in youn^ girls, in 
 adults, and in the aged. The old woman is no longer 
 interested in her own union, but she devotes herself to the 
 pairing of others. This habit of the old woman is nothing 
 new, it is only the continuance of her enduring instinct 
 surviving the complications that were caused when her 
 
26o SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 personal interests came into conflict with her general desire ; 
 it is the now unselfish pursuit of the impersonal idea. 
 
 It is convenient to recapitulate at this point what my 
 investigation has shown as to the sexuality of women. /I 
 have shown that woman is engrossed exclusively by 
 sexuality, not intermittently, but throughout her life ; that 
 her whole being, bodily and mental, is nothing but sexu- 
 ality itself. I added, moreover, that she was so constituted 
 that her whole body and being continually were in sexual 
 relations with her environment, and that just as the sexual 
 organs were the centre of woman physically, so the sexual 
 idea was the centre of her mental nature^ The idea of pairing 
 is the only conception which has positive worth for women. 
 The woman is the bearer of the thought of the continuity 
 of the species. The high value which she attaches to the 
 idea of pairing is not selfish and individual, it is super- 
 individual, and, if I may be forgiven the desecration of the 
 phrase, it is the transcendental function of woman. And 
 just as femaleness is no more than the embodiment of the 
 idea of pairing, so is it sexuality in the abstract. Pairing is 
 the supreme good for the woman ; she seeks to effect it 
 always and everywhere. Her personal sexuality is only a 
 special case of this universal, generalised, impersonal 
 instinct. 
 
 The effort of woman to realise this idea of pairing is so 
 fundamentally opposed to that conception of innocence 
 and purity, the higher virginity which man's erotic nature 
 has demanded from women, that not all his erotic incense 
 would have obscured her real nature but for one factor. I 
 have now to explain this factor which has veiled from man 
 the true nature of woman, and which in itself is one of the 
 deepest problems of woman, I mean her absolute duplicity. 
 Her pairing instinct and her duplicity, the latter so great as 
 to conceal even from woman herself what is the real 
 essence of her nature, must be explained together. 
 
 All that may have seemed like clear gain is now again 
 called into question. Self-observation was found lacking 
 in women, and yet there certainly are women who observe 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 261 
 
 very closely all that happens to them. They were denied 
 the love of truth, and yet one knows many women who 
 would not tell a lie for anything. It has been said that 
 they are lacking in consciousness of guilt ; but there are 
 many women who reproach themselves bitterly for most 
 trifling matters, besides " penitents " who mortify their 
 flesh. Modesty was left to man, but what is to be said of 
 the womanly modesty, that bashfulness, which, according to 
 Hamerling, only women have ? Is there no foundation for 
 the way in which the idea has grown and found such 
 acceptance ? And then again : Can religion be absent, in 
 spite ot so many " professing " women ? Are we to exclude 
 all women from the moral purity, all the womanly virtues, 
 which poets and historians have ascribed to her ? Are we 
 to say that woman is merely sexual, that sexuality only 
 receives its proper due from her when it is so well known 
 that women are shocked at the slightest allusion to sexual 
 matters, that instead of giving way to it they are often 
 irritated and disgusted at the idea of impurity, and quite 
 often detest sexual union for themselves and regard it just 
 as many men do ? 
 
 It is, of course, manifest that one and the same point is 
 bound up in all these antitheses, and on the answer given 
 to them depends the finai and decisive judgment on 
 woman. And it is clear that if only one single female 
 creature were really asexual, or could be shown to have a 
 real relationship to the idea of personal moral worth, every- 
 thing that I have said about woman, its general value as 
 psychically characteristic of the sex, would be irretrievably 
 demolished, and the whole position which this book has 
 taken up would be shattered at one blow. 
 
 These apparently contradictory phenomena must be 
 satisfactorily explained, and it must be shown that what is 
 at the bottom ot it ail and makes it seem so equivocal arises 
 from the very nature of woman whicti 1 have been trying 
 to explain all along. 
 
 In order to understand these fallacious contradictions 
 one must first of all remember the tremendous " accessi- 
 
262 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 bility," to use another word, the " impressionability," of 
 women, -^heir extraordinary aptitude for anything new, 
 and their easy acceptance of other people's views have not 
 yet been sufficiently emphasised in this bool^ 
 
 /As a rule, the woman adapts herself to the man, his 
 views become hers, his likes and dislikes are shared by 
 her, every word he says is an incentive to her, and the 
 stronger his sexual influence on her the more this is so. 
 Woman does not perceive that this influence which 
 man has on her causes her to deviate from the line 
 of her own development ; she does not look upon it as a 
 sort of unwarrantable intrusion ; she does not try to shake 
 off what is really an invasion of her private life ; she is not 
 ashamed of being receptive ; on the contrary, she is really 
 pleased when she can be so, and prefer^ man to mould her 
 mentally. She rejoices in being dependent, and her 
 expectatioiis-fr£)m.m.an resolve themselves i nto the m oment 
 w hen she may_ bg_p£if£cily43assi-ve. 
 
 But it is not only from her lover (although she would 
 like that best), but also from her father and mother, uncles 
 and aunts, brothers and sisters, near relations and distant ac- 
 quaintances, that a woman takes what she thinks and believes, 
 being only too glad to get her opinions " ready made." 
 
 It is not only inexperienced girls but even elderly and 
 married women who copy each other in everj'thing, from 
 the nice new dress or pretty coiffure down to the places 
 where they get their things, and the very recipes by which 
 they cook. 
 
 And it never seems to occur to them that they are doing 
 something derogatory on their part, as it ought to do if 
 they possessed an individuality of their own and strove to 
 work out their own salvation. A woman's thoughts and 
 actions have no definite, independent relations to things in 
 themselves ; they are not the result of the reaction of her 
 individuality to the world. They accept what is imposed 
 on them gladly, and adhere to it with the greatest firmness. 
 That is why woman is so intolerant when there has been a 
 breach of conventional laws. I must guote an amusing 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 263 
 
 instance, bearing on this side of woman's character, from 
 Herbert Spencer. It is the custom in various tribes of 
 Indians in North and South America for the men to hunt 
 and fight and leave all the laborious and menial tasks to 
 their wives. The Dakotan women are so imbued with the 
 idea of the reasonableness and fitness of this arrangement 
 that, instead of feeling injured by it, the greatest insult that 
 one of these women can offer to another would be implied 
 in some such words as follows ; " You disgraceful creature. 
 ... I saw your husband carrying home wood for the fires. 
 What was his wife doing that he had to demean himself by 
 doing woman's work ? " 
 
 <^ The extraordinary way in which woman can be influenced 
 b^ external agencies is similar in its nature to her suggesti- 
 bility, which is far greater and more general than man's ; 
 they are both in accordance with woman's desire to play 
 the passive and never the active part in the sexual act and 
 all that leads to it.*.\ 
 
 It is the universal passivity of woman's nature which 
 makes her accept and assume man's valuations of things, 
 although these are utterly at variance with her nature. 
 The way in which woman can be impregnated with the 
 masculine point of view, the saturation of her innermost 
 thoughts with a foreign element, her false recognition of 
 morahty, which cannot be called hypocrisy because it does 
 not conceal anything anti-moral, her assumption and prac- 
 tise of things which in themselves are not in her realm, are 
 all very well if the woman does not try to use her own 
 judgment, and they succeed in keeping up the fiction of 
 her superior morality. Complications first arise when these 
 acquired valuations come into collision with the only inborn, 
 genuine, and universally feminine valuation, the supreme 
 value she sets on pairing. 
 
 Woman's acceptance of pairing as the supreme good is 
 quite unconscious on her part. As she has no sense of 
 
 * The quiescent, inactive, large egg-cells are sought out by the 
 mobile, active, and slender spermatozoa. 
 
264 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 individuality she has nothing to contrast with oairing ; and 
 so, unlike man, she cannot realise its significance, or even 
 notice the presence in herself of this instinct. 
 
 No woman knows, or ever has known, or ever will 
 know, what she does when she enters into association with 
 man. Femaleness is identical with pairing, and a woman 
 would have to get outside herself in order to see and under- 
 stand that she pairs. Thus it is that the deepest desire of 
 woman, all that she means, and all that she is, remain 
 unrecognised by her. There is nothing, then, to prevent 
 the male negative valuation of pairing overshadowing the 
 female positive valuation of it in the consciousness of the 
 woman. The susceptibility of woman is so great that 
 she can even act in opposition to what she is, to the one 
 thing on which she really sets a positive value ! 
 
 But the imposture which she enacts when she allows 
 herself to be incorporated with man's opinions of sexuality 
 and shamelessness, even of the miposture itself, and when 
 she uses the masculine standard for her actions, is such a 
 colossal fraud that she is never conscious of it ; she has 
 acquired a second nature, without even guessing that it is 
 not her real one ; she takes herself seriously, believes she is 
 something and that she believes in something ; she is con- 
 vinced of the sincerity and originality of her moralisings and 
 opinions; the lie is as deeply rooted as that; it is organic. I 
 cannot do better than speak of the ontological untruthfulness 
 of woman. 
 
 Wolfram von Eschenbach says of his hero : 
 
 " . . .So keusch und rein 
 Ruht' er bei seiner Königin, 
 Dass kein Genügen fand' darin 
 So manches Weib beim lieben Mann. 
 Dass doch so manche in Gedanken 
 Zur Üppigkeit will überschwanken, 
 Die sonst sich spröde zeigen kann ! 
 Vor Fremden züchtig sie erscheinen. 
 Doch ist des Herzens tiefstes Meinen 
 Das Widerspiel vom äussern Schein." 
 
 Wolfram indicates clearly enough what is at the bottom 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 265 
 
 of woman's heart, but he does not say all that is to be said. 
 Women deceive themselves as well as others on this point. 
 One cannot artificially suppress and supplant one's real 
 nature, the physical as well as the other side, without some- 
 thing happening. The hygienic penalty that must be paid 
 for woman's denial of her real nature is hysteria. 
 
 Of all the neurotic and psychic phenomena, those of 
 hysteria are the most fascinating for psychologists ; they 
 represent a far more difficult and, therefore, a more interest- 
 ing study than those observed in melancholia or in simple 
 paranoia. 
 
 The majority of psychiatrists have a distrust of psycho- 
 logical analyses which it is not easy for them to shake off ; 
 every statement of pathological alteration of tissues or 
 intoxication by certain means is for them a limine credible ; 
 it is only in psychical matters that they refuse to recognise 
 a primary cause. But since no reason has so far been 
 given why psychical phenomena should be of importance 
 secondary to physical phenomena, it is quite justifiable to 
 disregard such prejudices. 
 
 It is quite possible — there is nothing to prevent it being 
 so — that a very great deal, perhaps everything, may depend 
 on the proper interpretation of the " psychical mechanism " 
 of hysteria. That this is so is proved by the fact that the 
 few conclusions of any value with reference to hysteria so 
 far discovered have been arrived at in this way ; the inves- 
 tigations carried out by Pierre Janet, Oskar Vogt, and 
 particularly by J. Breuer and S. Freud, show what I mean. 
 All good work on hysteria will undoubtedly follow the lines 
 these men have worked on ; that is to say, by investigation 
 of the psychological processes which led up to the disease. 
 
 I believe myself that what may be called a psycho- 
 logical sexual traumatism is at the root of hysteria. The 
 typical picture of a hysterical case is not very different 
 from the following : A woman has always accepted the 
 male views on sexual matters ; they are in reality totally 
 foreign to her nature, and sometime, by some chance, out of 
 the conflict between what her nature asserts to be true and 
 
266 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 what she has always accepted as true and beUeved to be 
 true, there comes what may be called a " wounding of the 
 mind." It is thus possible for the person affected to declare 
 a sexual desire to be an " extraneous body in her conscious- 
 ness," a sensation which she thinks she detests, but which 
 in reality has its origin in her own nature. The tremendous 
 intensity with which she endeavours to suppress the desire 
 (and which only serves to increase it) so that she may the 
 more vehemently and indignantly reject the thought — these 
 are the alternations which are seen in hysteria. And the 
 chronic untruthfulness of woman becomes acute if the 
 woman has ever allowed herself to be imbued with man's 
 ethically negative valuation of sexuality. It is well known 
 that hysterical women manifest the strongest suggestibility 
 with men. Hysteria is the organic crisis of the organic 
 untruthfulness of woman. 
 
 I do not deny that there are hysterical men, but these are 
 comparatively few ; and since man's psychic possibilities 
 are endless, that of becoming "female " is amongst them, 
 and, therefore, he can be hysterical. There are undoubtedly 
 many untruthful men, but in them the crisis takes a different 
 form, man's untruthfulness being of a different kind and 
 never so hopeless in character as woman's. 
 
 This examination mto the organic untruthfulness of 
 woman, into her inability to be honest about herself which 
 alone makes it possible for her to think that she thinks 
 what is really totally opposed to her nature, appears to me 
 to offer a satisfactory explanation of those difficulties which 
 the aetiology of hysteria present. 
 
 Hysteria shows that untruthfulness, however far it may 
 reach, cannot suppress everything. By education or environ- 
 ment woman adopts a whole system of ideas and valuations 
 which are foreign to her, or, rather, has patiently submitted 
 to have them impressed on her ; and it would need a 
 tremendous shock to get rid of this strongly-rooted psychical 
 complexity, and to transplant woman to that condition of 
 intellectual helplessness which is so characteristic of 
 hysteria. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 267 
 
 An extraordinary shock suffices to destroy the artificial 
 structure, and to place woman in the arena to undertake a 
 fight between her unconscious, oppressed nature, and her 
 certainly conscious but unnatural mind. The see-sawing 
 which now begins between the two explains the unusual 
 psychic discontinuity during the hysterical phase, the con- 
 tinual changes of mood, none of which are subject to the 
 control of a dominant, central, controlling nucleus of indi- 
 viduality. It is extraordinary how many contradictions 
 can co-exist in the hysterical. Sometimes they are highly 
 intelligent and able to judge correctly and keenly oppose 
 hypnotism and so forth. Then, again, they are excited by 
 most trivial causes, and are most subject to hypnotic trances. 
 Sometimes they are abnormally chaste, at other times 
 extremely sensual. 
 
 All this is no longer difficult to explain. The absolute 
 sincerity, the painful love of truth, the avoidance of every- 
 thing sexual, the careful judgment, and the strength of 
 will — all these form part of that spurious personality which 
 woman in her passivity has taken upon herself to exhibit 
 to herself and to the world at large. Everything that 
 belongs to her original temperament and her real sense 
 form that " other self," that " unconscious mind " which can 
 delight in obscurities and which is so open to suggestion. 
 
 It has been endeavoured to show that in what is known 
 as the " duplex " and " multiplex personality," the " double 
 conscience," the " dual ego," lies one of the strongest 
 arguments against the belief in the soul. As a matter 
 of fact, these phenomena are the very reasons why we 
 ought to believe in a soul. The " dividing up of the 
 personality " is only possible when there never has been 
 a personality, as with woman. All the celebrated cases 
 which Janet has described in his book, " L'Automatisme 
 Psychologique," concern women, not in a single instance 
 man. It is only woman who, minus soul or an intelligible 
 ego, has not the power to become conscious of what is in 
 her ; who cannot throw the light of truth on her inmost 
 self ; who can by her completely passive inundation by a 
 
268 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 consciousness belonging to another, allow what is in her 
 own nature to be suppressed by an extraneous element ; 
 who can display the hysterical phenomena described by 
 Janet. Hysteria is the bankruptcy of this superficial sham 
 self which has been put on, and the woman becomes for 
 the time being a tabula rasa, whilst the working in her of 
 her own genuine nature appears to her as something coming 
 from without. This apparent " secondary personality," this 
 " foreign body in the consciousness," this false self, is, in 
 reality, the true female nature, sexuality itself appearing, 
 and a proper understanding of this fact, and of the com- 
 plications that must ensue from the ebbings and fiowings of 
 the false, supposed to be true, and the true supposed to be 
 false, lie at the root of the most difficult phenomena of 
 hysteria. 
 
 Woman's incapacity for truth — which I hold to be con- 
 sequent on her lack of free will with regard to the truth, in 
 accordance with Kant's " Indetermmism " — conditions her 
 falsity. Any one who has had anything to do with women 
 knows how often they give offhand quite patently untrue 
 reasons for what they have said or done, under the momen- 
 tary necessity of answering a question. It is, however, 
 hysterical subjects who are most careful to avoid unveracity 
 (in a most marked and premeditated way before strangers) ; 
 but however paradoxical it may sound it is exactly in this 
 that their untruthfulness lies ! They do not know that this 
 desire for truth has come to them from outside and is no 
 part of their real nature. 
 
 They have slavishly accepted the postulate of morality, 
 and, therefore, wish to show at every opportunity, like a good 
 servant, how faithfully they follow instructions. 
 
 It is always suspicious when a man is frequently spoken 
 of as exceptionally trustworthy : he must have gone out of 
 his way to let people know it, and it would be safe to wager 
 that in reahty he is a rogue. No confidence must be placed 
 in the genuineness of hysterical morality, which doctors (no 
 doubt in good faith) often emphasise by remarks as to 
 the high moral position of their patients. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 269 
 
 I repeat : hysterical patients do not consciously simulate. 
 It can only be made clear to them by suggestion that they 
 actually have been simulating, and all the " confessions" of 
 the dissimulation can only be explained in the same way. 
 Otherwise they believe in their own natural honesty and 
 morality. Neither are the various things which torture 
 them imaginary; it is much more likely that in the fact 
 that they feel them, and that the symptoms first disappear 
 with what Breuer calls "catharsis " (the successive bringing 
 to their consciousness of the true causes of their illness by 
 hypnotism), lies the proof of their organic untruthfulness. 
 
 The self-accusations which hysterical people are so full 
 of are nothing but unconscious dissimulation. The sense 
 of guilt, which is equally poignant in great and most 
 trifling things, cannot be genuine ; if the hysterical self- 
 torturers possessed a standard of morality for themselves 
 and others they would not be so indiscriminate in their 
 self-accusations, and not cast as much blame on themselves 
 for a slight error as for real wrong-doing. 
 
 The most distingishing character of the unconscious un- 
 truthfulness of their self-reproaches is their habit of telling 
 others how wicked they are, what terrible things they have 
 done, and then they ask if they (the hysterical) are not hope- 
 lessly abandoned sort of people. No one who really feels 
 remorse could talk in such a way. The fallacy of repre- 
 senting the hysterical as being eminently moral is one which 
 even Breuer and Freud have shared. The h^^sterical simply 
 become imbued with moral ideas which are foreign to them 
 in their normal state. They subordinate themselves to this 
 code, they cease to prove things for themselves, they no 
 longer exercise their own judgment. 
 
 Probably these hysterical subjects approach more closely 
 than any other natures to the moral ideal of the social and 
 utilitarian ethics which regard a lie as moral if it is for the 
 good of society or of the race. Hysterical women realise 
 that ideal ontogenetically inasmuch as their standard of 
 morality comes from without, not from within, and prac- 
 tically as they appear to act most readily from altruistic 
 
270 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 motives. For them duty towards others is not merely 
 a special application of duty towards oneself. 
 
 The untruthfulness of the hysterical is proportional to 
 their belief in their own accuracy. From their complete 
 inability to attain personal truth, to be honest about them- 
 selves — the hysterical never think for themselves, they want 
 other people to think about them, they want to arouse the 
 interest of others — it follows that the hysterical are the 
 best mediums for hypnotic purposes. But any one who 
 allows him or herself to be hypnotised is doing the most 
 immoral thing possible. It is yielding to complete slavery ; 
 it is a renunciation of the will and consciousness ; it means 
 allowing another person to do what he likes with the sub- 
 ject. Hypnosis shows how all possibility of truth depends 
 upon the wish to be truthful, but it must be the real wish of 
 the person concerned : when a hypnotised person is told to 
 do something, he does it when he comes out of the trance, 
 and if asked his reasons will give a plausible motive on the 
 spot, not only before others, but he will justify his action 
 to himself by quite fanciful reasons. In this we have, so to 
 speak, an experimental proof of Kant's " Ethical Code." 
 
 All women can be hypnotised and like being hypnotised, 
 but this proclivity is exaggerated in hysterical women. 
 Even the memory of definite events in their life can be 
 destroyed by the mere suggestion of the hypnotiser. 
 Breuer's experiments on hypnotised patients show clearly 
 that the consciousness of guilt in them is not deeply seated, 
 as otherwise it could not be got rid of at the mere sugges- 
 tion of the hypnotiser. But the sham conviction of 
 responsibility, so readily exhibited by women of hysterical 
 constitution, rapidly disappears at the moment when nature, 
 the sexual impulse, appears to drive through the superficial 
 restraints. In the hysterical paroxysm what happens is that 
 the woman, while no longer believing it altogether herself, 
 asseverates more and more loudly : "I do not want 
 that at all, some one not really me is forcing it on me, but 
 I do not want it at all." Every stimulation from outside 
 will now be brought into relation with that demand, which. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 271 
 
 as she partly believes, is being forced on her, but which, in 
 reality, corresponds with the deepest wish of her nature. 
 That is why women in a hysterical attack are so easily 
 seduced. The " attitudes passionelles " of the hysterical 
 are merely passionate repudiations of sexual desire, which are 
 loud merely because they are not real, and are more plaintive 
 than at other times because the danger is greater. It is 
 easy to understand why the sexual experiences of the time 
 preceding puberty play so large a part in acute hysteria. 
 The influence of extraneous moral views can be imposed 
 comparatively easily on the child, as they have little to 
 overcome in the almost unawakened state of the sexual incli- 
 nations. But, later on, the suppressed, although not wholly 
 vanquished, nature lays hold of these old experiences, rein- 
 terprets them in the light of the new contents of conscious- 
 ness, and the crisis takes place. The different forms that 
 the paroxysms assume and their shifting nature are due very 
 largely to the fact that the subject does not admit the true 
 cause, the presence of a sexual desire, any consciousness of 
 it being attributed by her to some extraneous influence, 
 some self that is not her " real self." 
 
 Medical observation or interpretation of hysteria is wrong ; 
 it allows itself to be deceived by the patients, who in turn 
 deceive themselves. It is not the rejecting ego but the 
 rejected which is the true and original nature of the hysterical 
 patients, however much they pretend to themselves and 
 others that it is foreign to them. 
 
 If the rejecting ego were really their natural ego they 
 could act in opposition to the disturbing element which 
 they say is foreign to them, and be fully conscious of it, and 
 differentiate and recognise it in their memory. But the 
 fraud is evident, because the rejecting ego is only borrowed, 
 and they lack the courage to look their own desire in the 
 face, although something seems to say that it is the real, 
 inborn, and only powerful one they have. Even the desire 
 itself has no real identity, for it is not seated in a real indi- 
 vidual, and, as it is suppressed, leaps, so to speak, from one 
 part of the body to the other. It may be that my attempt 
 
272 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 at an explanation will be thought fanciful, but at least it 
 appears to be true that the various forms of hysteria are 
 one and the same thing. This one thing is what the 
 hysterical patient will not admit is part of hei, although it 
 is what is pressing on her. If she were able to ascribe it to 
 herself and criticise it in the way in which she admits trivial 
 matters of another kind, she would be in a measure outside 
 and above her own experiences. The frantic rage of hys- 
 terical women at what they say is imposed on them by some 
 strange will, whilst it in reality is their own will, shows that 
 theyare just as much under the domination of sexuality as are 
 non-hysterical women, are just as subject to their destiny 
 and incapable of avertmg it, since they, too, are without 
 any intelligible, free ego. 
 
 But it may be asked, with reason, why all women are not 
 hysterical, since all women are liars ? This brings us to a 
 necessary inquiry as to the hysterical constitution. If my 
 theory has been on the right lines, it ought to be able to 
 give an answer in accordance with facts. According to it, 
 the hysterical woman is one who has passively accepted in 
 entirety the masculine and conventional valuations instead 
 of allowing her own mental character its proper play. The 
 woman who is not to be led is the antithesis of the hysterical 
 woman. I must not delay over this point ; it really belongs 
 to special female characterology. The hysterical woman is 
 hysterical because she is servile ; mentally she is identical 
 with the maid-servant. Her opposite (who does not really 
 exist) is the shrewish dame. So that women may be sub- 
 divided into the maid who serves, and the woman who 
 commands.* 
 
 The servant is born and not made, and there are many 
 women in good circumstances who are *' born servants," 
 although they never need to put their rightful position to 
 
 * We may find the analogy to this in men : there are masculine 
 " servants " who are so by nature, and there is the masculine 
 form of the shrew — e.g., the policeman. It is a noticeable 
 fact that a policeman usually finds his sexual complement in the 
 housemaid. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 273 
 
 the test ! The servant and the mistress are a sort of " com- 
 plete woman " when considered as a "whole."* 
 
 The consequences of this theory are fully borne out by 
 experience. The Xanthippe is the woman who has the 
 least resemblance to the hysterical type. She vents her 
 spleen (which is really the outcome of unsatisfied sexual 
 desires) on others, whereas the hysterical woman visits 
 hers on herself. The " shrew " detests other women, the 
 " servant " detests herself. The drudge weeps out her woes 
 alone, without really feeling lonely — loneliness is identical 
 with morality, and a condition which implies true duality or 
 manifoldness ; the shrew hates to be alone because she 
 must have some one to scold, whilst hysterical women vent 
 their passion on themselves. The shrew lies openly and 
 boldly but without knowing it, because it is her nature to 
 think herself always in the right, and she insults those who 
 contradict her. The servant submits wonderingly to the 
 demands made of her which are so foreign to her nature : 
 the hypocrisy of this pliant acquiescence is apparent in her 
 hysterical attacks when the conflict with her own sexual 
 emotions begins. It is because of this receptivity and sus- 
 ceptibility that hysteria and the hysterical type of woman 
 are so leniently dealt with : it is this type, and not the 
 shrewish type, that will be cited in opposition to my views.f 
 
 Untruthfulness, organic untruthfulness, characterises both 
 types, and accordingly all women. It is quite wrong to say 
 
 * A real dame would never dream of asking her husband what 
 she was to do, what she is to give him for dinner, &c. ; the hysteri- 
 cal woman, on the contrary, is always lacking in ideas, and wants 
 suggestions from others. This is a rough way of indicating the 
 two types. 
 
 f It is the " yielding type " and not the virago type of woman 
 that men think capable of love. Such a woman's love is only the 
 mental sense of satisfaction aroused by the maleness of some parti- 
 cular man, and, therefore, it is only possible with the hysterical ; it 
 has nothing to do with her individual power of loving, and can have 
 nothing to do with it. The bashfulness of woman is also due to 
 her " obsession " by one man ; this also causes her neglect of all 
 other men. 
 
274 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 that women lie. That would imply that they sometimes 
 speak the truth. Sincerity, pro foro interno et externo, is the 
 virtue of all others of which women are absolutely incapable, 
 which is impossible for them ! 
 
 The point I am urging is that woman is never genuine at 
 any period of her life, not even when she, in hysteria, 
 slavishly accepts the aspect of truth laid on her by another, 
 and apparently speaks in accordance with those demands. 
 
 A woman can laugh, cry, blush, or even look wicked at 
 will : the shrew, when she has some object in view ; the 
 " maid," when she has to make a decision for herself. Men 
 have not the organic and physiological qualifications for 
 such dissimulation. 
 
 If we are able to show that the supposed love of truth 
 in these types of woman is no more than their natural 
 hypocrisy in a mask, it is only to be expected that all the 
 other qualities for which woman has been praised will suffer 
 under analysis. Her modesty, her self-respect, and her 
 religious fervour are loudly acclaimed. Womanly modesty, 
 none the less, is nothing but prudery, i.e., an extravagant 
 denial and rejection of her natural immodesty. Whenever 
 a woman evinces any trace of what could really be called 
 modesty, hysteria is certainly answerable for it. The woman 
 who is absolutely unhysterical and not to be influenced, 
 i.e., the absolute shrew, will not be ashamed of any re- 
 proaches her husband may shower on her, however just ; 
 incipient hysteria is present when a woman blushes under 
 her husband's direct censure ; but hysteria in its most 
 marked form is present when a woman blushes when she 
 is quite alone : it is only then that she may be said to be 
 fully impregnated with the masculine standard of values. 
 
 The women who most nearly approximate to what has 
 been called sexual anaethesia or frigidity are always 
 hysterical, as Paul Solliers, with whom I entirely agree, 
 discovered. Sexual anaesthesia is merely one of the 
 many hysterical, that is to say, unreal, simulated forms of 
 anaesthesia. Oskar Vogt, in particular (and general obser- 
 vation has confirmed him), proved that such anaesthesia 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 275 
 
 does not involve a real lack of sensation, but is simply due 
 to an inhibition which keeps certain sensations in check, and 
 excludes them from the consciousness. 
 
 If the anaesthetised arm of a hypnotised subject is pricked 
 a certain number of times, and the medium is told to say 
 how many times he has been pricked, he is able to do so, 
 although otherwise he would not have perceived them. So 
 also with sexual frigidity ; it is an order given by the con- 
 trolling force of the super-imposed asexual ideas; but this, 
 like all other forms of anaesthesia, can be counteracted by a 
 sufficiently strong " order." 
 
 The repulsion to sexuality in general shown by the 
 hysterical woman corresponds in its nature with her 
 insensibility to sexual matters in her own case. Such a 
 repulsion, an intense disinclination for everything sexual, 
 is really present in many women, and this may be urged 
 as an exception to my generalisation as to the universality 
 in woman of the match-making tendency. But women 
 who are made ill by discovering two people in sexual inter- 
 course are always hysterical. In this we have a special 
 justification of the theory which holds match-making to be 
 the true nature of woman, and which looks upon her own 
 sexuality as merely a special case of it. A woman may 
 be made hysterical not only by a sexual suggestion to herself 
 which she outwardly resists whilst inwardly assenting to it, 
 but may be just as much so by the sight of two people in 
 sexual intercourse, for, though she thinks the matter has no 
 value for her, her inborn assent to it forces itself through 
 all outward and artificial barriers, and overcomes the super- 
 imposed and incorporated method of thought in which she 
 usually lives. That is to say, she feels herself involved in 
 the sexual union of others. 
 
 Something similar takes place in the hysterical " conscious- 
 ness of guilt," which has already been spoken about. The 
 absolute shrew never feels herself really in the wrong ; 
 the woman who is slightly hysterical only feels so in the 
 presence of men ; the woman who is thoroughly hysterical 
 feels it in the presence of the particular man who dominates 
 
276 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 her. One cannot prove the existence of a sense of guilt in 
 woman by the mortifications to which " devotees " and 
 " penitents" subject themselves. It is these extreme cases 
 of self-discipline which make one suspicious. Doing 
 penance proves, in most cases, that the doer has not over- 
 come his fault, that the sense of guilt has not really entered 
 consciousness ; it appears really to be much rather an 
 attempt to force repentance from the outside, to make up for 
 not really feeling it. 
 
 The difference between the conviction of guilt in 
 hysterical women and in men, and the origin of the 
 self-reproaches of the former, are of some importance. 
 When the hysterical woman realises that she has done or 
 thought something immoral, she tries to rectify it by 
 some code which she seeks to obey and to substitute in 
 her mind in place of the immoral thought. She does not 
 really get rid of the thought which is too deeply rooted in 
 her nature ; she does not really face it, try to understand 
 it, and so purge herself of it. She simply, from point to 
 point, case by case, tries to adhere to the moral code without 
 ever transforming herself, reforming her idea. The moral 
 character in the woman is elaborated bit by bit ; in the male 
 right conduct comes from moral character. The vow re- 
 models the whole man ; the change takes place in the only 
 possible way, from within outwards, and leads to a real 
 morality which is not only a justification by works. The 
 morality of the woman is merely superficial and is not real 
 morality. 
 
 The current opinion that woman is religious is equally 
 erroneous. Female mysticism, when it is anything more 
 than mere superstition, is either thinly veiled sexuality (the 
 identification of the Deity and the lover has been frequently 
 discussed, as, for instance, in Maupassant's " Bel-Ami," or in 
 Hauptmann's " Hannele's Himmelfahrt") as in numberless 
 spiritualists and theosophists, or it is a mere passive and 
 unconscious acceptance of man's religious views which are 
 clung to the more firmly because of woman's natural 
 disinclination for them. The lover is readily transformed 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 277 
 
 into a Saviour ; very readily (as is well known to be the 
 case with many nuns) the Saviour becomes the lover. All 
 the great women visionaries known to history were hys- 
 terical ; the most famous, Santa Teresa, was not misnamed 
 "the patron saint of hysteria." At any rate, if woman's 
 religiousness were genuine, and if it proceeded from her 
 own nature, she would have done something great in the 
 religious world ; but she never has done anything of any 
 importance. I should like to put shortly what I take to 
 be the difference between the masculine and feminine 
 creeds ; man's religion consists in a supreme belief in him- 
 self, woman's in a supreme belief in other people. 
 
 There is left to consider the self-respect which is often 
 described as being so highly developed in the hysterical. That 
 it is only man's self-respect which has been so thoroughly 
 forced into woman, is clear from its nature and the way it 
 shows itself, as Vogt, who extended and verified experiments 
 first made by Freud, discovered from self-respect under 
 hypnotism. The extraneous masculine will creates by its 
 influence a "self-respecting" subject in the hypnotised 
 woman by inducing a limitation of the field of the un- 
 hypnotised state. Apart from suggestion, in the ordinary 
 life of the hysterical it is only the man with whom they 
 are " impregnated " who is respected in them. Any 
 knowledge of human nature which women have comes 
 from their absorption of the right sort of man. In the 
 paroxysms of hysteria this artificial self-respect disappears 
 with the revolt of oppressed nature. 
 
 This is quite parallel to the clairvoyance of hysterical 
 mediums, which is undoubted, but has as little to do with 
 "occult" spiritism as the ordinary hypnotic phenomena. 
 Just as Vogt's patients made strenuous efforts to observe 
 themselves carefully under the powerful will of the 
 suggestor, the clairvoyante, under the influence of the 
 dominating voice of the man who is imposing his will on 
 her, is capable of telepathic performances, and at his 
 command can, blindfolded, read communications held 
 by people unknown to her at a great distance away ; 
 
278 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 this I saw happen at München under circumstances which 
 precluded any chance of fraud. 
 
 In woman there are not strong passions opposed to the 
 desire for the good and true as is the case with man. The 
 masculine will has more power over woman than over the 
 man himself ; it can realise something in women which, in 
 his own case, has to encounter too many obstacles. He 
 himself has to battle with an anti-moral and anti-logical 
 opposition in himself. The masculine will can obtain such 
 power over woman's mind that he makes her, in a sense, 
 clairvoyant, and breaks down her limitations of mentality. 
 
 Thus it comes about that woman is more telepathic than 
 man, can appear more innocent, and can accomplish more 
 as a " seer," and it is only when she becomes a medium, i.e., 
 the object, that she realises in herself most easily and surely 
 the masculine will for the good and true. Wala can be 
 made to understand, but not until Dotan subdues her. She 
 meets him half-way, for her one desire is to be conquered. 
 
 The subject of hysteria, so far as the purposes of this 
 book are concerned, is now exhausted. 
 
 The women who are uniformly quoted as proofs of 
 female morality are always of the hysterical type, and it is 
 the very observance of morality, in domg things according 
 to the moral law as if this moral law were a law of their 
 personality instead of being only an acquired habit, that 
 the unreaUty, the immorality of this morality is shown. 
 
 The hysterical diathesis is an absurd imitation of the 
 masculine mind, a parody of free will which woman parades 
 at me very moment when she is most under a masculine 
 influence. 
 
 Woman is not a free agent ; she is altogether subject to 
 her desire to be under man's influence, herself and all 
 others : she is under the sway of the phallus, and irre- 
 trievably succumbs to her destiny, even if it leads to 
 actively developed sexuality. At the most a woman can 
 reach an indistinct feeling of her un-freedom, a cloudy 
 idea of the possibility of controlling her destiny — mani- 
 festly only a flickering spark of the free, intelligible subject, 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 279 
 
 the scanty remains of inherited maleness in her, which, by 
 contrast, gives her even this shght comprehension. It is 
 also impossible for a woman to have a clear idea of her 
 destiny, or of the forces within her : it is only he who is free 
 who can discern fate, because he is not chained by 
 necessity ; part of his personality, at least, places him in 
 the position of spectator and a combatant outside his own 
 fate and makes him so far superior to it. One of the most 
 conclusive proofs of human freedom is contained in the 
 fact that man has been able to create the idea of causality. 
 Women consider themselves most free when they are most 
 bound ; and they are not troubled by the passions, because 
 tliey are simply the embodiment of them. It is only a man 
 who can talk of the " dira necessitas " within him ; it is only 
 he could have created the idea of destiny, because it is only 
 he who, in addition to the empirical, conditioned existence, 
 possesses a free, intelligible ego. 
 
 As 1 have shown, woman can reach no more than a 
 vague half-consciousness of the fact that she is a conditioned 
 being, and so she is unable to overcome the sexuality that 
 binds her. Hysteria is the only attempt on her part to 
 overcome it, and, as I have shown, it is not a genuine 
 attempt. The hysteria itself is what the hysterical woman 
 tries to resist, and the falsity of this effort against slavery is 
 the measure of its hopelessness. The most notable examples 
 of the sex (I have in mind Hebbel's Judith and Wagner's 
 Kundryj may feel that is because they wish it that servitude 
 is a necessity for them, but this realisation does not give 
 them power to resist it ; at the last moment they will kiss 
 the man who ravishes them, and succumb with pleasure to 
 those whom they have been resisting violently. It is as if 
 woman were under a curse. At times she feels the weight 
 of it, but she never flees from it. Her shrieks and ravings 
 are not really genuine, and she succumbs to her fate at the 
 moment when it has seemed most repulsive to her. 
 
 After a long analysis, then, it has been found that there 
 is no exception to the complete absence in women of any 
 true, inalienable relation to worth. Even what is covered 
 
2 8o SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 by such current terms as " womanly love," " womanly 
 virtue," " womanly devoutness," " womanly modesty," has 
 failed to invalidate my conclusions. I have maintained my 
 ground in face of the strongest opposition, even including 
 that which comes from woman's hysterical imitations of the 
 male morality. 
 
 Woman, the normal receptive woman of whom I am 
 speaking, is impregnated by the man not only physically 
 (and I set down the astonishing mental alteration in 
 women after marriage to a physical phenomenon akin to 
 telegony), but at every age of her life, by man's conscious- 
 ness and by man's social arrangements. Thus it comes 
 about that although woman lacks all the characters of the 
 male sex, she can assume them so cleverly and so slavishly 
 that it is possible to make mistakes such as the idea of the 
 higher morality of women. 
 
 But this astounding receptivity of woman is not isolated, 
 and must be brought into practical and theoretical con- 
 nection with the other positive and negative characteristics 
 of woman. 
 
 What has the match-making instinct m woman to do with 
 her plasticity ? What connection is there between her 
 untruthfulness and her sexuality ? How does it come 
 about that there is such a strange mixture of all these 
 things in woman ? 
 
 This brings us to ask the reason why women can 
 assimilate everything. Whence does she derive the 
 falsity which makes it possible for her to prefer-^ to 
 believe only what others have told her, to have only 
 what they (choose to) give her, to be merely what they 
 make her ? 
 
 In order to give the right answer to these questions we 
 must turn once more, for the last time, from the actual point. 
 It was found that the power of recognition which animals 
 possess, and which is the psychical equivalent of universal 
 organic response to repeated ^tumili, was curiously like and 
 unlike humany memory ; both signify an equally lasting 
 influence of an impression which was limited to a 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 281 
 
 definite period; bui memory is differentiated from mere 
 passive recognition by its power of actively reproducing 
 the past. 
 
 Later on, it was seen that mere individuation, the charac- 
 terestic of all organic differentation, and individuality, man's 
 possession, are different. And finally it was found that it 
 was necessary to distinguish carefully between love, peculiar 
 to man, and the sexual instinct, shared by the animals. 
 The two are allied inasmuch as they are both efforts at 
 immortality. 
 
 The desire for worth was referred to as a human char- 
 acter, absent in the animals where there is only a desire 
 for satisfaction. The two are analagous, and yet funda- 
 mentally different. Pleasure is craved ; worth is what 
 we feel we ought to crave. The two have been con- 
 fused, with the worst results for psychology and ethics. 
 There has been a similar confusion between personality 
 and persons, between recognition and memory, sexuality 
 and love. 
 
 All these antitheses have bee^ continually confused, and, 
 what is even more striking, almost always by men with the 
 same views and theories, and with the same object — that of 
 trying to obliterate the difference between man and the 
 lower animals. 
 
 There are other less known distinctions which have been 
 equally neglected. Limited consciousness is an animal trait ; 
 the active power of noticing is a purely human one. It is 
 evident that there is something in common in the two facts, 
 but still they are very different. Desire, or impulse, and will 
 are nearly always spoken of as if they were identical. The 
 former is common to all living creatures, but man has, in 
 addition, a will, which is free, and no factor of psychology^ 
 because it is the foundation of all psychological experiences. 
 The identification of impulse and will is not solely due to 
 Darwin ; it occurred also in Schopenhauer's conception of 
 the will, which was sometimes biological, sometimes purely 
 philosophical. 
 
 I may group the two sets of factors as follows ' 
 
282 SEX AND CHARACrrER 
 
 ^ . J • 1 Limited to mankind, and in 
 
 Common to men and animals, , , , « 
 
 r J .11 • particular to the males of 
 
 fundamentally organic. ^ , . , 
 
 ^ ° mankind. 
 
 Individuation. Individuality. 
 
 Recognition. Memory. 
 
 Pleasure. Sense of vi^orth or value. 
 
 Sexual desire. Love. 
 
 Limitation of the field of Faculty of " taking 
 
 consciousness. notice." 
 
 Impulse. Will. 
 
 The series shows that man possesses not only each 
 character which is found in all living things, but also an 
 analagous and higher character peculiar to himself. The 
 old tendency at once to identify the two series and to con- 
 trast them seems to show the existence of something binding 
 together the two series, and at the same time separating 
 them. One may recall in this connection the Buddhistic 
 conception of there being in man a superstructure added to 
 the characters of lower existences. It is as if man possessed 
 all the properties of the beasts, with, in each case, some 
 special quality added. What is this that has been added ? 
 How far does it resemble, and in what respects does it differ, 
 from the more primitive set ? 
 
 The terms in the left-hand row are fundamental charac- 
 teristics of all animal and vegetable life. All such life is 
 individual life, not the life of undivided masses ; it manifests 
 itself as the impulse to satisfy needs, as sexual impulse for 
 the purpose of reproduction. Individuality, memory, will, 
 love, are those qualities of a second life, which, although 
 related to organic life to a certain extent, are toto ccelo 
 different from it. 
 
 This brings us face to face with the religious idea of the 
 eternal, higher, new life, and especially with the Christian 
 form of it. 
 
 As well as a share in organic life, man shares another 
 life, the ^wi? alwWc of the New Dispensation. Just as all 
 earthly life is sustained by earthly food, this other life 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 283 
 
 requires spiritual sustenance (symbolised in the communion 
 service). The birth and death of the former have their 
 counterparts in the latter — the moral re-birth of man, the " re- 
 generation " — and the end : the final loss of the soul through 
 error or crime. The one is determined from without by 
 the bonds of natural causation ; the other is ruled by the 
 moral imperative from within. The one is limited and 
 confined to a definite purpose ; the other is unlimited, 
 eternal and moral. The characters which are in the left 
 row are common to all forms of lower life ; those in the 
 right-hand column are the corresponding presages of eternal 
 life, manifestations of a higher existence in which man, and 
 only man, has a share. The perpetual intermingling and 
 the fresh complications which arise between the higher 
 and lower natures are the making of all history of the human 
 mind ; this is the plot of the history of the universe. 
 
 It is possible that some may perceive in this second life 
 something which in man might have been derived from the 
 other lower characters ; such a possibility dismiss at once. 
 
 A clearer grasp of this sensuous, impressionable lower 
 life will make it clear that, as I have explained in earlief 
 chapters, the case is reversed ; the lower life is merely a 
 projection of the higher on the world of the senses, a 
 reflection of it in the sphere of necessity, as a degradation 
 of it, or its Fall. And the great problem is how the eternal, 
 lofty idea came to be bound with earth. This problem is 
 the guilt of the world. My investigation is now on the 
 threshold of what cannot be investigated ; of a problem 
 that so far no one has dared to answer, and that never will 
 be answered by any human being. It is the riddle of the 
 universe and of life ; the binding of the unlimited in the 
 bonds of space, of the eternal in time, of the spirit in 
 matter. It is the relation of freedom to necessity, of some- 
 thing to nothing, of God to the devil. The dualism of the 
 world is beyond comprehension ; it is the plot of the story 
 of man's Fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding of 
 eternal life in a perishable being, of the innocent in the 
 guilty. 
 
284 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 But it is evident that neither I nor any other man can 
 understand this. I can understand sin only when I cease 
 to commit it, and the moment I understand it I cease to 
 commit it. So also I can never comprehend life while I am 
 still alive. There is no moment of my life when I am not 
 bound down by this sham existence, and it must be impos- 
 sible for me to understand the bond until I am free from it. 
 When I understand a thing I am already outside it ; I 
 cannot comprehend my sinfulness while I am still sinful. 
 
 As the absolute female has no trace of individuality and 
 will, no sense of worth or of love, she can have no part 
 in the higher, transcendental life. The intelligible, hyper- 
 empirical existence of the male transcends matter, space, 
 and time. He is certainly mortal, but he is immortal as 
 well. And so he has the power to choose between the two, 
 between the life which is lost with death and the life to 
 which death is only a stepping-stone. The deepest will of 
 man is towards this perfect, timeless existence ; he is com- 
 pact of the desire for immortality. That the woman has no 
 craving for perpetual life is too apparent ; there is nothing 
 in her of that eternal which man tries to interpose and 
 must interpose between his real self and his projected, 
 empirical self. Some sort of relation to the idea of supreme 
 value, to the idea of the absolute, that perfect freedom which 
 he has not yet attained, because he is bound by necessity, 
 but which he can attain because mind is superior to matter ; 
 such a relation to the purpose of things generally, or to the 
 divine, every man has. And although his life on earth is 
 accompanied by separation and detachment from the abso- 
 lute, his mind is always longing to be free from the taint of 
 original sin. 
 
 Just- as the love of his parents was not pure in purpose, 
 but sought more or less a physical embodiment, the son, 
 who is the outcome of that love, will possess his share of 
 mortal life as well as of eternal : we are horrified at the thought 
 of death, we fight against it, cling to this mortal life, and 
 prove from that that we were anxious to be born as we 
 were born, and that we still desire to be born of this world. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 285 
 
 But since every male has a relation to the idea of the 
 highest value, and would be incomplete without it, no male 
 is really ever happy. It is only women who are happy. 
 No man is happy, because he has a relation to freedom, and 
 yet during his earthly life he is always bound in some way. 
 None but a perfectly passive being, such as the absolute 
 female, or a universally active being, like the divine, can be 
 happy. Happiness is the sense of perfect consummation, 
 and this feeling a man can never have ; but there are women 
 who fancy themselves perfect. The male always has pro- 
 blems behind him and efforts before him : all problems 
 originate in the past ; the future is the sphere for efforts. 
 Time has no objective, no meaning, for woman ; no woman 
 questions herself as to the reason of her existence ; and yet 
 the sole purpose of time is to give expression to the fact 
 that this life can and must mean something. 
 
 Happiness for the male ! That would imply wholly inde- 
 pendent activity, complete freedom ; he is always bound, 
 although not with the heaviest bonds, and his sense of guilt 
 increases the further he is removed from the idea of freedom, 
 
 Mortal life is a calamity, and must remain so whilst 
 mankind is a passive victim of sensation ; so long as he 
 remains not form, but merely the matter on which form is 
 impressed. Every man, however, has some glimmer of 
 higher things ; the genius most certainly and most directly. 
 This trace of light, however, does not come from his per- 
 ceptions ; so far as he is ruled by these, man is merely a 
 passive victim of surrounding things. His spontaneity, his 
 freedom, come from his power of judging as to values, 
 and his highest approach to absolute spontaneity and free- 
 dom comes from love and from artistic or philosophical 
 creation. Through these he obtains some faint sense of 
 what happiness might be. 
 
 Woman can really never be quite unhappy, for happiness 
 •s an empty word for her, a word created by unhappy men. 
 Women never mind letting others see their unhappiness, as 
 it is not real ; behind it there lies no consciousness of guilt, 
 no sense of the sin of the world. 
 
286 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 The last and absolute proof of the thoroughly negative 
 character of woman's life, of her complete want of a higher 
 existence, is derived from the way in which women commit 
 suicide. 
 
 Such suicides are accompanied practically always by 
 thoughts of other people, what they will think, how they 
 will mourn over them, how grieved — or angry — they will 
 be. Every woman is convinced that her unhappiness is 
 undeserved at the time she kills herself ; she pities herself 
 exceedingly with the sort of self-compassion which is only 
 a "weeping with others when they weep." 
 
 How is it possible for a woman to look upon her un- 
 happiness as personal when she possesses no idea of a 
 destiny? The most appallingly decisive proof of the empti- 
 ness and nullity of women is that they never once succeed 
 in knowing the problem of their own lives, and death leaves 
 them ignorant of it, because they are unable to realise the 
 higher life of personality. 
 
 I am now ready to answer the question which I put 
 forward as the chief object of this portion of my book, the 
 question as to the significance of the male and female in the 
 universe. Women have no existence and no essence ; they 
 are not, they are nothing. Mankind occurs as male or 
 female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in 
 ontological reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, 
 in the deepest interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man 
 in his highest form, the genius, has such a relation, and for 
 him the absolute is either the conception of the highest 
 worth of existence, in which case he is a philosopher ; or it 
 is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of abso- 
 lute beauty, and then he is an artist. But both views mean 
 the same. Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither 
 affirms nor denies it ; she is neither moral nor anti-moral ; 
 mathematically speaking, she has no sign ; she is purposeless, 
 neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil, never egoisti- 
 cal {and therefore has often been said to be altruistic) ; she 
 is as non-moral as she is non-logical. But all existence is 
 moral and logical existence. So woman has no existence. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 287 
 
 Woman is untruthful. An animal has just as little meta- 
 physical reality as the actual woman, but it cannot speak, 
 and consequently it does not lie. In order to speak the 
 truth one must be something ; truth is dependent on an 
 existence, and only that can have a relation to an existence 
 which is in itself something. Man desires truth all the 
 time ; that is to say, he all along desires only to be some- 
 thing. The cognition-impulse is in the end identical with 
 the desire for immortality. Any one who objects to a state- 
 ment without ever having realised it ; any one who gives 
 outward acquiescence without the inner affirmation, such 
 persons, like woman, have no real existence and must of 
 necessity lie. So that woman always lies, even if, objec- 
 tively, she speaks the truth. 
 
 Woman is the great emissary of pairing. The living units 
 of the lower forms of life are individuals, organisms ; the 
 living units of the higher forms of life are individualities, 
 souls, monads, " meta-organisms," a term which Hellenbach 
 uses and which is not without point. 
 
 Each monad, however, is differentiated from every other 
 monad, and is as distinct from it as only two things can be. 
 Monads have no windows, but, instead, have the universe 
 in themselves. Man as monad, as a potential or actual 
 individuahty, that is, as having genius, has« in addition 
 differentiation and distinction, individuation and discrimina- 
 tion ; the simple undifferentiated unit is exclusively female. 
 Each monad creates for itself a detached entity, a whole ; 
 but it looks upon every other ego as a perfect totality also, 
 and never intrudes upon it. Man has limits, and accepts 
 them and desires them ; woman, who does not recognise 
 her own entity, is not in a position to regard or perceive 
 the privacy of those around her, and neither respects, nor 
 honours, nor leaves it alone : as there is no such thing as 
 one-ness for her there can be no plurality, only an 
 indistinct state of fusion with others. Because there is no 
 " I " in woman she cannot grasp the "thou " ; according to 
 her perception the I and thou are just a pair, an undiffer- 
 entiated one ; this makes it possible for woman to bring 
 
288 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 people together, to match-make. The object of her love is 
 that of her sympathy — the community, the blending of 
 everything.* 
 
 Woman has no limits to her ego which could be broken 
 through, and which she would have to guard. 
 
 The chief difference between man's and woman's friend- 
 ship is referable to this fact. Man's friendship is an attempt 
 to see eye to eye with those who individually and collec- 
 tively are striving after the same idea ; woman's friendship 
 is a combination for the purpose of match-making. It is 
 the only kind of intimate and unreserved intercourse 
 possible between women, when they are not merely 
 anxious to meet each other for the purpose of gossiping or 
 discussing every day affairs.f 
 
 If, for instance, one of two girls or women is much 
 prettier than the other, the plainer of the two experiences a 
 certain sexual satisfaction at the admiration which the 
 other receives. The principal condition of all friendship 
 between women is the exclusion of rivalry ; every woman 
 compares herself physically with every woman she gets to 
 know. In cases where one is more beautiful than the other, 
 the plainer of the two will idolise the other, because, though 
 neither of them is in the least conscious of it, the next best 
 thing to her own sexual satisfaction for the one is the 
 success of the other ; it is always the same ; woman partici- 
 pates in every sexual union. The completely impersonal 
 existence of women, as well as the super-individual nature 
 of their sexuality, clearly shows match-making to be the 
 fundamental trait of their beings. 
 
 The least that even the ugliest woman demands, and 
 from which she derives a certain amount of pleasure, is 
 that any one of her sex should be admired and desired. 
 
 It follows from the absorbing and absorbable nature of 
 
 * All individuality is an enemy of the community. This is seen 
 most markedly in men of genius, but it is just the same with regard 
 to the sexes. 
 
 •f Men's friendships avoid breaking down their friends' personal 
 reserve. Women expect intimacy from their friends. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 289 
 
 woman's life that women can never feel really jealous. 
 However ignoble jealousy and the spirit of revenge may be, 
 they both contain an element of greatness, of which 
 women, whether for good or evil, are incapable. In 
 jealousy there lies a despairing claim to an assumed right, 
 and the idea of justice is out of woman's reach. But that 
 is not the chief reason why a woman can never be really 
 jealous of any man. If a man, even if he were the man she 
 was madly in love with, were sitting in the next room 
 making love to another woman, the thoughts that would be 
 aroused in her breast would be so sexually exciting that 
 they would leave no room for jealousy. To a man, such a 
 scene, if he knew of it, would be absolutely repulsive, and 
 it would be nauseous to him to be near it ; woman would 
 feverishly follow each detail, or she would become hysteri- 
 cal if it dawned on her what she was doing. 
 
 A man is never really affected by the idea of the pairing 
 of others : he is outside and above any such circumstance 
 which has no meaning for him ; a woman, however, would 
 be scarcely responsible for her interest in the process, she 
 would be in a state of feverish excitement and as if spell- 
 bound by the thought of her proximity to it. 
 
 A man's interest in his fellow men, who are problems for 
 him, may extend to their sexual affairs ; but the curiosity 
 which is specially for these things is peculiar to woman, 
 whether with regard to men or women. It is the love 
 affairs of a man which, from first to last, interest women ; 
 and a man is only intellectually mysterious and charming 
 to a woman so long as she is not clear as to these. 
 
 From all this it is again manifest that femaleness and 
 match-making are identical ; even a superficial study of the 
 case would have resulted in the same conclusions. But I 
 had a much wider purpose, and I hope I have clearly 
 shown the connection between woman positive as match- 
 maker, and woman negative as utterly lacking in the higher 
 life. Woman has but one idea, an idea she cannot be 
 conscious of, as it is her sole idea, and that is absolutely 
 opposed to the spiritual idea. Whether as a mother seeking 
 
290 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 reputable matrimony, or the Bacchante of the Venusberg, 
 whether she wishes to be the foundress of a family, or is 
 content to be lost in the maze of pleasure-seekers, she 
 always is in relation to the general idea of the race as a 
 whole of which she is an inseparable part, and she follows 
 the instinct which most of all makes for community. 
 
 She, as the missionary of union, must be a creature 
 without limits or individuality. I have prolonged this side 
 of my investigation because its important result has been 
 omitted from all earlier characterology. 
 
 At this stage it well may be asked if women are really to 
 be considered human beings at all, or if my theory does not 
 unite them with plants and animals ? For, according to 
 the theory, women, just as little as plants and animals, 
 have any real existence, any relation to the intelligible 
 whole.' Man alone is a microcosm, a mirror of the 
 universe 
 
 In Ibsen's " Little Eyolf " there is a beautiful and appo- 
 site passage. 
 
 " Rita. ' After all, we are only human beings.' 
 
 " Allmers. ' But we have some kinship with the sky and 
 the sea, Rita.' 
 
 " Rita. * You, perhaps ; not me.' " 
 
 Woman, according to the poet, according to Buddha, and 
 in my interpretation, has no relation to the all, to the world 
 whole, to God. Is she then human, or an animal, or a 
 plant ? 
 
 Anatomists will find the question ridiculous, and will at 
 once dismiss the philosophy which could lead up to such a 
 possibility. For them woman is the female of Homo 
 sapiens, differentiated from all other living beings, and 
 occupying the same position with regard to the human 
 male that the females of other species occupy with regard 
 to their males. And he will not allow the philosopher to 
 say, " What has the anatomist to do with me ? Let him 
 mind his own business." 
 
 As a matter of fact, women are sisters of the flowers, and 
 are in close relationship with the animals. Many of their 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 291 
 
 sexual perversities and affections for animals (Pasiphäe myth 
 and Leda myth) indicate this. But they are human beings. 
 Even the absolute woman, whom we think of as without 
 any trace of intelligible ego, is still the complement of man. 
 And there is no doubt that the fact of the special sexual and 
 erotic completion of the human male by the human female, 
 even if it is not the moral phenomenon which advocates of 
 marriage would have us believe, is still of tremendous import- 
 ance to the woman problem. Animals are mere individuals ; 
 women are persons, although they are not personalities. 
 
 An appearance of discriminative power, though not the 
 reality, language, though not conversation, memory, though 
 it has no continuity or unity of consciousness — must all be 
 granted to them. 
 
 They possess counterfeits of everything masculine, and 
 thus are subject to those transformations which the de- 
 fenders of womanliness are so fond of quoting. The result 
 of this is a sort of amphi-sexuality of many ideas (honour, 
 shame, love, imagination, fear, sensibility, and so on), which 
 have both a masculine and feminine significance. 
 
 There now remains to discuss the real meaning of the 
 contrast between the sexes. 
 
 The parts played by the male and female principles in the 
 animal and vegetable kingdoms are not now under con- 
 sideration ; we are dealing solely with humanity. 
 
 That such principles of maleness and femaleness must be 
 accepted as theoretical conceptions, and not as metaphysical 
 ideas, was the point of this investigation from the beginning. 
 The whole object of the book has been to settle the question, 
 in man at least, of the really important differences between 
 man and woman, quite apart from the mere physiological- 
 sexual-differentiation. Furthermore, the view which sees 
 nothmg more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than 
 an arrangement for physiological division of labour — an 
 idea tor which, I believe, the zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is 
 responsible — appears, according to this work, quite unten- 
 able ; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a 
 superficial and mtellectually complacent view. 
 
292 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 Darwinism, indeed, is responsible for making popular the 
 view that sexually differentiated organisms have been de- 
 rived from earlier stages in which there was no sexual 
 dimorphism ;■ but long before Darwin, Gustav Theodor 
 Fechner had already shown that the sexes could not be 
 supposed to have arisen from an undifferentiated stage by 
 any principle such as division of labour, adaptation to the 
 struggle for existence, and so forth. 
 
 The ideas " man " and " woman " cannot be investigated 
 separately ; their significance can be found out only by 
 placing them side by side and contrasting them. The key 
 to their natures must be found in their relations to each 
 other. In attempting to discover the nature of erotics I 
 went a Itttle way into this subject. The relation of man to 
 woman is simply that of subject to object. Woman seeks 
 her consummation as the object. She is the plaything of 
 husband or child, and, however we may try to hide it, she 
 is anxious to be nothing but such a chattel. 
 
 No one misunderstands so thoroughly what a woman 
 wants as he who tries to find out what is passing within 
 her, endeavouring to share her feelings and hopes, her 
 experiences and her real nature. 
 
 Woman does not wish to be treated as an active agent ; 
 she wants to remain always and throughout — this is just her 
 womanhood — purely passive, to feel herself under another's 
 will. She demands only to be desired physically, to be 
 taken possession of, like a new property. 
 
 Just as mere sensation only attains reality when it is 
 apprehended, i.e., when it becomes objective, so a woman 
 is brought to a sense of her existence only by her husband 
 or children — by these as subjects to whom she is the object 
 — so obtaining the gift of an existence. 
 
 The contrast between the subject and the object in the 
 theory of knowledge corresponds ontologically to the con- 
 trast between form and matter. It is no more than a 
 translation of this distinction from the theory of experience 
 to metaphysics. Matter, which in itself is absolutely unindi- 
 vidualised and so can assume any form, of itself has no 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 293 
 
 definite and lasting qualities, and has as little essence as 
 mere perception, the matter of experience, has in itself any 
 existence. If the Platonic conception is followed out, it will 
 be apparent that that great thinker asserted to be nothing 
 what the ordinary Philistine regards as the highest form of 
 reality. According to Pinto, the negation of existence is no 
 other than matTcr . Form is the only real existence. Aristotle 
 carried the Piatomc conception into the regions of biology. 
 For Plato form is the parent and creator of all reality. For 
 Aristotle, in the sexual process the male principle is the 
 active, formative agent, the female principle the passive 
 matter on which the form is impressed. In my view, the 
 significance of woman in humanity is explained by the 
 Platonic and Aristotelian conception. Woman is the 
 material on which man acts. Man as the microcosm 
 is compounded of the lower and higher life. Woman is 
 matter, is nothing. This knowledge gives us the keystone 
 to our structure, and it makes everything clear that was 
 indistinct, it gives things a coherent form. Woman's sexual 
 part depends on contact; it is the absorbing and not the 
 liberating impulse. It coincides with this, that the keenest 
 sense woman has, and the only one she has more highly 
 developed than man, is the sense of touch. The eye and 
 the ear lead to the unlimited and give glimpses of infinity; 
 the sense of touch necessitates physical limitations to our 
 own actions : one is affected by what one feels ; it is the 
 eminently sordid sense, and suited to the physical require- 
 ments of an earth-bound being. 
 
 Man is form, woman is matter: if that is so it must find 
 expression in the relations between their respective psychic 
 txperiences. 
 
 The summing up of the connected nature of man's 
 mental life, as opposed to the inarticulate and chaotic con- 
 dition of woman's, illustrates the above antithesis of form 
 and matter. 
 
 Matter needs to be formed : and thus woman demands 
 that man should clear her confusion of thought, give 
 meaning to her benid ideas. Women are matter, which 
 
294 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 can assume any shape. Those experiments which ascribe 
 to girls a better memory for learning by rote than boys are 
 explained in this way : they are due to the nullity and 
 inanity of women, who can be saturated with anything and 
 everything, whilst man only retains what has an interest 
 for him, forgetting all else. 
 
 This accounts for what has been called woman's submis- 
 siveness, the way she is influenced by the opinions of others, 
 her suggestibility, the way in which man moulds her formless 
 nature. Woman is nothing ; therefore, and only, therefore, 
 she can become everythmg, whilst man can only remain 
 what he is. A man can make what he likes of a woman : 
 the most a woman can do is to help a man to achieve what 
 he wants. 
 
 A man's real nature is never altered by education : woman, 
 on the other hand, by external influences, can be taught to 
 suppress her most characteristic self, the real value she sets 
 on sexuaUty. 
 
 Woman can appear everything and deny everything, but 
 in reality she is never anything. 
 
 Women have neither this nor that characteristic ; their 
 peculiarity consists in having no characteristics at all ; the 
 complexity and terrible mystery about women come to this ; 
 it is this which makes them above and beyond man's under- 
 standing — man, who always wants to get to the heart of 
 things. 
 
 It may be said, even by those who may wish to agree 
 with the foregoing arguments, that they have not indicated 
 what man really is. Has he any special male characteristics, 
 like match-making and want of character in women ? Is 
 there a definite idea of what man is, as there is of woman, 
 and can this idea be similarly formulated ? 
 
 Here is the answer : The idea of maleness consists in the 
 fact of an individuality, of an essential monad, and is covered 
 by it. Each monad, however, is as different as possible from 
 every other monad, and therefore cannot be classified in 
 one comprehensive idea common to many other monads. 
 Man is the microcosm ; he contains all kinds of possibilities. 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 295 
 
 This must not be confused with the universal susceptibility 
 of woman who becomes all without being anything, whilst 
 man is all, as much or as httle, according to his gifts, as he 
 will. Man contains woman, for he contains matter, and he' 
 can allow this part of his nature to develop itself, i.e., to 
 thrive and enervate him ; or he can recognise and fight 
 against it— so that he, and he alone, can get at the truth 
 about woman. But woman cannot develop except through 
 
 man. 
 
 The meaning of man and woman is first arrived at when 
 we examine their mutual sexual and erotic relations. 
 Woman's deepest desire is to be formed by man, and so to 
 receive her being. Woman desires that man should impart 
 opinions to her quite different to those she held before^ 
 she is content to let herself be turned by him from what she 
 had till then thought right. She wishes to be taken ta 
 pieces as a whole, so that he may build her up again. 
 
 Woman is tirst created by man's will— he dominates her 
 and changes her whole being (hypnotism). Here is the 
 explanation of the relation of the psychical to the physical 
 in man and woman. Man assumes a reciprocal action of 
 body and mind, in the bense rather that the dominant mind 
 creates the body, than that the mind merely projects itself 
 on phenomena, whilst the woman accepts both mental and 
 psychical phenomena empirically. None the less, even 
 in the woman there is some reciprocal action. However, 
 whilst in the man, as Schopenhauer truly taught, the human 
 being is his own creation, his own will makes and re-makes 
 the body, the woman is bodily influenced and changed by 
 an alien will (suggestion). 
 
 Man not ouly forms himself, but woman also— a far easier 
 matter. The myhs of the book of Genesis and other cos- 
 mogonies, which teach that woman was created out of man, 
 are nearer the truth than the biological theories of descent, 
 according to which males have been evolved from females. 
 
 We have now to come to the question left open m 
 Chapter IX., as to how woman, who is herself without soul 
 or will, is yet able to realise to what extent a man may be 
 
296 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 endowed with them ; and we may now endeavour to answer 
 it. Of this one must be certain, that what woman notices, 
 that for which she has a sense, is not the special nature of 
 man, but only the general fact and possibly the grade of his 
 maleness. It is quite erroneous to suppose that woman has 
 an innate capacity to understand the individuality of a man. 
 The lover, who is so easily fooled by the unconscious simu- 
 lation of a deeper comprehension on the part of his sweet- 
 heart, may believe that he understands himself through a 
 girl ; but those who are less easily satisfied cannot help 
 seeing that women only possess a sense of the fact not of 
 the individuality of the soul, only for the formal general 
 fact, not for the differentiation of the personality. In order 
 to perceive and apperceive the special form, matter must not 
 itself be formless ; woman's relation to man, however, is 
 nothing but that of matter to form, and her comprehension 
 of him nothing but willingness to be as much formed as 
 possible by him ; the instinct of those without existence for 
 existence. Furthermore, this " comprehension " is not 
 theoretical, it is not sympathetic, it is only a desire to be 
 sympathetic ; it is importunate and egoistical. Woman has 
 no relation to man and no sense of man, but only for male- 
 ness ; and if she is to be considered as more sexual than 
 man, this greater claim is nothing but the intense desire for 
 the fullest and most definite formation, it is the demand for 
 the greatest possible quantity of existence. 
 
 And, finally, match-making is nothing else than this. The 
 sexuality of women is super-individual, because they are not 
 limited, formed, individualised entities, in the higher sense 
 of the word. 
 
 The supremest moment in a woman's life, when her 
 original nature, her natural desire manifests itself, is that in 
 which her own sexual union takes place. She embraces the 
 man passionately and presses him to her ; it is the greatest 
 joy of passivity, stronger even than the contented feeling of a 
 hypnotised person, the desire of matter which has just been 
 formed, and wishes to keep that form for ever. That is why 
 a woman is so grateful to her possessor, even if the gratitude 
 
WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 297 
 
 is limited to the moment, as in the case of prostitutes with 
 no memory, or, if it lasts longer, as in the case of more 
 highly differentiated women. 
 
 This endless striving of the poor to attach themselves to 
 riches, the altogether formless and therefore super-individual 
 striving of the inarticulate to obtain form by contact, to keep 
 it indefinitely and so gain an existence, is the deepest motive 
 in pairing. 
 
 Pairing is only possible because woman is not a monad, 
 and has no sense of individuality ; it is the endless striving 
 of nothing to be something. 
 
 I It is thus that the duality of man and woman has 
 ' gradually developed into complete dualism, to the dualism 
 of the higher and lower lives, of subject and object, of 
 form and matter, something and nothing. All meta- 
 physical, all transcendental existence is logical and moral 
 existence ; woman is non-logical and non-moral. She has 
 no dislike for what is logical and moral, she is not anti- 
 logical, she is not anti-moral. She is not the negation, she 
 is, rather, nothing. She is neither the affirmation nor the 
 denial. A man has in himself the possibility of being the 
 absolute something or the absolute nothing, and therefore 
 his actions are directed towards the one or the other ; woman 
 does not sin, for she herself is the sin which is a possibility 
 in man. 
 
 The abstract male is the image of God, the absolute some- 
 thing; the female, and the female element in the male, is the 
 symbol of nothing ; that is the significance of the woman 
 in the universe, and in this way male and female complete 
 and condition one another. Woman has a meaning and a 
 function in the universe as the opposite of man ; and as 
 the human male surpasses the animal male, so the human 
 female surpasses the female of zoology. It is not that 
 limited existence and limited negation (as in the animal 
 kingdom) are at war in humanity ; what there stand in 
 opposition are unlimited existence and unlimited negation. 
 And so male and female make up humanity. 
 
 The meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She repre- 
 
298 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 sents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the 
 other possibility of humanity. And so nothing is so despic- 
 able as a man become female, and such a person will be 
 regarded as the supreme criminal even by himself. And 
 so also is to be explained the deepest fear of man ; the fear 
 of the woman, which is the fear of unconsciousness, the 
 alluring abyss of annihilation. 
 
 An old woman manifests once for all what woman really 
 is. The beauty of woman, as may be experimentally proved, 
 is only created by love of a man ; a woman becomes more 
 beautiful when a man loves her because she is passively 
 responding to the will which is in her lover ; however 
 deep this may sound, it is only a matter of everyday 
 experience. 
 
 All the qualities of woman depend on her non-existence, 
 on her want of character ; because she has no true, per- 
 manent, but only a mortal life, in her character as the 
 advocate of pairing she furthers the sexual part of life, and 
 is fundamentally transformed by and susceptible to the man 
 who has a physical influence over her. 
 
 Thus the three fundamental characters of woman with 
 which this chapter has dealt come together in the con- 
 ception of her as the non-existent. Her instability and 
 untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the 
 premiss of her non-existence. Her only positive character, 
 the conception of her as the pairing agent, comes from it 
 by a simple process of analysis. The nature of woman is 
 no more than pairing, no more than super-individual 
 sexuality. 
 
 If we turn to the table of the two kinds of life given 
 earlier in this chapter, it will be apparent that every inclina- 
 tion from the higher to the lower is a crime against oneself. 
 Immorality is the will towards negation, the craving to 
 change the formed into the formless, the wish for 
 destruction. And from this comes the intimate relation 
 between femaleness and crime. There is a close relation 
 between the immoral and the non-moral. It is only when 
 man accepts his own sexuality, denies the absolute in him, 
 
i WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE 299 
 
 turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence. The 
 acceptance of the Phallus is immoral. It has always been 
 thought of as hateful ; it has been the image of Satan, and 
 Dante made it the central pillar of hell. 
 
 Thus comes about the domination of the male sexuaHty 
 over the female. It is only when man is sexual that woman 
 has existence and meaning. 
 
 Her existence is bound up with the Phallus, and so tliat 
 is her supreme lord and welcome master. 
 
 Sex, in the form of man, is woman's fate ; the Don Juan 
 is the only type of man who has complete power over her. 
 
 The curse, which was said to be heavy on woman, is the 
 evil will of man : nothing is only a tool in the hand of the 
 will for nothing. The early Fathers expressed it pathetically 
 when they called woman the handmaid of the devil. For 
 matter in itself is nothing, it can only obtain existence 
 through form. The fall of " form " is the corruption that 
 takes place when form endeavours to relapse into the form- 
 less. When man became sexual he formed woman. That 
 woman is at all has happened simply because man has 
 accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this 
 affirmation ; she is sexuality itself. Woman's existence is 
 dependent on man ; when man, as man, in contradistinction 
 to woman, is sexual, he is giving woman form, calling her 
 into existence. Therefore woman's one object must be to 
 keep man sexual. She desires man as Phallus, and for this 
 she is the advocate of pairing. She is incapable of making 
 use of any creature except as a means to an end, the end 
 being pairing ; and she has but one purpose, that of con- 
 tinuing the guilt of man, for she would disappear the 
 moment man had overcome his sexuality. 
 
 Man created woman, and will always create her afresh, 
 as long as he is sexual. Just as he gives woman con- 
 sciousness, so he gives her existence. Woman is the sin of 
 man. 
 
 He tries to pay the debt by love. Here we have the 
 explanation of what seemed like an obscure myth at the 
 end of the previous chapter. Now we see what was hidden in 
 
300 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 il : that woman is nothing before man's fall, nor without it ; 
 that he does not rob her of anything she had before. The 
 crime man has committed in creating woman, and still 
 commits in assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman 
 by his eroticism. 
 
 Whence otherwise would come the generosity of love, 
 which can never be satisfied by giving ? How is it that 
 love is so anxious to endow woman with a soul, and not 
 any other creature ? Whence comes it that a child cannot 
 love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty, 
 with the repeated forming of woman, with the renewing of 
 sin ? Woman is nothing but man's expression and projec- 
 tion of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a 
 woman, in which he embodies himself and his own guilt. 
 
 But woman is not herself guilty ; she is made so by the 
 guilt of others, and everything for which woman is blamed 
 should be laid at man's door. 
 
 Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it ; it 
 elevates woman instead of nullifying her. The "something" 
 folds the ** nothing" in its arms, and thinks thus to free the 
 universe of negation and drown all objections ; whereas 
 the nothing would only disappear if the something put it 
 away. 
 
 Since man's hatred for woman is not conscious hatred of 
 his own sexuality, his love is his most intense effort to save 
 woman as woman, instead of desiring to nullify her in 
 himself. And the consciousness of guilt comes from the 
 fact that the object of guilt is coveted instead of being 
 annihilated. 
 
 Woman alone, then, is guilt ; and is so through man's 
 fault. And if femaleness signifies pairing, it is only because 
 all guilt endeavours to increase its circle. What woman, 
 always unconsciously, accomplishes, she does because she 
 cannot help it ; it is her reason for being, her whole nature. 
 She is only a part of man, his other, ineradicable, his lower 
 part. So matter appears to be as inexplicable a riddle as 
 form ; woman as unending as man, negation as eternal as 
 existence ; but this eternity is only the eternity of guilt. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 JUDAISM 
 
 It would not be surprising if to many it should seem from 
 the foregoing arguments that " men " have come out of 
 them too well, and, as a collective body, have been placed 
 on an exaggeratedly lofty pedestal. The conclusions drawn 
 from these arguments, however surprised every Philistine 
 and young simpleton would be to learn that in himself he 
 comprises the whole world, cannot be opposed and con- 
 futed by cheap reasoning ; yet the treatment of the male 
 sex must not simply be considered too indulgent, or due 
 to a direct tendency to omit all the repulsive and small side 
 of manhood in order to favourably represent its best points. 
 The accusation would be unjustified. It does not enter 
 the author's mind to idealise man in order more easily to 
 lower the estimation of woman. So much narrowness and 
 so much coarseness often thrive beneath the empirical 
 representation of manhood that it is a question of the better 
 possibilities lying in every man, neglected by him or per- 
 ceived either with painful clearness or dull animosity ; pos- 
 sibilities which as such in woman neither actually nor 
 meditatively ever come to any account. And here the 
 author cannot in any wise really rely on the dissimilarities 
 between men, however little he may impugn their import- 
 ance. It is, therefore, a question of establishing what 
 woman is not, and truly in her there is infinitely much want- 
 ing which is never quite missing even in the most mediocre 
 and plebeian of men. That which is the positive attribute of 
 the woman, in so far as a positive can be spoken of in re- 
 gard to such a being, will constantly be found also in many 
 
302 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 men. There are, as has already often been demonstrated, 
 men who have become women or have remained women; 
 but there is no woman who has surpassed certain circum- 
 scribed, not particularly elevated moral and intellectual 
 limits. And, therefore, I must again assert that the woman 
 of the highest standard is immeasurably beneath the man 
 of lowest standard. 
 
 These objections may go even further and touch a pK)int 
 where the ignoring of theory must assuredly become repre- 
 hensible. There are, to wit, nations and races whose men, 
 though they can in no wise be regarded as intermediate 
 forms of the sexes, are found to approach so slightly and 
 so rarely to the ideal of manhood as set forth in my argu- 
 ment, that the principles, indeed the entire foundation on 
 which this work rests, would seem to be severely shaken 
 by their existence. What shall we make, for example, out 
 of the Chinese, with their feminine freedom from internal 
 cravings and their incapacity for every effort ? One 
 might feel tempted to believe in the complete effeminacy 
 of the whole race. It can at least be no mere whim of the 
 entire nation that the Chinaman habitually wears a pigtail, 
 and that the growth of his beard is of the very thinnest. 
 But how does the matter stand with the negroes ? A genius 
 has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, 
 and the standard of their morality is almost universally so 
 low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America 
 that their emancipation was an act of imprudence. 
 
 If, consequently, the principle of the intermediate forms 
 of the sexes may perhaps enjoy a prospect of becoming of 
 importance to racial anthropology (since in some peoples 
 a greater share of womanishness would seem to be generally 
 disseminated), it must yet be conceded that the foregoing 
 deductions refer above all to Aryan men and Aryan women. 
 In how far, in the other great races of mankind, uniformity 
 with the standard of the Aryan race may reign, or what has 
 prevented and hindered this ; to arrive more nearly at such 
 knowledge would require in the first instance the most 
 intense research into racial characteristics. 
 
JUDAISM 303 
 
 The Jewish race, which has been chosen by me as a sub- 
 ject of discussion, because, as will be shown, it presents 
 the gravest and most formidable difficulties for my views, 
 appears to possess a certain anthropological relationship 
 with both negroes and Mongolians. The readily curling 
 hair points to the negro ; admixture of Mongolian blood 
 is suggested by the perfectly Chinese or Malay formation of 
 face and skull which is so often to be met with amongst 
 the Jews and which is associated with a yellowish com- 
 plexion. This is nothing more than the result of everyday 
 experience, and these remarks must not be otherwise 
 understood ; the anthropological question of the origin 
 of the Jewish race is apparently insoluble, and even such 
 an interesting answer to it as that given by H. S. Chamber- 
 lain has recently met with much opposition. The author 
 does not possess the knowledge necessary to treat of this ; 
 what will be here briefly, but as far as possible profoundly 
 analysed, is the psychical peculiarity of the Jewish race. 
 
 This is an obligatory task imposed by psychological 
 observation and analysis. It is undertaken independently 
 of past history, the details of which must be uncertain. 
 The Jewish race offers a problem of the deepest significance 
 for the study of all races, and in itself it is intimately 
 bound up with many of the most troublesome problems of 
 the day. 
 
 I must, however, make clear what I mean by Judaism ; I 
 mean neither a race nor a people nor a recognised creed. 
 I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological 
 constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but 
 which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion 
 only amongst the Jews. Antisemitism itself will confirm 
 my point of view. 
 
 The purest Aryans by descent and disposition are seldom 
 Antisemites, although they are often unpleasantly moved by 
 some of the peculiar Jewish traits ; they cannot in the least 
 understand the Antisemite movement, and are, in conse- 
 quence of their defence of the Jews, often called Philo- 
 semites ; and yet these persons writing on the subject of 
 
304 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 the hatred of Jews, have been guilty of the most profound 
 misunderstanding of the Jewish character. The aggressive 
 Antisemites, on the other hand, nearly always display certain 
 Jewish characters, sometimes apparent in their faces, al- 
 though they may have no real admixture of Jewish blood.* 
 
 The explanation is simple. People love in others the 
 qualities they would like to have but do not actually have in 
 any great degree ; so also we hate in others only what we 
 do not wish to be, and what notwithstanding we are partly. 
 We hate only qualities to which we approximate, but which 
 we realise first in other persons. 
 
 Thus the fact is explained that the bitterest Antisemites 
 are to be found amongst the jews themselves. For only 
 the quite Jewish Jews, like the completely Aryan Aryans, are 
 not at all Antisemitically disposed ; among the remainder 
 only the commoner natures are actively Antisemitic and 
 pass sentence on others without having once sat in judg- 
 ment on themselves in these matters ; and very few exercise 
 their Antisemitism first on themselves. This one thing, 
 however, remains none the less certain : whoever detests 
 the Jewish disposition detests it first of all in himself ; that 
 he should persecute it in others is merely his endeavour to 
 separate himself in this way from Jewishness ; he strives to 
 slj^ke it off and to localise it in his fellow-creatures, and so 
 for a moment to dream himself free of it. Hatred, like 
 love, is a projected phenomenon; that person alone is haled 
 who reminds one unpleasantly of oneself. 
 
 The Antisemitism of the Jews bears testimony to the 
 fact that no one who has had experience of them considers 
 them loveable — not even the Jew himself ; the Antisemi- 
 tism of the Aryans grants us an insight no less full of 
 
 * Zola was a typical case of a person absolutely without trace of 
 the Jewish qualities, and, therefore, a philosemite. The greatest 
 geniuses, on the other hand, have nearly always been antisemites 
 (Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Herder, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul, 
 Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Wagner) ; this comes about from the 
 fact as geniuses they have something of everything in their natures, 
 and so can understand Judaism. 
 
' JUDAISM 305 
 
 significance : it is that the Jew and the Jewish race must 
 not be confounded. There are Aryans who are more Jewish 
 than Jews, and real Jews who are more Aryan than certain 
 Aryans. I need not enumerate those non-semites who had 
 much Jewishness in them, the lesser (like the well-known 
 Frederick Nicolai of the eighteenth century) nor those of 
 moderate greatness (here Frederick Schiller can scarcely 
 be omitted), nor will I analyse their Jewishness. Above all 
 Richard Wagner — the bitterest Antisemite — cannot be held 
 free from an accretion of Jewishness even in his art, how- 
 ever little one be misled by the feeling which sees in him 
 the greatest artist enshrined in historical humanity ; and 
 this, though indubitably his Siegfried is the most un- 
 Jewish type imaginable. As Wagner's aversion to grand 
 opera and the stage really led to the strongest attraction, an 
 attraction of which he was himself conscious, so his music, 
 which, in the unique simplicity of its motifs, is the most 
 powerful in the world, cannot be declared free from obtru- 
 siveness, loudness, and lack of distinction ; from some con- 
 sciousness of this Wagner tried to gain coherence by the 
 extreme instrumentation of his works. It cannot be denied 
 (there can be no mistake about it) that Wagner's music 
 produces the deepest impression not only on Jewish Anti- 
 semites, who have never completely shaken off Jewishness, 
 but also on Indo-Germanic Antisemites. From the music 
 of " Parsifal," which to genuine Jews will ever remain as 
 unapproachable as its poetry, from the Pilgrim's march 
 and the procession to Rome in " Tannhaüser," and assuredly 
 from many another part, they turn away. Doubtless, also, 
 none but a German could make so clearly manifest the 
 very essence of the German race as Wagner has succeeded 
 in doing in the " Meistersingers of Nürnberg." In Wagner 
 one thinks constantly of that side of his character which leans 
 towards Feuerbach, instead of towards Schopenhauer. 
 Here no narrow psychological depreciation of this great 
 man is intended. Judaism was to him the greatest help in 
 reaching a clearer understanding and assertion of the 
 extremes within him in his struggle to reach " Siegfried" and 
 
 u 
 
3o6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 " Parsifal," and in giving to German nature the highest 
 means of expression which has probably ever been found in 
 the pages of history. Yet a greater than Wagner was obliged 
 to overcome the Jewishness within him before he found his 
 special vocation ; and it is, as previously stated, perhaps its 
 great significance in the world's history and the immense 
 merit of Judaism that it and nothing else, leads the Aryan 
 to a knowledge of himself and warns him against himself. 
 For this the Aryan has to thank the Jew that, through 
 him, he knows to guard against Judaism as a possibility 
 within himself. This example will sufficiently illustrate what, 
 in my estimation, is to be understood by Judaism. 
 
 I do not refer to a nation or to a race, to a creed or to a 
 scripture. When I speak of the Jew I mean neither an 
 individual nor the whole body, but mankind in general, in 
 so far as it has a share in the platonic idea of Judaism. 
 My purpose is to analyse this idea. 
 
 That these researches should be included in a work 
 devoted to the characterology of the sexes may seem an 
 undue extension of my subject. But some reflection will 
 lead to the surprising result that Judaism is saturated with 
 femininity, with precisely those qualities the essence of 
 which I have shown to be in the strongest opposition to the 
 male nature. It would not be difficult to make a case for 
 the view that the Jew is more saturated with femininity 
 than the Aryan, to such an extent that the most manly Jew 
 is more feminine than the least manly Aryan. 
 
 This interpretation would be erroneous. It is most 
 important to lay stress on the agreements and differences 
 simply because so many points that become obvious in 
 dissecting woman reappear in the Jew. 
 
 Let me begin with the analogies. It is notable that the 
 Jews, even now when at least a relative security of tenure is 
 possible, prefer moveable property, and, in spite of their 
 acquisitiveness, have little real sense of personal property, 
 especially in its most characteristic form, landed property. 
 Property is indissolubly connected with the self, with 
 individuality. It is in harmony with the foregoing that the 
 
JUDAISM 307 
 
 jew is so readily disposed to communism. Communism 
 must be distinguished clearly from socialism, the former 
 being based on a community of goods, an absence of 
 individual property, the latter meaning, in the first place a 
 co-operation of individual with individual, of worker with 
 worker, and a recognition of human individuality in every 
 one. Socialism is Aryan (Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fichte). 
 Communism is Jewish (Marx). Modern social democracy 
 has moved far apart from the earlier socialism, precisely 
 because Jews have taken so large a share in developing it. 
 In spite of the associative element in it, the Marxian 
 doctrine does not lead in any way towards the State as a 
 union of all the separate individual aims, as the higher unit 
 combining the purposes of the lower units. Such a con- 
 ception is as foreign to the Jew as it is to the woman. 
 
 For these reasons Zionism must remain an impracticable 
 ideal, notwithstanding the fashion in which it has brought 
 together some of the noblest qualities of the Jews. Zionism 
 is the negation of Judaism, for the conception of Judaism 
 involves a world-wide distribution of the Jews. Citizenship 
 ! is an un-Jewish thing, and there has never been and never 
 I will be a true Jewish State. The State involves the aggrega- 
 tion of individual aims, the formation of and obedience to 
 self-imposed laws ; and the symbol of the State, if nothing 
 more, is its head chosen by free election. The opposite 
 conception is that of anarchy, with which present-day 
 communism is closely allied. The ideal State has never 
 been historically realised, but in every case there is at least 
 a minimum of this higher unit, this conception of an ideal 
 power which distinguishes the State from the mere collec- 
 tion of human beings in barracks. Rousseau's much- 
 despised theory of the conscious co-operation of individuals 
 to form a State deserves more attention than it now receives. 
 Some ethical notion of free combination must always be 
 included. 
 
 The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, 
 because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his 
 failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of 
 
3o8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 a free intelligible ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere 
 together, but they do not associate as free independent 
 individuals mutually respecting each other's individuality. 
 
 As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant 
 by the word " gentleman " does not exist amongst the Jews. 
 The genuine Jew fails in this innate good breeding by 
 which alone individuals honour their own individuality and 
 respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility, and 
 this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced 
 back for thousands of years. 
 
 The familiar Jewish arrogance has a similar explanation; 
 it springs from want of true knowledge of himself and the 
 consequent overpowering need he feels to enhance his own 
 personality by depreciating that of his fellow-creatures. 
 And so, although his descent is incomparably longer than 
 that of the members of Aryan aristocracies, he has an 
 inordinate love for titles. The Aryan respect for his 
 ancestors is rooted in the conception that they were his 
 ancestors ; it depends on his valuation of his own person- 
 ality, and, in spite of the communistic strength and antiquity 
 of the Jewish traditions, this individual sense of ancestry is 
 lacking. 
 
 The faults of the Jewish race have often been attributed 
 to the repression of that race by Aryans, and many Chris- 
 tians are still disposed to blame themselves in this respect. 
 But the self-reproach is not justified. Outward circum- 
 stances do not mould a race in one direction, unless there 
 is in the race the innate tendency to respond to the 
 moulding forces ; the total result comes at least as much 
 from the natural disposition as from the modifying circum- 
 stances. We know now that the proof of the inheritance 
 of acquired characters has broken down, and, in the human 
 race still more than the lower forms of life, it is certain that 
 individual and racial characters persist in spite of all 
 adaptive moulding. When men change, it is from within, 
 outwards, unless the change, as in the case of women, is a 
 mere superficial imitation of real change, and is not rooted 
 in their natures. And how can we reconcile the idea that 
 
JUDAISM 309 
 
 the Jewish character is a modern modification with the 
 history of the foundation of the race, given in the Old 
 Testament without any disapprobation of how the patriarch 
 Jacob deceived his dying father, cheated his brother Esau 
 and over-reached his father-in-law, Laban ? 
 
 The defenders of the Jew have rightly acquitted him of 
 any tendency to heinous crimes, and the legal statistics of 
 different countries confirm this. The Jew is not really 
 anti-moral. But, none the less, he does not represent the 
 highest ethical type. He is rather non-moral, neither very 
 good nor very bad, with nothing in him of either the angel 
 or the devil. Notwithstanding the Book of Job and the 
 story of Eden, it is plain that the conceptions of a Supreme 
 Good and a Supreme Evil are not truly Jewish ; I have 
 no wish to enter upon the lengthy and controversial topics 
 of Biblical criticism, but at the least I shall be on sure 
 ground when I say that these conceptions play the least 
 significant part in modern Jewish life. Orthodox or un- 
 orthodox, the modern Jew does not concern himself with 
 God and the Devil, with Heaven and Hell. If he does not 
 reach the heights of the Aryan, he is also less inclined to 
 commit murder or other crimes of violence. 
 
 So also in the case of the woman ; it is easier for her 
 defenders to point to the infrequency of her commission of 
 serious crimes than to prove her intrinsic morality. The 
 homology of Jew and woman becomes closer the further 
 examination goes. There is no female devil, and no female 
 angel ; only love, with its blind aversion from actuality, 
 sees in woman a heavenly nature, and only hate sees in her 
 a prodigy of wickedness. Greatness is absent from the 
 nature of the woman and the Jew, the greatness of morality, 
 or the greatness of evil. In the Aryan man, the good and 
 bad principles of Kant's religious philosophy are ever pre- 
 sent, ever in strife. In the Jew and the woman, good and 
 evil are not distinct from one another. 
 
 jews, then, do not live as free, self-governing individuals, 
 choosing between virtue and vice in the Aryan fashion. 
 They are a mere collection of similar individuals each cast 
 
3IO SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 in the same mould, the whole forming as it were a con- 
 tinuous Plasmodium. The Antisemite has often thought of 
 this as a defensive and aggressive union, and has formulated 
 the conception of a Jewish " solidarity." There is a deep 
 confusion here. When some accusation is made against 
 some unknown member of the Jewish race, all Jews secretly 
 take the part of the accused, and wish, hope for, and seek 
 to establish his innocence. But it must not be thought 
 that they are mteresting themselves more in the fate of the 
 individual Jew than they would do in the case of an indi- 
 vidual Christian. It is the menace to Judaism in general, 
 the fear that the shameful shadow may do harm to Judaism 
 as a whole, which is the origin of the apparent feeling of 
 sympathy. In the same way, women are delighted when a 
 member of their sex is depreciated, and will themselves 
 assist, until the proceeding seems to throw a disadvan- 
 tageous light over the sex in general, so frightening men 
 from marriage. The race or sex alone is defended, not the 
 individual. 
 
 It would be easy to understand why the family (in its 
 biological not its legal sense) plays a larger role amongst 
 the Jews than amongst any other people ; the English, 
 who in certain ways are akin to the Jews, coming next. 
 The family, in this biological sense, is feminine and maternal 
 in its origin, and has no relation to the State or to society. 
 The fusion, the continuity of the members of the family, 
 reaches its highest point amongst the Jews. In the Indo- 
 Germanic races, especially in the case of the more gifted, 
 but also in quite ordinary individuals, there is never com- 
 plete harmony between father and son ; consciously, or 
 unconsciously, there is always in the mind of the son a cer- 
 tain feeling of impatience against the man who, unasked, 
 brought him into the world, gave him a name, and deter- 
 mined his limitations in this earthly life. It is only amongst 
 the Jews that the son feels deeply rooted in the family and 
 IS fully at one with his father. It scarcely ever happens 
 amongst Christians that father and son are really friends. 
 Amongst Christians even the daughters stand a little further 
 
JUDAISM 311 
 
 apart from the family circle than happens with Jewesses, 
 and more frequently take up some calling which isolates 
 them and gives them independent interests. 
 
 We reach at this point a fact in relation to the argument 
 of the last chapter. I showed there that the essential 
 element in the pairing instinct was an indistinct sense of 
 individuality and of the limits between individuals. Men 
 who are match-makers have always a Jewish element in 
 them. The Jew is always more absorbed by sexual matters 
 than the Aryan, although he is notably less potent sexually 
 and less liable to be enmeshed in a great passion. The Jews 
 are habitual match-makers, and in no race does it so often 
 happen that marriages are arranged by men. This kind of 
 activity is certainly peculiarly necessary in their case, for, as 
 I have alread)- stated, there is no people amongst which 
 marriages for love are so rare. The organic disposition of 
 the Jews towards match-making is associated with their 
 racial failure to comprehend asceticism. It is interesting to 
 note that the Jewish Rabbis have always been addicted to 
 speculations as to the begetting of children and have a rich 
 tradition on the subject, a natural result in the case of the 
 people who invented the phrase as to the duty of *' multi- 
 plying and replenishing the earth." 
 
 The pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits 
 between individuals; and the Jew, par excellence, is the 
 breaker down ot such limits. He is at the opposite pole 
 from aristocrats, with whom the preservation of the limits 
 between individuals is the leading idea. The Jew is an 
 inborn communist. The Jew's careless manners in society 
 and his want of social tact turn on this quality, for the 
 reserves of social intercourse are simply barriers to protect 
 individuality. 
 
 I desire at this point again to lay stress on the fact, 
 although it should be self-evident, that, in spite of my low 
 estimate of the Jew, nothing could be further from my 
 intention than to lend the faintest support to any practical 
 or theoretical persecution of Jews. I am dealing with 
 Judaism, in the platonic sense, as an idea. There is no 
 
312 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 more an absolute Jew than an absolute Christian. I am not 
 speaking against the individual, whom, indeed, if that had 
 been so, I should have wounded grossly and unnecessarily. 
 Watchwords, such as " Buy only from Christians," have 
 in reality a Jewish taint ; they have a meaning only for those 
 who regard the race and not the individual, and what is to 
 be compared with them is the Jewish use of the word " Goy," 
 which is now almost obsolete. I have no wish to boycott 
 the Jew, or by any such immoral means to attempt to solve 
 the Jewish question. Nor will Zionism solve that question; 
 as H. S. Chamberlain has pointed out, since the destruction 
 of the Temple at Jerusalem, Judaism has ceased to be 
 national, and has become a spreading parasite, straggling 
 all over the earth and finding true root nowhere. Before 
 Zionism is possible, the Jew must first conquer Judaism. 
 
 To defeat Judaism, the Jew must first understand himself 
 and war against himself. So far, the Jew has reached no 
 further than to make and enjoy jokes against his own pecu- 
 liarities. Unconsciously he respects the Aryan more than 
 himself. Only steady resolution, united to the highest self- 
 respect, can free the Jew from Jewishness. This resolution, 
 be it ever so strong, ever so honourable, can only be under- 
 stood and carried out by the individual, not by the group. 
 Therefore the Jewish question can only be solved indi- 
 vidually ; every single Jew must try to solve it in his proper 
 person. 
 
 There is no other solution to the question and can be no 
 other ; Zionism will never succeed in answering it. 
 
 The Jew, indeed, who has overcome, the Jew who has 
 become a Christian, has the fullest right to be regarded by 
 the Aryan in his individual capacity, and no longer be con- 
 demned as belonging to a race above which his moral 
 efforts have raised him. He may rest assured that no 
 one will dispute his well-founded claim. The Aryan of 
 good social standing always feels the need to respect the 
 Jew ; his Antisemitism being no joy, no amusement to him. 
 Therefore he is displeased when Jews make revelations 
 about Jews, and he who does so may expect as few thanks 
 
/ JUDAISM 313 
 
 from that quarter as from over-sensitive Judaism itself. 
 Above all, the Aryan desires that the Jew should justify 
 Antisemitism by being baptized. But the danger of this 
 outward acknowledgment of his inward struggles need not 
 trouble the Jew who wishes for liberty within him. He 
 will long to reach the holy baptism of the Spirit, of which 
 that of the body is but the outward symbol. 
 
 To reach so important and useful a result as what 
 Jewishness and Judaism really are, would be to solve 
 one of the most difficult problems ; Judaism is a much 
 deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and in 
 very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even 
 the parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and 
 then it may help us further. 
 
 In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness 
 and cringing, are ever at strife ; in the former self-con- 
 sciousness and contrition, in the latter arrogance and 
 bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew lies his 
 failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish dis- 
 position springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the 
 " Decalogue," the most immoral book of laws in the uni- 
 verse, which enjoins on obedient followers, submission to 
 the powerful will of an exterior influence, with the reward 
 of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His 
 relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly 
 fears, whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise 
 the Jew ; he, like the woman, requires the rule of an 
 exterior authority. According to the definition of Scho- 
 penhauer, the word ' God ' indicates a man who made 
 the world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of 
 the Jew. Of the divine in man, of " the God who in my 
 bosom dwells," the true Jew knows nothing ; for what 
 Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant, the 
 priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant 
 by divine, for what the saying, " I am with you always even 
 to the end of the world " — for the meaning of all these the 
 Jew remains without understanding. For the God in man 
 is the human soul, and the absolute Jew is devoid of a soul. 
 
314 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 It is inevitable, then, that we should find no trace of 
 belief in immortality in the Old Testament. Those who 
 have no soul can have no craving for immortality, and so 
 it is with the woman and the Jew ; " Anima naturaliter 
 Christiana," said Tertullian. 
 
 The absence from the Jew of true mysticism — Cham- 
 berlain has remarked on this — has a similar origin. They 
 have nothing but the grossest superstition and the system of 
 divinatory magic known as the " Kabbala." Jewish mono- 
 theism has no relation to a true belief in God ; it is not 
 a religion of reason, but a belief of old women founded 
 on fear. 
 
 Why is it that the Jewish slave of Jehovah should become 
 so readily a materialist or a freethinker ? It is merely the 
 alternative phase to slavery ; arrogance about what is not 
 understood is the other side of the slavish intelligence. 
 When it is fully recognised that Judaism is to be regarded 
 rather as an idea in which other races have a share, than as 
 the absolute property of a particular race, then the Judaic 
 element in modern materialistic science will be better 
 understood. Wagner has given expression to Judaism in 
 music ; there remains to say something about Judaism in 
 modern science. 
 
 Judaism in science, in the widest interpretation of it, is 
 the endeavour to remove all transcendentalism. The Aryan 
 feels that the effort to grasp everything, and to refer every- 
 thing to some system of deductions, really robs things of 
 their true meaning ; for him, what cannot be discovered is 
 what gives the world its significance. The Jew has no fear 
 of these hidden and secret elements, for he has no con- 
 sciousness of their presence. He tries to take a view of the 
 world as flat and commonplace as possible, and to refuse to 
 see all the secret and spiritual meanings of things. His 
 view is non-philosophical rather an anti-philosophical. 
 
 Because fear of God in the Jew has no relation with real 
 religion, the Jew is of all persons the least perturbed by 
 mechanical, materialistic theories of the world ; he is readily 
 beguiled by Darwinism and the ridiculous notion that 
 
JUDAISM 315 
 
 men are derived from monkeys ; and now he is disposed 
 to accept the view that the soul of man is an evolution that 
 has taken place within the human race ; formerly, he was a 
 mad devotee of Büchner, now he is ready to follow Ostwald. 
 It is due to a real disposition that the jews should be so 
 prominent in the study of chemistry ; they cling naturally 
 to matter, and expect to find the solution of everything in 
 its properties. And yet one who was the greatest German 
 investigator of all times, Kepler himself, wrote the following 
 hexameter on chemistry : 
 
 " O curas Chymicorum ! O quantum in pulvere inane ! " 
 
 The present turn of medical science is largely due to the 
 influence of the Jews, who in such numbers have embraced 
 the medical profession. From the earliest times, until the 
 dominance of the Jews, medicine was closely allied with 
 religion. But now they would make it a matter of drugs, a 
 mere administration of chemicals. But it can never be that 
 the organic will be explained by the inorganic. Fechner and 
 Preyer were right when they said that death came from 
 life, not life from death. We see this taking place daily in 
 individuals (in human beings, for instance, old age pre- 
 pares for death by a calcification of the tissues). And as 
 yet no one has seen the organic arise from the inorganic. 
 From the time of Schwammerdam to that of Pasteur it has 
 become more and more certain that living things never 
 arise from what is not alive. Surely this ontogenetic obser- 
 vation should be applied to phylogeny, and we should be 
 equally certain that, in the past, the dead arose from the 
 living. The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these 
 on a level with their own dead ashes. We should return 
 from this Judaistic science to the nobler conceptions of 
 Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Euler, Newton and 
 Linnaeus, Lamarck and Faraday, Sprengel and Cuvier. The 
 freethinkers of to-day, soulless and not believing in the 
 soul, are incapable of filling the places of these great men 
 and of reverently realising the presence of intrinsic secrets 
 in nature. 
 
3i6 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 It is this want of depth which explains the absence of 
 truly great Jews ; like women, they are without any trace 
 of genius. The philosopher Spinoza, about whose purely 
 Jewish descent there can be no doubt, is incomparably the 
 greatest Jew of the last nine hundred yea'-s, much greater 
 than the poet Heine (who, indeed, was almost destitute of 
 any quality of true greatness) or than that original, if 
 shallow painter, Israels. The extraordinary fashion in 
 which Spinoza has been over-estimated is less due to his 
 intrinsic merit than to the fortuitous circumstance that he 
 was the only thinker to whom Goethe gave his attention. 
 
 For Spinoza himself there was no deep problem in 
 nature (and in this he showed his Jewish character), as, 
 otherwise, he would not have elaborated his mathematical 
 method, a method according to which the explanation of 
 things was to be found in themselves. This system formed 
 a refuge into which Spinoza could escape from himself, and 
 it is not unnatural that it should have been attractive to 
 Goethe, who was the most introspective of men, as it might 
 have seemed to offer to him tranquillity and rest. 
 
 Spinoza showed his Jewishness and the limits that always 
 confine the Jewish spirit in a still plainer fashion ; I am not 
 thinking of his failure to comprehend the State or of his 
 adhesion to the Hobbesian doctrine of universal warfare 
 as the primitive condition of mankind. The matter goes 
 deeper. I have in mind his complete rejection of free-will 
 — the Jew is always a slave and a determinist — and his 
 view that individuals were mere accidents into which the 
 universal substance had fallen. The Jew is never a believer in 
 monads. And so there is no wider philosophical gulf than 
 that between Spinoza and his much more eminent con- 
 temporary, Leibnitz, the protagonist of the monad theory, 
 or its still greater creator, Bruno, whose superficial likeness 
 with Spinoza has been exaggerated in the most grotesque 
 fashion. 
 
 Just as Jews and women are without extreme good and 
 extreme evil, so they never show either genius or the deptti 
 of stupidity of which mankind is capable. The specitic 
 
JUDAISM 317 
 
 kind of intelligence for which Jews and women alike are 
 notorious is due simply to the alertness of an exaggerated 
 egotism ; it is due, moreover, to the boundless capacity 
 shown by both for pursuing any object with equal zeal, 
 because they have no intrinsic standard of value — nothing 
 in their own souls by which to judge of the worthiness 
 of any particular object. And so they have unhampered 
 natural instincts, such as are not present to help the Aryan 
 man when his transcendental standard fails him. 
 
 I may now touch upon the likeness of the English to the 
 Jews, a topic discussed at length by Wagner. It cannot be 
 doubted that of the Germanic races the English are in 
 closest relationship with the Jews. Their orthodoxy and 
 their devotion to the Sabbath afford a direct indication. 
 The religion of the Englishman is always tinged with hypo- 
 crisy, and his asceticism is largely prudery. The English, 
 like women, have been most unproductive in religion and 
 in music ; there may be irreligious poets, although not 
 great artists, but there is no irreligious musician. So, also, 
 the English have produced no great architects or philoso- 
 phers. Berkeley, like Swift and Sterne, were Irish ; Carlyle, 
 Hamilton, and Burns were Scotch. Shakespeare and 
 Shelley, the two greatest Englishmen, stand far from the 
 pinnacle of humanity ; they do not reach so far as Angelo 
 and Beethoven. If we consider English philosophers we 
 shall see that there has been a great degeneration since the 
 Middle Ages. It began with William of Ockham and Duns 
 Scotus ; it proceeded through Roger Bacon and his name- 
 sake, the Chancellor ; through Hobbes, who, mentally, was 
 so near akin to Spinoza ; through the superficial Locke to 
 Hartley, Priestley, Bentham, the two Mills, Lewes, Huxley, 
 and Spencer. These are the greatest names in the history 
 of English philosophy, for Adam Smith and David Hume 
 were Scotchmen. It must always be remembered against 
 England, that from her there came the soulless psychology. 
 The Englishman has impressed himself on the German as a 
 rigorous empiricist and as a practical politician, but these 
 two sides exhaust his importance in philosophy. There 
 
3i8 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 has never yet been a true philosopher who made empiricism 
 his basis, and no Englishman has got beyond empiricism 
 without external help. 
 
 None the less, the Englishman must not be confused with 
 the Jew. There is more of the transcendental element in 
 'him, and his mind is directed rather from the transcendental 
 to the practical, than from the practical towards the trans- 
 cendental. Otherwise he would not be so readily disposed 
 to humour, unlike the Jew, who is ready to be witty only at 
 his own expense or on sexual things. 
 
 I am well aware how difficult are the problems of laughter 
 and humour — just as difficult as any problems that are 
 peculiar to man and not shared by him with the beasts ; so 
 difficult that neither Schopenhauer nor Jean Paul himself 
 were able to elucidate them. Humour has many aspects ; 
 in some men it seems to be an expression of pity for them- 
 selves or for others, but this element is not sufficient to 
 distinguish it. 
 
 The essence of humour appears to me to consist in a 
 laying of stress on empirical things, in order that their 
 unreality may become more obvious. Everything that is 
 realised is laughable, and in this way humour seems to be 
 the antithesis of eroticism. The latter welds men and the 
 world together, and unites them in a great purpose ; the 
 former loses the bonds of synthesis and shows the world as 
 a silly affair. The two stand somewhat in the relation of 
 polarised and unpolarised light. 
 
 When the great erotic wishes to pass from the limited to 
 the illimited, humour pounces down on him, pushes him 
 in front of the stage, and laughs at him from the wings. 
 The humourist has not the craving to transcend space ; he 
 is content with small things ; his dominion is neither the 
 sea nor the mountains, but the fiat level plain. He shuns 
 the idyllic, and plunges deeply into the commonplace, 
 only, however, to show its unreality. He turns from the 
 immanence of things and will not hear the transcendental 
 even spoken of. Wit seeks out contradictions in the sphere of 
 experience ; humour goes deeper and shows that experience 
 
JUDAISM 319 
 
 is a blind and closed system ; both compromise the pheno- 
 menal world by showing that everything is possible in it. 
 Tragedy, on the other hand, shows what must for all 
 eternity be impossible in the phenomenal world ; and thus 
 tragedy and comedy alike, each in their own way, are 
 negations of the empiric. 
 
 The Jew who does not set out, like the humourist, from 
 the transcendental, and does not move towards it, like the 
 erotic, has no interest in depreciating what is called the 
 actual world, and that never becomes for him the para- 
 phernalia of a juggler or the nightmare of a mad-house. 
 Humour, because it recognises the transcendental, if only 
 by the mode of resolutely concealing it, is essentially 
 tolerant ; satire, on the other hand, is essentially intolerant, 
 and is congruous with the disposition of the Jew and the 
 woman. Jews and women are devoid of humour, but 
 addicted to mockery. In Rome there was even a woman 
 (Sulpicia) who wrote satires. Satire, because of its intoler- 
 ance, is impossible to men in society. The humourist, who 
 knows how to keep the trifles and littlenesses of phenomena 
 from troubhng himself or others, is a welcome guest. 
 Humour, like love, moves away obstacles from our path ; 
 it makes possible a way of regarchng the world. The Jew, 
 therefore, is least addicted to society, and the Englishman 
 most adapted for it. 
 
 The comparison of the Jew with the Englishman fades 
 out much more quickly than that with the woman. Both 
 comparisons first arose in the heat of the conflict as to the 
 worth and the nature of Jew^s. I may again refer to Wagner, 
 who not only interested himself deeply in the problem of 
 Judaism, but rediscovered the Jew in the Englishman, and 
 threw the shadow of Ahasuerus over his Kundry, probably 
 the most perfect representation of woman in art. 
 
 The fact that no woman in the w^orld represents the idea 
 of the wife so completely as the Jewess (and not only in the 
 eyes of Jews) still further supports the comparison between 
 Jews and women. In the case of the Aryans, the metaphy- 
 sical qualities of the male are part of his sexual attraction 
 
320 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 for the woman, and so, in a fashion, she puts on an appear- 
 ance of these. The Jew, on the other hand, has no trans- 
 cendental quality, and in the shaping and moulding of the 
 wife leaves the natural tendencies of the female nature a 
 more unhampered sphere ; and the Jewish woman, accord- 
 ingly, plays the part required of her, as house-mother or 
 odalisque, as Cybele or Cyprian, in the fullest way. 
 
 The congruity between Jews and women further reveals 
 itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great 
 talent for journalism, the "mobility" of their minds, their 
 lack of deeply-rooted and original ideas, in fact the mode 
 in which, like women, because they are nothing in them- 
 selves, they can become everything. The Jew is an indivi- 
 dual, not an individuality ; he is in constant close relation 
 with the lower life, and has no share in the higher metaphy- 
 sical life. 
 
 At this point the comparison between the Jew and the 
 woman breaks down ; the being-nothing and becoming-all- 
 things differs in the two. The woman is material which 
 passively assumes any form impressed upon it. In the Jew 
 there is a definite aggressiveness ; it is not because of the 
 great impression that others make on him that he is recep- 
 tive ; he is no more subject to suggestion than the Aryan 
 man, but he adapts himself to every circumstance and every 
 race, becoming, like the parasite, a new creature in 
 every different host, although remaining essentially the 
 same. He assimilates himself to everything, and assi- 
 milates everything ; he is not dominated by others, but 
 submits himself to them. The Jew is gifted, the woman 
 is not gifted, and the giftedness of the Jew reveals itself in 
 many forms of activity, as, for instance, in jurisprudence ; 
 but these activities are always relative and never seated in 
 the creative freedom of the will. 
 
 The Jew is as persistent as the woman, but his persistence 
 is not that of the individual but of the race. He is not 
 unconditioned like the Aryan, but his limitations differ from 
 those of the woman. 
 
 The true peculiarity of the Jew reveals itself best in his 
 
JUDAISM 321 
 
 essentially irreligious nature. I cannot here enter on a dis- 
 cussion as to the idea of religion ; but it is enough to say 
 that it is associated essentially with an acceptance of the 
 higher and eternal in man as different in kind, and in no 
 sense to be derived from the phenomenal life. The Jew is 
 eminently the unbeliever. Faith is that act of man by 
 which he enters into relation with being, and religious faith 
 is directed towards absolute, eternal being, the " life ever- 
 lasting" of the religious phrase. The Jew is really nothing, 
 because he believes in nothing. 
 
 Belief is everything. It does not matter if a man does 
 not believe in God ; let him believe in atheism. But the 
 Jew believes nothing; he does not believe his own belief; 
 I he doubts as to his own doubt. He is never absorbed by 
 I his own joy, or engrossed by his own sorrow. He never 
 , takes himself in earnest, and so never takes any one else in 
 \ earnest He is content to be a Jew, and accepts any disad- 
 ! vantages that come from the fact. 
 
 We have now reached the fundamental difference between 
 the Jew and the woman. Neither believe in themselves ; but 
 the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or 
 her children, or in love itself ; she has a centre of gravity, 
 although it is outside her own being. The Jew believes in 
 nothing, within him or without him. His want of desire 
 for permanent landed property and his attachment to 
 movable goods are more than symbolical. 
 
 The woman believes in the man, in the man outside her, 
 or in the man from whom she takes her inspiration, and 
 in this fashion can take herself in earnest. The Jew takes 
 nothing seriously; he is frivolous, and jests about anything, 
 about the Christian's Christianity, the Jew's baptism. He 
 is neither a true realist nor a true empiricist. Here I must 
 state certain limitations to my agreement with Chamber- 
 lain's conclusions. The Jew is not really a convinced 
 empiricist in the fashion of the English philosophers. The 
 empiricist believes in the possibility of reaching a complete 
 system of knowledge on an empirical basis ; he hopes for 
 the perfection of science. The Jew does not really believe in 
 
32 2 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 knowledge, nor is he a sceptic, for he doubts his own scepti- 
 cism. On the other hand, a brooding care hovers over the 
 non-metaphysical system of Avenarius, and even in Ernst 
 Mach's adherence to relativity there are signs of a deeply 
 reverent attitude. The empiricists must not be accused of 
 Judaism because they are shallow. 
 
 The Jew is the impious man in the widest sense. Piety 
 is not something near things nor outside things ; it is the 
 groundwork of everything. The Jew has been incorrectly 
 called vulgar, simply because he does not concern himself 
 with metaphysics. All true culture that comes from within, 
 all that a man believes to be true and that so is true for 
 him, depend on reverence. Reverence is not limited to the 
 mystic or the religious man ; all science and all scepticism, 
 everything that a man truly believes, have reverence as the 
 fundamental quality. Naturally it displays itself in dif- 
 ferent ways, in high seriousness and sanctity, in earnestness 
 and enthusiasm. The Jew is never either enthusiastic or indif- 
 ferent, he is neither ecstatic nor cold. He reaches neither the 
 heights nor the depths. His restraint becomes meagreness, 
 his copiousness becomes bombast. Should he venture into 
 the boundless realms of inspired thought, he seldom 
 reaches beyond pathos. And although he cannot embrace 
 the whole world, he is for ever covetous of it. 
 
 Discrimination and generalisation, strength and love, 
 science and poetry, every real and deep emotion of the 
 human heart, have reverence as their essential basis. It is 
 not necessary that faith, as in men of genius, should be in 
 relation only to metaphysical entity ; it can extend also to 
 the empirical world and appear fully there, and yet none 
 the less be faith in oneself, in worth, in truth, in the absolute, 
 in God. 
 
 As the comprehensive view of religion and piety that I 
 have given may lead to misconstruction, I propose to eluci- 
 date it further. True piety is not merely the possession of 
 piety, but also the struggle to possess it ; it is found equally 
 in the convinced believer in God (Handel or Fechner), and 
 also in the doubting seeker (Lenau and Dürer) ; it need not 
 
JUDAISM 323 
 
 be made obvious to the world (as in the case of Bach), it 
 may display itself only in a reverent attitude (Mozart). Nor 
 is piety necessarily connected with the appearance of a 
 Founder ; the ancient Greeks were the most reverent people 
 that have lived, and hence their culture was highest; but 
 their religion had no personal Founder. 
 
 Religion is the creation of the all ; and all that humanity 
 can be is only through religion. So far from the Jew being 
 religious, as has been assumed, he is profoundly irreligious 
 ! Were there need to elaborate my verdict on the Jews I 
 j might point out that the Jews, alone of peoples, do not try 
 to make converts to their faith, and that when converts are 
 made they serve as objects of puzzled ridicule to them. 
 Need I refer to the meaningless formality and the repetitions 
 of Jewish prayer ? Need I remind readers that the Jewish 
 religion is a mere historical tradition, a memorial of such 
 incidents as the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, with 
 I the consequent thanks of cowards to their Saviour ; and 
 that it is no guide to the meaning and conduct of life ? The 
 Jew is truly irreligious and furthest of mankind from faith. 
 There is no relation between the Jew himself and the 
 universe ; he has none of the heroism of faith, just as he 
 has none of the disaster of absolute unbelief. 
 
 It is not, then, mysticism that the Jew is without, as 
 Chamberlain maintains, but reverence. If he were only an 
 honest-minded materialist or a frank evolutionist ! He is 
 not a critic, but only critical ; he is not a sceptic in the 
 Cartesian sense, not a doubter who sets out from doubt 
 towards truth, but an ironist ; as, for instance, to take a 
 conspicuous example, Heine. 
 
 What, then, is the Jew if he is nothing that a man can 
 be ? What goes on within him if he is utterly without 
 finality, if there is no ground in him which the plumb hne 
 of psychology may reach ? 
 
 The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always 
 double or multiple. There are always before him two 
 or many possibilities, where the Aryan, although he sees as 
 widelv, feels himself limited in his choice. I think that the 
 
324 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 idea of Judaism consists in this want of reality, this absence 
 of any fundamental relation to the thing-in-and-for-itself. ^ 
 He stands, so to speak, outside reality, without ever entering 
 it. He can never make himself one with anything — never 
 enter into real relationships. He is a zealot without zeal ; .- 
 he has no share in the unlimited, the unconditioned. He is 
 without simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each 
 new interpretation, so seeming more alert than the Aryan. 
 Internal multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal 
 simplicity that of the Aryan. 
 
 It might be urged that the Jewish double-mindedness is 
 modern, and is the result of new knowledge struggling with 
 the old orthodoxy. The education of the Jew, however, 
 only accentuates his natural qualities, and the doubting 
 Jew turns with a renewed zeal to money-making, in which 
 only he can find his standard of value. A curious proof of 
 the absence of simplicity in the mind of the Jew is that he 
 seldom sings, not from bashfulness, but because he does not 
 believe in his own singing. Just as the acuteness of Jews 
 has nothing to do with true power of differentiating, so his 
 shyness about singing or even about speaking in clear 
 positive tones has nothing to do with real reserve. It is 
 a kind of inverted pride ; having no true sense of his own 
 worth, he fears being made ridiculous by his singing or 
 speech. The embarrassment of the Jew extends to things 
 which have nothing to with the real ego. 
 
 It has been seen how difficult it is to define the Jew. He 
 has neither severity nor tenderness. He is both tenacious 
 and weak. He is neither king nor leader, slave nor vassal. 
 He has no share in enthusiasm, and yet he has little 
 equanimity. Nothing is self-evident to him, and yet he is 
 astonished at nothing. He has no trace of Lohengrin in 
 him, and none of Telramund. He is ridiculous as a 
 member of a students' corps and he is equally ridiculous 
 as a "philister." Because he believes in nothing, he takes 
 refuge in materialism ; from this arises his avarice, which is 
 simply an attempt to convince himself that something has 
 a permanent value. And yet he is no real tradesman ; what 
 
JUDAISM 325 
 
 is unreal, insecure in German commerce, is the result of the 
 Jewish speculative interest. 
 
 The erotics of the Jew are sentimentalisni, and their 
 humour is satire. Perhaps examples may help to explain 
 my interpretation of the Jewish character, and I point 
 readily to Ibsen's King Hakon in the " Pretenders," and to 
 his Dr. Stockmann in '* The Enemy of the People." These 
 may make clear what is for ever absent in the Jew. Judaism 
 and Christianity form the greatest possible contrasts ; the 
 former is bereft of all true faith and of inner identity, the 
 latter is the highest expression of the highest faith. Chris- 
 tianity is heroism at its highest point ; Judaism is the extreme 
 of cowardliness. 
 
 Chamberlain has said much that is true and striking as to 
 the fearful awe-struck want of understanding that the Jew 
 displays with regard to the person and teaching of Christ, 
 for the combination of warrior and sufferer in Him, for His 
 life and death. None the less, it would be wrong to state 
 that the Jew is an enemy of Christ, that he represents the 
 anti-Christ ; it is only that he feels no relation with Him. 
 It is strong-minded Aryans, malefactors, who hate Jesus. 
 The Jew does not get beyond being bewildered and 
 disturbed by Him, as something that passes his wit to 
 understand. 
 
 And yet it has stood the Jew in good stead that the New 
 Testament seemed the outcome and fine flower of the Old, 
 the fulfilment of its Messianic prophecies. The polar oppo- 
 sition between Judaism and Christianity makes the origin of 
 the latter from the former a deep riddle ; it is the riddle of 
 the psychology of the founder of religions. 
 
 What is the difference between the genius who founds a 
 religion and other kinds of genius ? What is it that has led 
 him to found the religion ? 
 
 The main difference is no other than that he did not 
 always believe in the God he worships. Tradition relates 
 of Buddha, as of Christ, that they were subject to greater 
 temptations than other men. Two others, Mahomet and 
 Luther, were epileptic. Epilepsy is the disease of the 
 
326 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 criminal ; Caesar, Narses, Napoleon, the greatest of the 
 criminals, were epileptics. 
 
 The founder of a religion is the man who has lived 
 without God and yet has struggled towards the greatest 
 faith. How is it possible for a bad man to transform him- 
 self ? As Kant, although he was compelled to admit the fact, 
 asked in his " Philosophy of Religion," how can an evil tree 
 bring forth good fruit ? The inconceivable mystery of the 
 transformation into a good man of one who has lived evilly 
 all the days and years of his life has actually realised itself 
 in the case of some six or seven historical personages. 
 These have been the founders of religions. 
 
 Other men of genius are good from their birth ; the 
 religious founder acquires goodness. The old existence 
 ceases utterly and is replaced by the new. The greater the 
 man, the more must perish in him at the regeneration. I 
 am inclined to think that Socrates, alone amongst the 
 Greeks, approached closely to the founders of religion ; 
 perhaps he made the decisive struggle with evil in the four- 
 and-twenty hours during which he stood alone at Potidaea. 
 
 The founder of a religion is the man for whom no problem 
 has been solved from his birth. He is the man with the 
 least possible sureness of conviction, for whom everything 
 is doubtful and uncertain, and who has to conquer every- 
 thing for himself in this life. One has to struggle against 
 illness and physical weakness, another trembles on the 
 brink of the crimes which are possible for him, yet another 
 has been in the bonds of sin from his birth. It is only a 
 formal statement to say that original sin is the same in all 
 persons ; it differs materially for each person. Here one, 
 there another, each as he was born, has chosen what is 
 senseless and worthless, has preferred instinct to his will, or 
 pleasure to love ; only the founder of a religion has had 
 original sin in its absolute form ; in him everything is 
 doubtful, everything is in question. He has to meet every 
 problem and free himself from all guilt. He has to reach 
 firm ground from the deepest abyss ; he has to surmount 
 the nothingness in him and bind himself to the utmost 
 
JUDAISM 327 
 
 reality. And so it may be said of him that he frees himself 
 of original sin, that in him God becomes man, but also 
 that the man becomes God ; in him was all error and 
 all guilt ; in him there comes to be all expiation and 
 redemption. 
 
 Thus the founder of a religion is the greatest of the 
 geniuses, for he has vanquished the most. He is the man 
 who has accomplished victoriously what the deepest 
 thinkers of mankind have thought of only timorously as 
 a possibility, the complete regeneration of a man, the 
 reversal of his will. Other great men of genius have, 
 indeed, to fight against evil, but the bent of their souls is 
 towards the good. The founder of a religion has so much 
 in him of evil, of the perverse, of earthly passion, that he 
 must fight with the enemy withm him for forty days in the 
 wilderness, without food or sleep. It was only thus that he 
 can conquer and overcome the death within him and free 
 himself for the highest life. Were it otherwise there would 
 be no impulse to found a faith. The founder of a religion 
 is thus the very antipodes of the emperor ; emperor and 
 Galilean are at the two poles of thought. In Napoleon's 
 life, also, there was a moment when a conversion took 
 place; but this was not a turning away from earthly life, but 
 the deliberate decision tor the treasure and power and 
 splendour of the earthly life. Napoleon was great in the 
 colossal intensity with which he flung from him all the 
 ideal, all relation to the absolute, in the magnitude of his 
 guilt. The founder of religion, on the other hand, cannot 
 and will not bring to man anything except that which was 
 most difficult for himself to attain, the reconciliation with 
 God. He knows that he himself was the man most laden 
 with guilt, and he atones for the guilt by his death on the 
 
 cross. 
 
 There were two possibilities in Judaism. Before the 
 birth of Christ, these two, negation and affirmation, were 
 together awaiting choice. Christ was the man who con- 
 quered in Himself Judaism, the greatest negation, and 
 created Christianity, the strongest affirmation and the most 
 
328 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 direct opposite of Judaism. Now the choice has been 
 made ; the old Israel has divided into Jews and Christians, 
 and Judaism has lost the possibility of producing greatness. 
 The new Judaism has been unable to produce men like 
 Samson and Joshua, the least Jewish of the old Jews. In 
 the history of the world, Christendom and Jewry represent 
 negation and affirmation. In old Israel there was the 
 highest possibility of mankind, the possibility of Christ. 
 The other possibility is the Jew. 
 
 I must guard against misconception ; I do not mean that 
 there was any approach to Christianity in Judaism; the one 
 is the absolute negation of the other ; the relation between 
 the two is only that which exists between all pairs of direct 
 opposites. Even more than in the case of piety and Judaism, 
 Judaism and Christianity can best be contrasted by what 
 each respectively excludes. Nothing is easier than to be 
 Jewish, nothing so difficult as to be Christian. Judaism is 
 the abyss over which Christianity is erected, and for that 
 reason the Aryan dreads nothing so deeply as the Jew. 
 
 I am not disposed to believe, with Chamberlain, that the 
 birth of the Saviour in Palestine was an accident. Christ 
 was a Jew, precisely that He might overcome the Judaism 
 within Him, for he who triumphs over the deepest doubt 
 reaches the highest faith ; he who has raised himself above 
 the most desolate negation is most sure in his position of 
 affirmation. Judaism was the peculiar, original sin of 
 Christ ; it was His victory over Judaism that made Him 
 greater than Buddha or Confucius. Christ was the greatest 
 man because He conquered the greatest enemy. Perhaps 
 He was, and will remain, the only Jew to conquer Judaism. 
 The first of the Jews to become wholly the Christ was also 
 the last who made the transition. It may be, however, that 
 there still lies in Judaism the possibility of producing 
 a Christ, and that the founder of the next religion will pass 
 through Jewry. 
 
 On no other supposition can we account for the long 
 persistence of the Jewish race which has outlived so many 
 other peoples. Without at least some vague hope, the Jews 
 
JUDAISM 329 
 
 could not have survived, and the hope is that there must be 
 something in Judaism for Judaism ; it is the idea of a Mes- 
 siah, of one who shall save them from Judaism. Every 
 other race has had some special watchword, and, on realis- 
 ing their watchword, they have perished. The Jews have 
 failed to realise their watchword, and so their vitality per- 
 sists. The Jewish nature has no other metaphysical mean- 
 ing than to be the spring from which the founders of 
 rehgion will come. Their tradition to increase and multiply 
 is connected with this vague hope, that out of them shall 
 come the Messiah, The possibility of begetting Christs is 
 the meaning of Judaism. % 
 
 As in the Jew there are the greatest possibilities, so also 
 in him are the meanest actualities ; he is adapted to most 
 things and realises fewest. 
 
 Judaism, at the present day, has reached its highest point 
 since the time of Herod. Judaism is the spirit of modern 
 life. Sexuality is accepted, and contemporary ethics sing 
 the praises of pairing. Unhappy Nietzsche must not be 
 made responsible for the shameful doctrines of Wilhelm 
 Bölsche. Nietzsche himself understood asceticism, and 
 perhaps it was only as a revulsion from the evils of his own 
 asceticism that he attached value to the opposite concep- 
 tion. It is the Jew and the woman who are the apostles of 
 pairing to bring guilt on humanity. 
 
 Our age is not only the most Jewish but the most feminine. 
 It is a time when art is content with daubs and seeks its 
 inspiration in the sports of animals ; the time of a superficial 
 anarchy, with no feeling for Justice and the State ; a time 
 of communistic ethics, of the most foolish of historical 
 views, the materialistic interpretation of history ; a time of 
 capitalism and of Marxism ; a time when history, life, and 
 science are no more than political economy and technical 
 instruction ; a time when genius is supposed to be a form 
 of madness ; a time with no great artists and no great 
 philosophers ; a time without originality and yet with the 
 most foolish craving for originality; a time when the cult 
 of the Virgin has been replaced by that of the Demi- 
 
330 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 vierge. It is the time when pairing has not only been 
 approved but has been enjoined as a duty. 
 
 But from the new Judaism the new Christianity may be 
 pressing forth ; mankind waits for the new founder of reli- 
 gion, and, as in the year one, the age presses for a decision. 
 The decision must be made between Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity, between business and culture, between male and 
 female, between the race and the individual, between un- 
 worthiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher 
 life, between negation and the God-like. Mankind has the 
 choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no 
 middle way. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 WOMAN AND MANKIND 
 
 At last we are ready, clear-eyed and well armed, to deal 
 with the question of the emancipation of women. Our 
 eyes are clear, for we have freed them from the thronging 
 specks of dubiety that had hitherto obscured the question, 
 and we are armed with a well-founded grasp of theory, and 
 a secure ethical basis. We are far from the maze in which 
 this controversy usually lies, and our investigation has got 
 beyond the mere statement of different natural capacity 
 for men and women, to a point whence the part of women 
 in the world-whole and the meaning of her relation to 
 humanity can be estimated. I am not going to deal with 
 any practical applications of my results ; the latter are not 
 nearly optimistic enough for me to hope that they could 
 have any effect on the progress of political movements. I 
 refrain from working out laws of social hygiene, and content 
 myself with facing the problem from the standpoint of that 
 conception of humanity which pervades the philosophy of 
 Immanuel Kant. 
 
 This conception is in great danger from woman. Woman 
 is able, in a quite extraordinary way, to produce the im- 
 pression that she herself is really non-sexual, and that her 
 sexuality is only a concession to man. But be that as it 
 may, at the present time men have almost allowed them- 
 selves to be persuaded by woman that their strongest and 
 most markedly characteristic desire lies in sexuality, that it 
 is only through woman that they can hope to satisfy their 
 truest and best ambitions, and that chastity is an un- 
 natural and impossible state for them. How often it 
 
332 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 happens that young men who are wrapped up in their work 
 are told by women to whom they appeal and who would 
 prefer to have them paying them attention, or even as sons- 
 in-law, that " they ought not to work too hard," that they 
 ought to " enjoy life." At the bottom of this sort of advice 
 there lies a feeling on the woman's part, which is none 
 the less real because it is unconscious, that her whole 
 significance and existence depend on her mission as a 
 procreating agent, and that she goes to the wall if man is 
 allowed to occupy himself altogether with other than sexual 
 matters. 
 
 That women will ever change in this respect is doubtful. 
 There is nothing to show that she ever was different. It 
 may be that to-day the physical side of the question is more 
 to the fore than formerly, since a great deal of the " woman 
 movement" of the times is merely a desire to be "free," to 
 shake off the trammels of motherhood ; as a whole the 
 practical results show that it is revolt from motherhood 
 towards prostitution, a prostitute emancipation rather than 
 the emancipation of woman that is aimed at : a bold bid for 
 the success of the courtesan. The only real change is man's 
 behaviour towards the movement. Under the influence of 
 modern Judaism, men seem inclined to accept woman's 
 estimate of them and to bow before it. 
 
 Masculine chastity is laughed at, and the feeling that 
 woman is the evil influence in man's life is no longer under- 
 stood, and men are not ashamed of their own lust. 
 
 It is now apparent from where this demand for " seeing 
 life," the Dionysian view of the music-hall, the cult of 
 Goethe in so far as he follows Ovid, and this quite modern 
 "coitus-cult" comes. There is no doubt that the move- 
 ment is so widespread that very few men have the courage 
 to acknowledge their chastity, preferring to pretend that 
 they are regular Don Juans. Sexual excess is held to be 
 the most desirable characteristic of a man of the world, and 
 sexuality has attained such pre-eminence that a man is 
 doubted unless he can, as it were, show proofs of his 
 prowess. Chastity, on the other hand, is so despised that 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 333 
 
 many a really pure lad attempts to appear a blase roue. It 
 is even true that those who are modest are ashamed of the 
 feeling ; but there is another, the modern form of shame — 
 not the eroticist's shame, but the shame of the woman who 
 has no lover, who has not received appraisement from the 
 opposite sex. Hence it comes that men make it their 
 business to tell each other what a rignt and proper pleasure 
 they take in " doing their duty " by the opposite sex. And 
 women are careful to let it be known that only what is 
 " manly " in man can appeal to them : and man takes their 
 measure of his manliness and makes it his own. Man's 
 qualifications as a male have, in fact, become identical with 
 his value with women, in women's eyes. 
 
 But God forbid that it should be so ; that w ould mean 
 that there are no longer any men. 
 
 Contrast with this the fact that the high value set on 
 women's virtue originated with man, and w^ill always 
 come from men worthy of the name ; it is the projection 
 of man's own ideal of spotless purity on the object of his 
 love. 
 
 But there should be no mistaking this true chastity for 
 the shivering and shaking before contact, which is soon 
 changed for delighted acquiescence, nor for the hysterical 
 suppression of sexual desires. The outward endeavour to 
 correspond to man's demand for physical purity must not 
 be taken for anything but a fear lest the buyer will fight 
 shy of the bargain ; least of all the care which women so 
 often take to choose only the man who can give them most 
 value must not deceive any one (it has been called the 
 "high value" or '* self-respect" a girl has for herself) ! If 
 one remembers the view women take of virginity, there 
 can be very little doubt that woman's one end is the 
 bringing about of universal pairing as the only means by 
 which they acquire a real existence ; that women desire 
 pairing, and nothing else, even if they personally appear to 
 be as uninterested as possible in sensual matters. All this 
 can be fully proved from the generality of the match- 
 making instinct. 
 
334 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 In order to be fully persuaded of this, woman's attitude 
 towards the virginity of those of her own sex must be 
 considered. 
 
 It is certain that women have a very low opinion of the 
 unmarried. It is, in fact, the one female condition which 
 has a negative value for woman. Women only respect a 
 woman when she is married ; even if she is unhappily 
 married to a hideous, weak, poor, common, tyrannical, 
 " impossible " man, she is, nevertheless, married, has 
 received value, existence. Even if a woman has had a 
 short experience of the freedom of a courtesan's life, even 
 if she has been on the streets, she still stands higher in a 
 woman's estimation than the old maid, who works and 
 toils alone in her room, without ever having known lawful 
 or unlawful union with a man, the enduring or fleeting 
 ecstasy of love. 
 
 Even a young and beautiful girl is never valued by a 
 woman for her attractions as such (the sense of the beauti- 
 ful is wanting in woman since they have no standard in 
 themselves to measure it by), but merely because she has 
 more prospect of enslaving a man. The more beautiful a 
 young girl is, the more promising she appears to other 
 women, the greater her value to woman as the match- 
 maker in her mission as guardian of the race ; it is only 
 this unconscious feeling which makes it possible for a 
 woman to take pleasure in the beauty of a young girl. 
 It goes without saying that this can only happen when 
 the woman in question has already achieved her own 
 end (because, otherwise, envy of a contemporary, and the 
 fear of having her own chances jeopardised by others, 
 would overcome other considerations). She must first 
 of all attain her own union, and then she is ready to help 
 others. 
 
 Women are altogether to blame for the unpleasant asso- 
 ciations which are so unfortunately connected with "old 
 maids." One often hears men talking respectfully of an 
 elderly woman ; but every woman and girl, whether married 
 or single, has nothing but contempt for such a one, even 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 335 
 
 when, as is often the case, they are unconscious that it is so 
 with them. I once heard a married woman, whose talents 
 and beauty put jealousy quite out of the question, making 
 fun of her plain and elderly Italian governess for repeatedly 
 saying that : " lo sono ancora una virgine " (that she was 
 still a virgin). The interpretation put on the words was 
 that the speaker wished to admit she had made a virtue of 
 necessity, and would have been very glad to get rid of her 
 virginity if she could have done so without detriment to her 
 position in life. 
 
 This is the most important point of all : women not 
 only disparage and despise the virginity of other women, 
 but they set no value on their own state of virginity (except 
 that men prize it so highly). This is why they look upon 
 every married woman as a sort of superior being. The 
 deep impression made on women by the sexual act can be 
 most plainly seen by the respect which girls pay to a married 
 woman, of however short a standing ; which points to their 
 idea of their existence being the attainment of the same 
 zenith themselves. They look upon other young girls, on 
 the contrary, as being, like themseves, still imperfect beings 
 awaiting consummation. 
 
 I think I have said enough to show that experience con- 
 firms the deduction I made from the importance of the 
 pairing instinct in women, the deduction that virgin worship 
 is of male, not female origin. 
 
 A man demands chastity in himself and others, most of 
 all from the being he loves ; a woman wants the man with 
 most experience and sensuality, not virtue. Woman has 
 no comprehension of paragons. On the contrary, it 
 is well known that a woman is most ready to fly to the 
 arms of the man with the widest reputation for bemg a 
 Don Juan. 
 
 Wom^an requires man to be sexual, because she only 
 gains existence through his sexuality. Women have no 
 sense of a man's love, as a superior phenomenon, they only 
 perceive that side of him which unceasingly desires and 
 appropriates the object of his affections, and men who have 
 
336 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 none or very little of the instinct of brutality developed in 
 them have no influence on them. 
 
 As for the higher, platonic love of man, they do not 
 want it ; it flatters and pleases them, but it has no signi- 
 ficance for them, and if the homage on bended knees 
 lasts too long, Beatrice becomes just as impatient as Mes- 
 salina. 
 
 In coitus lies woman's greatest humiliation, in love her 
 supremest exaltation. Since woman desires coitus and not 
 love, she proves that she wishes to be humiliated and not 
 worshipped. The ultimate opponent of the emancipation 
 of women is woman. 
 
 It is not because sexual union is voluptuous, not because 
 it is the typical example of all the pleasures of the lower 
 life, that it is immoral. Asceticism, which would regard 
 pleasure in itself as immoral, is itself immoral, inasmuch 
 it attributes immorality to an action because of the external 
 consequences of it, not because of immorality in the thing 
 itself ; it is the imposition of an alien, not an inherent law. 
 A man may seek pleasure, he may strive to make his life 
 easier and more pleasant ; but he must not sacrifice a moral 
 law. Asceticism attempts to make man moral by self- 
 repression and will give him credit and praise for morality 
 simply because he has denied himself certain things. 
 Asceticism must be rejected from the point of view of 
 ethics and of psychology inasmuch as it makes virtue the 
 efifect of a cause, and not the thing itself. Asceticism is a 
 dangerous although attractive guide ; since pleasure is one 
 of the chief things that beguile men from the higher path, 
 it is easy to suppose that its mere abandonment is 
 meritorious. 
 
 In itself, however, pleasure is neither moral nor immoral. 
 It is only when the desire for pleasure conquers the desire 
 for worthiness that a human being has fallen. 
 
 Coitus is immoral because there is no man who does not 
 use woman at such times as a means to an end ; for whom 
 pleasure does not, in his own as well as her being, during 
 that time represent the value of mankind. 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 337 
 
 During coitus a man forgets all about everything, he 
 forgets the woman ; she has no longer a psychic but only 
 a physical existence for him. He either desires a child by 
 her or the satisfaction of his own passion ; in neither case 
 does he use her as an end in herself, but for an outside cause. 
 This and this alone makes coitus immoral. 
 
 There is no doubt that woman is the missionary of sexual 
 union, and that she looks upon herself, as on everything else, 
 merely as a means to its ends. She wants a man to satisfy 
 her passion or to obtain children ; she is willing to be used 
 by man as a tool, as a thing, as an object, to be treated as 
 his property, to be changed and modelled according to his 
 good pleasure. But we should not allow ourselves to be 
 used by others as means to an end. 
 
 Kundry appealed often to Parsifal's compassion for her 
 yearnings : but here we see the weakness of sympathetic 
 morality, which attempts to grant every desire of those 
 around, however wrong such wishes may be. Ethics 
 and morality based on sympathy are equally absurd, since 
 they make the " ought " dependent on the " will," (whether 
 it be the will of oneself, or of others, or of society, it is all 
 the same,) instead of making the "will" dependent on the 
 " ought " ; they take as a standard of morality concrete 
 cases of human history, concrete cases of human happiness, 
 concrete moments in life instead of the idea. 
 
 But the question is : how ought man to treat woman ? 
 As she herself desires to be treated or as the moral idea 
 would dictate ? 
 
 If he is going to treat her as she wishes, he must have 
 intercourse with her, for she desires it ; he must beat her, 
 for she likes to be hurt ; he must hypnotise her, since she 
 wishes to be hypnotised ; he must prove to her by 
 his attentions how little he thinks of himself, for she 
 likes compliments, and has no desire to be respected for 
 herself. 
 
 If he is going to treat her as the moral idea demands, 
 he must try to see in her the concept of mankind 
 and endeavour to respect her. Even although woman 
 
 Y 
 
338 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 is only a function of man, a function he can degrade 
 or raise at will, and women do not wish to be more 
 or anything else than what man makes them, it is no 
 more a moral arrangement than the suttee of Indian 
 widows, which, even though it be voluntary and insisted 
 upon by them, is none the less terrible barbarity. 
 
 The emancipation of woman is analogous to the eman- 
 cipation of Jews and negroes. Undoubtedly the principal 
 reason why these people have been treated as slaves and 
 inferiors is to be found in their servile dispositions ; their 
 desire for freedom is not nearly so strong as that of the 
 Indo-Germans. And even although tHe whites in America 
 at the present day find it necessary to keep themselves quite 
 aloof from the negro population because they make such a 
 bad use of their freedom, yet in the war of the Northern 
 States against the Federals, which resulted in the freedom 
 of the slaves, right was entirely on the side of the emanci- 
 pators. 
 
 Although the humanity of Jews, negroes, and still more of 
 women, is weighed down by many immoral impulses ; 
 although in these cases there is so much more to fight 
 against than in the case of Aryan men, still we must try to 
 respect mankind, and to venerate the idea of humanity (by 
 which I do not mean the human community, but the being, 
 man, the soul as part of the spiritual world). No matter 
 how degraded a criminal may be, no one ought to arrogate 
 to himself the functions of the law ; no man has the right 
 to lynch such an offender. 
 
 The problem of woman and the problem of the Jews are 
 absolutely identical with the problem of slavery, and they 
 must be solved in the same way. No one should be op- 
 pressed, even if the oppression is of such a kind as to be 
 unfelt as such. The animals about a house are not 
 " slaves," because they have no freedom in the proper 
 sense of the word which could be taken away. 
 
 But woman has a faint idea of her incapacity, a last 
 remnant, however weak, of the free intelligible ego, simply 
 because there is no such thing as an absolute woman. 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 339 
 
 Women are human beings, and must be treatea as such, 
 even if they themselves do not wish it. Woman and man 
 have the same rights. That is not to say that women ought 
 to have an equal share in political affairs. From the 
 utilitarian standpoint such a concession, certainly at present 
 and probably always, would be most undesirable ; in New 
 Zealand, where, on ethical principles, women have been 
 enfranchised, the worst results have followed. As children, 
 imbeciles and criminals would be justly prevented from 
 taking any part in public affairs even if they were numeri- 
 cally equal or in the majority ; woman must in the same way 
 be kept from having a share in anything which concerns 
 the public welfare, as it is much to be feared that the mere 
 effect of female influence would be harmful. Just as the 
 results of science do not depend on whether all men accept 
 them or not, so justice and injustice can be dealt out to 
 the woman, although she is unable to distinguish between 
 them, and she need not be afraid that injury will be done 
 her, as justice and not might will be the deciding factor 
 in her treatment. But justice is always the same whether 
 for man or woman. No one has a right to forbid things 
 to a woman because they are " unwomanly " ; neither 
 should any man be so mean as to talk of his unfaithful 
 wife's doings as if they were his affair. Woman must be 
 looked upon as an individual and as if she were a free 
 individual, not as one of a species, not as a sort of 
 creation from the various wants of man's nature ; even 
 though woman herself may never prove worthy of such a 
 lofty view. 
 
 Thus this book may be considered as the greatest honour 
 ever paid to women. Nothing but the most moral relation 
 towards women should be possible for men ; there should 
 be neither sexuality nor love, for both make woman the 
 means to an end, but only the attempt to understand her. 
 Most men theoretically respect women, but practically 
 they thoroughly despise them ; according to my ideas this 
 method should be reversed. It is impossible to think highly 
 pf women, but it does not follow that we are to despise 
 
340 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 them for ever. It is unfortunate that so many great ano 
 famous men have had mean views on this point. The views 
 of Schopenhauer and Demosthenes as to the emancipation 
 of women are good instances. So also Goethe's 
 
 Immer is so das Mädchen beschäftigt und reifet im stillen 
 Häuslicher Tugend entgegen, den klugen Mann zu beglücken. 
 Wünscht sie dann endlich zu lesen, so wählt sie gewisslich ein 
 Kochbuch, 
 
 is scarcely better than Moliere's 
 
 . . . Une femme en sait tonjours assez, 
 Quand la capacite de son esprit se hausse 
 A connaitre un pourpoint d'avec un haut de chausse. 
 
 Men will have to overcome their dislike for masculine 
 women, for that is no more than a mean egoism. If 
 women ever become masculine by becoming logical and 
 ethical, they would no longer be such good material for man's 
 projection ; but that is not a sufficient reason for the present 
 method of tying woman down to the needs of her husband 
 and children and forbidding her certain things because they 
 are masculine. 
 
 For even if the possibility of morality is incompatible 
 with the idea of the absolute woman, it does not follow 
 that man is to make no effort to save the average woman 
 from further deterioration ; much less is he to help to keep 
 woman as she is. In every living woman the presence of 
 what Kant calls "the germ of good" must be assumed ; it 
 is the remnant of a free state which makes it possible for 
 Woman to have a dim notion of her destiny. The theo- 
 retical possibility of grafting much more on this " germ 
 of good " should never be lost sight of, even although 
 nothing has ever been done, or even if nothing could ever 
 be done in that respect. 
 
 The basis and the purpose of the universe is the good, 
 and the whole world exists under a moral law ; even to the 
 animals, which are mere phenomena, we assign moral values^ 
 holding the elephant, for instance, to be higher than the 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 341 
 
 snake, notwithstanding the fact that we do not make an 
 animal accountable when it kills another. In the case of 
 woman, however, we regard her as responsible if she com- 
 mits murder, and in this alone is a proof that women are 
 above the animals. If it be the case that womanliness is 
 simply immorality, then woman must cease to be womanly 
 and try to be manly. 
 
 I must give warning against the danger of woman trying 
 merely to liken herself outwardly to man, for such a course 
 would simply plunge her more deeply into womanliness. 
 It is only too likely that the efforts to emancipate women 
 will result not in giving her real freedom, in letting her 
 reach free-will, but merely in enlarging the range of her 
 caprices. 
 
 It seems to me that if we look the facts of the case in 
 the face there are only two possible courses open for 
 women : either to pretend to accept man's ideas, and to 
 think that they believe what is really opposed to their 
 whole, unchanged nature, to assume a horror of immorality 
 (as if they were moral themselves), of sexuality (as if they 
 desired platonic love) ; or to openly admit that they are 
 wrapped up in husband and children, without bein.i^ con- 
 scious of all that such an admission implies, of the shame- 
 lessness and self-immolation of it. 
 
 Unconscious hypocrisy, or cynical identification with 
 their natural instincts ; nothing else seems possible for 
 woman. 
 
 But it is neither agreement nor disagreement with, but 
 rather the denial and overcoming of her womanishness 
 that a woman should aim at. If a woman really were to 
 wish, for instance, for man's chastity, it would mean that 
 she had conquered the woman in her, it would mean that 
 pairing was no longer of supreme importance to her and 
 that her aim was no longer to further it. But here is 
 the trouble : such pretensions must not be accepted as 
 genuine, even although here and there they are actually 
 put forward. For a woman who longed for man's purity 
 is, apart from her hysteria, so stupid and so incapable of 
 
342 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 truthfulness that she is unable to perceive that she is in this 
 way negating herself, making herself absolutely worthless, 
 without existence ! 
 
 It is difficult to decide which is preferable : the unlimited 
 hypocrisy which can appropriate the thing that is most 
 foreign to it, i.e., the ascetic ideal, or the ingenuous admira- 
 tion for the reformed rake, the complacent devotion to him. 
 The principal problem of the woman question lies in the 
 fact that in each case woman's one desire is to put all 
 responsibility on man, and in this it is identical with the 
 problem of mankind. 
 
 Friedrich Nietzsche says in one of his books : " To 
 underestimate the real difficulties of the man and woman 
 problem, to fail to admit the abysmal antagonism and the 
 inevitable nature of the constant strain between the two, to 
 dream of equal rights, education, responsibilities and duties, 
 is the mark of the superficial observer, and any thinker who 
 has been found shallow in these difficult places — shallow by 
 nature — should be looked upon as untrustworthy, as a 
 useless and treacherous guide ; he will, no doubt, be one of 
 those who 'briefly deal with' all the real problems of life, 
 death and eternity — who never gets to the bottom of things. 
 But the man who is not superficial, who has depth of 
 thought as well as of purpose, the depth which not only 
 makes him desire right but endows him with determination 
 and strength to do right, must always look on woman from 
 the oriental standpoint : — as a possession, as private property, 
 as something born to serve and be dependent on him — he 
 must see the marvellous reasonableness of the Asiatic instinct 
 of superiority over women, as the Greeks of old saw it, 
 those worthy successors and disciples of the Eastern school. 
 It was an attitude towards woman which, as is well known, 
 from Homer's time till that of Pericles, grew with the 
 growth of culture, and increased in strength step by step, 
 and gradually became quite oriental. What a necessary, 
 logical, desirable growth for mankind ! if we could only 
 attain to it ourselves ! " 
 
 The great individualist is here thinking in the terms of 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 343 
 
 social ethics, and the autonomy of his moral doctrine is over- 
 shadowed by the ideas of caste, groups, and divisions. 
 And so, for the benefit of society, to preserve the place of 
 men, he would place woman in subjection, so that the 
 voice of the wish for emancipation could no longer be 
 heard, and so that we might be freed from the false and 
 foolish cry of the existing advocates of women's rights, ad- 
 vocates who have no suspicion of the real source of woman 
 bondage. But I quoted Nietzsche, not to convict him of 
 want of logic, but to lead to the point that the solution of 
 the problem of humanity is bound up with the solution of 
 the woman problem. If any one should think it a high- 
 flown idea that man should respect woman as an entity, a 
 real existence, and not use her merely as a means to an 
 end, that he should recognise in her the same rights and 
 the same duties (those of building up one's own moral 
 personality) as his own, then he must reflect that man 
 cannot solve the ethical problem in his own case, if he 
 continues to lower the idea of humanity in the women by 
 using her simply for his own purposes. 
 
 Coitus is the price man has to pay to women, undei the 
 Asiatic system, for their oppression. And although it is true 
 that women may be more than content with such recom- 
 pence for the worst form of slavery, man has no right to 
 take part in such conduct, simply because he also is morally 
 damaged by it. 
 
 Even technically the problem of humanity is not soluble 
 for man alone ; he has to consider woman even if he only 
 wishes to redeem himself ; he must endeavour to get her to 
 abandon her immoral designs on him. Women must really 
 and truly and spontaneously relinquish coitus. That un- 
 doubtedly means that woman, as woman, must disappear, 
 and until that has come to pass there is no possibility of 
 establishing the kingdom of God on earth. Pythagoras, 
 Plato, Christianity (as opposed to Judaism), Tertullian, 
 Swift, Wagner, Ibsen, all these have urged the freedom of 
 woman, not the emancipation of woman from man, but 
 rather the emancipation of woman from herself. 
 
344 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 It is easy to bear Nietzsche's anathema in such company ! 
 But it is very hard for woman to reach such a goal by her 
 own strength. The spark in her is so flickering that it 
 always needs the fire of man to relight it ; she must have an 
 example to go by. Christ is an example ; He freed the 
 fallen Magdalen, He swept away her past and expiated it for 
 her. Wagner, the greatest man since Christ's time, under- 
 stood to the full the real significance of that act : until 
 woman ceases to exist as woman for man she cannot cease 
 being woman. Kundry could only be released from 
 Klingsor's curse by the help of a sinless, immaculate man — 
 Parsifal. This shows ^the complete harmony between the 
 psychological and philosophical deduction which is dealt 
 with in Wagner's " Parsifal," the greatest work in the world's 
 literature. It is man's sexuality which first gives woman 
 existence as woman. Woman will exist as long as man's 
 guilt is inexpiated, until he has really vanquished his own 
 sexuality. 
 
 It is only in this way that the eternal opposition to all 
 anti-feministic tendencies can be avoided ; the view that 
 says, since woman is there, being what she is, and not to 
 be altered, man must endeavour to make terms with her ; 
 it is useless to fight, because there is nothing which can be 
 exterminated. But it has been shown that woman is nega- 
 tive and ceases to exist the moment man determines to be 
 nothing but true existence. 
 
 That which must be fought against is not an affair of 
 ever unchangeable existence and essence : it is something 
 which can be put an end to, and which ought to be put an 
 end to. 
 
 This is the way, and no other, to solve the woman ques- 
 tion, and this comes from comprehending it. The solution 
 may appear impossible, its tone exaggerated, its claims over- 
 stated, its requirements too exacting. Undoubtedly there 
 has been little said about the woman question, as women 
 talk of it ; we have been dealing with a subject on which 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 345 
 
 women are silent, and must always remain silent — the 
 bondage which sexuality implies. 
 
 This woman question is as old as sex itself, and as young 
 as mankind. And the answer to it ? Man must free him- 
 self of sex, for in that way, and that way alone, can he free 
 woman. In his purity, not, as she believes, in his impurity, 
 lies her salvation. She must certainly be destroyed, as 
 woman ; but only to be raised again from the ashes — new, 
 restored to youth — as a real human being. 
 
 So long as there are two sexes there will always be a 
 woman question, just as there will be the problem of mankind. 
 Christ was mindful of this when, according to the account 
 of one of the Fathers of the Church — Clemens — He talked 
 with Salome, without the optimistic palliation of the 
 sex which St. Paul and Luther invented later : death will 
 last so long as women bring forth, and truth will not 
 prevail until the two become one, until from man and 
 woman a third self, neither man nor woman, is evolved. 
 
 Now for the first time, looking at the woman question as 
 the most important problem of mankind, the demand for 
 the sexual abstinence on the part of both sexes is put 
 forward with good reason. To seek to ground this claim, 
 on the prejudicial effects on the health following sexual 
 intercourse would be absurd, for any one with knowledge 
 of the physical frame could upset such a theory at all 
 points ; to found it on the immorality of passion would also 
 be wrong, because that would introduce a heteronomous 
 motive into ethics. St. Augustine, however, must certainly 
 have been aware, when he advocated chastity for all man- 
 kind, that the objection raised to it would be that m such a 
 case the whole human race would quickly disappear from 
 the face of the earth. 
 
 This extraordmary apprehension, the worst part of which 
 appears to be the thought that the race would be extermi- 
 nated, shows not only the greatest unbelief in individual 
 immortality and eternal life for moral well-doers ; it is not 
 
346 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 only most irreligious, but it proves at the same time the 
 cowardice of man and his incapacity to live an individual 
 life. To any one who thinks thus, the earth can only mean 
 the turmoil and press of those on it ; death must seem less 
 terrible to such a man than isolation. If the immortal, 
 moral part of his personality were really vigorous, he would 
 have courage to look this result in the face ; he would 
 not fear the death of the body, nor attempt to substitute 
 the miserable certainty of the continuation of the race 
 for his lack of faith in the eternal life of the soul. The 
 rejection of sexuality is merely the death of the physical 
 life, to put m its place the full development of the spiritual 
 life. 
 
 Hence it follows that it cannot be a moral duty to provide 
 for the continuance of the race. This common argument 
 appears to me to be so extraordinarily false that I am 
 almost ashamed to meet it. Yet at the risk of making 
 myself ridiculous I must ask if any one ever consummated 
 coitus to avoid the great danger of letting the human race 
 die out, if he failed in his duty ? And would it not follow 
 that any man who prefers chastity would be open to the 
 charge of immoral conduct ? Every form of fecundity is 
 loathsome, and no one who is honest with himself feels 
 bound to provide for the continuity of the human race. 
 And what we do not realise to be a duty, is not a duty. 
 
 On the contrary, it is immoral to procreate a human being 
 for any secondary reason, to bring a being into the limita- 
 tions of humanity, the conditions made for him by his 
 parentage ; the fundamental reason why the possible freedom 
 and spontaneity of a human being is limited is that he was 
 begotten in such an immoral fashion. That the human race 
 should persist is of no interest whatever to reason ; he who 
 would perpetuate humanity would perpetuate the problem 
 and the guilt, the only problem and the only guilt. The 
 only true goal is divinity and the union of humanity with 
 the Godhead ; that is the real choice between good and 
 evil, between existence and negation. The moral sanction 
 that has been invented for coitus, in supposing that there 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 347 
 
 is an ideal attitude to the act in which only the propagation 
 of the race is thought of, is no sufficient defence. There is 
 no such imperative in the mind of man ; it is merely an 
 ingenious defence of a desire, and there is the fundamental 
 immorality in it, that the being to be created has no power 
 of choice with regard to his parents. As for the sexual 
 union in which the production of children is prevented, 
 there is no possible justification. 
 
 Sexual union has no place in the idea of mankind, not 
 because ascetism is a duty, but because in it woman becomes 
 the object, the cause, and man does what he will with her, 
 looks upon her merely as a " thing," not as a living human 
 being with an inner, psychic, existence. And so man 
 despises woman the moment coitus is over, and the woman 
 knows that she is despised, even although a few minutes 
 before she thought herself adored. 
 
 The only thing to be respected in man is the idea of 
 mankind ; this disparagement of woman (and himself), in- 
 duced by coitus, is the surest proof that it is opposed to that 
 idea of mankind. Any one who is ignorant of what this 
 Kantian "idea of mankind" means, may perhaps under- 
 stand it when he thinks of his sisters, his mother, his female 
 relatives ; it concerns them all : for our own sakes, then, 
 woman ought to treated as human, respected and not 
 degraded, all sexuality implying degradation. 
 
 But man can only respect woman when she herself ceases 
 to wish to be object and material for man ; if there is any 
 question of emancipation it should be the emancipation from 
 the prostitute element. It has never until now been made 
 clear where the bondage of woman lies ; it is in the sove- 
 reign, all too welcome power wielded on them by the 
 Phallus. Th .;re can be no doubt that the men who have 
 really desired the emancipation of women are the men who 
 are not very sexual, who have no great craving for love, 
 who are not very profound, but who are men of noble and 
 spiritual minds. I am not going to try to palliate the 
 erotic motives of man, nor to represent his antipathy to 
 the " emancipated woman " as being in any sense less than 
 
348 SEX AND CHARACTER 
 
 it is; it is much easier to go with the majority, than, as 
 Kant did, to dimb, painfully and slowly, to the heights of 
 isolation. 
 
 But a great deal of what is taken for enmity to emanci- 
 pation is due to the want of confidence in its possibility. 
 Man does not really want woman as a slave : he is usually 
 only too anxious for a companion. The education which 
 the woman of the present day receives is not calculated 
 to fit her for the battle against her real bondage. The last 
 resource of her " womanly " teacher, if she declines to do 
 this or that, is to say that no man will have her unless she 
 does it. Women's education is directed solely to prepar- 
 ing them for their marriage, the happy state in which 
 they are to find their crown. Such training would have 
 little effect on man, but it serves to accentuate woman's 
 womanishness, her dependence, and her servile condition. 
 The education of woman must be taken out of the hands 
 of woman ; the education of mankind must be taken out 
 of the hands of the mother. This is the first step towards 
 placing woman in a relation to the idea of mankind, which 
 since the beginning she has done more than anything else 
 to hinder. 
 
 A woman who had really given up her sexual self, who 
 wished to be at peace would be no longer " woman." She 
 would have ceased to be " woman," she would have received 
 the inward and spiritual sign as well as the outward form of 
 regeneration. 
 
 Can such a thing be ? 
 
 There is no absolute woman, but even so to say " yes " 
 to the above question is like giving one's assent to a miracle. 
 Emancipation will not make woman happier ; it will not 
 ensure her salvation, and it is a long road which leads to 
 God. No being in the transition stage between freedom 
 and slavery can be happy. But will woman choose to 
 abandon slavery in order to become unhappy ? The 
 question is not merely if it be possible for woman to 
 
WOMAN AND MANKIND 349 
 
 become moral. It is this : is it possible for woman really 
 to wish to realise the problem of existence, the conception 
 of guilt ? Can she really desire freedom ? This can happen 
 only by her being penetrated by a^ ideal, brought to the 
 guiding star. It can happen only if the categorical im- 
 perative were to become active in woman ; only if woman 
 can place herself in relation to the moral idea, the idea of 
 humanity. 
 
 In that way only can there be an emancipation of woman. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Esthetics and Erotics, Chap. XL. 
 \ 236-251 
 
 I Affinity, sexual, compared with che- 
 I mical, 41 
 \ Ahriman, 183 
 
 Alcmaeon, of Kroton, 81 
 
 Alexander the Great, 229 
 
 Amphibia, hermaphroditism, 22 
 
 Anaesthesia, sexual, 274 
 
 Anatomical distinctions of the sexes, 3 
 
 Anatomy, as guide to sexuality, 3, 4 
 
 Animals, women and the sexual union 
 of, 257 
 
 Angelo, M., 105 
 
 Anti-Christ, 183 
 
 Antisemitism, 303, 304, 312, 313 
 
 Apprehension, 116 
 
 Architecture, 119 
 
 Aristotle, 18, 140, 187, 293 
 
 Arrhenoplasm, Chap. II., 11-25 
 
 Aryans, 302 
 
 Asceticism, 329, 336, 347 
 
 Attraction, between the sexes, 26, 27 
 
 Autobiography, 122 
 
 Avenarius, 31, 82, 94, 100, 128, 144, 
 322 
 
 Bach, 103, 323 
 
 Bachelors, and women, 258 
 
 Bacon, 182 
 
 Bashkir tseff, Marie, 69 
 
 Bateson, on dimorphic earwigs^ 34 
 
 Beatrice, 240, 336 
 
 Beauty, analysis of, 240, 242 
 
 Beethoven, 96, 112, 317 
 
 Bentham, 176, 317 
 
 Berkeley, 141, 317 
 
 Bisexuality, oscillations in, 55 
 
 Bischoff, 12, 217 
 
 Bjornson, 108 
 
 Blavatsky, Mdme., 68 
 
 Blindness, colour, no 
 
 Blood, transfusion of, 20 
 
 Bölsche, 329 
 
 Bonheur, Rosa, 68 
 
 Bonnet, 143 
 
 Boys and girls, education of, 58 
 Breeding, application of laws of 
 
 sexual attraction to, 43 
 Breuer, on hysteria, 265, 269, 270 
 Bridgman, Laura, 66 
 Brünnhilde, 223 
 Bruno, 141, 240, 316 
 Büchner, 315 
 Buddha, 325, 328 
 Burchhardt, 72 
 Burns, Robert, 317 
 Byron, Lord, 236 
 
 CiESAR, 134, 229, 230, 326 
 
 Carlyle, 113, 136, 140, 175, 229, 307, 
 317 
 
 Castration, effect of, 18 
 
 Catharsis, 269 
 
 Catherine II. of Russia, 66 
 
 Catholic vi^ w of marriage, 221 
 
 Catholicism and women, 207 
 
 Cattle, homosexuality in, 49 
 
 Causality, invented by man, 279 
 
 Cells, sexuality of, 15, 17, 22, 23 
 
 Ceres, 224 
 
 Chamberlain on Jews, 312, 321, 323, 
 328 
 on origin of Christianity, 328 
 
 "Character" of Avenarius, 94, 95, 
 96 
 
 Characteriology, Chap. V., 52-63 
 
 Characters, classification of, 14 
 secondary sexual, 43 
 
 Chastity, 331, 332, 334, 335,341, 346 
 
 Chemistry, Kepler's esdmateof, 315 
 
 Chemotropism, 39, 41 
 
 Child, relation of mother and prosti- 
 tute to, 219 
 
 Chinese, 187, 302 
 
 Chivalry, 204 
 
 Chopin, 67 
 
 Christ, 313, 325, 329 
 
 Christianity and Judaism, 325, 327, 
 328 
 
 Clairvoyance, 277 
 
 Classification, 97 
 
352 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Clemens, 345 
 Cleopatra, 230 
 Coitus, 332, 337, 343 
 Colour blindness, 1 10 
 Commerce, and Jews, 325 
 Communism, 307 
 Comparisons, in poetry, 118 
 Compassion, womanly, 197 
 Compliments, and women, 203 
 Comprehension, power of by genius, 
 
 105 
 Comte, A., 141, 204, 244 
 Confucius, 328 
 Consciousness, male and female, 
 
 Chap. III., 93-102 
 Conventions, women and, 262, 263 
 Conversion, Jews and, 323 
 Copernicus, 140, 315 
 Coquetry, and sexuality, 232 
 Correlations, importance of, 61 
 Cromwell, 229 
 
 Crustacea, hermaphroditism in, 19 
 Cuvier, 6i, 62, 315 
 Cyrano de Bergerac, 211 
 
 Danäe, 231 
 
 Dante, 249, 299 
 
 Darwin, 97, 130, 140, 217 
 on correlation, 61 
 on female talent, 71 
 on heterostylism, 33, 34 
 on sexual tastes of animals, 27 
 on union of those akin, 44 
 
 Da Vinci, 97 
 
 Death, 346 
 
 Death, consciousness at, 128, 129 
 
 De Bergerac, 211 
 
 Decalogue, 313 
 
 Demeter, 224 
 
 Demosthenes, 340 
 
 Descartes, 149 
 
 Determinants, in psychology, 81 
 
 Determination of sex, 23 
 
 De Vries, on cell characters, 16 
 
 Dilthey. 82 
 
 Dimorphism, sexual, 6 
 
 Divorce, 221 
 
 Don Juan, 90, 233. 299, 332, 335 
 
 Doppelgänger, 210 
 
 Drawing, and women, 120 
 
 Dualism of the world, 166 
 
 Dürer, 322 
 
 Eckhard, 313 
 Education, 57 
 
 of the race, 348 
 
 of women, 348 
 Ego, awakening of, 164 
 Ego, conception of. Chap. VII., 153- 
 162 
 
 " Elective Afl&nities," 69, 218 
 
 " Element " of Avenarius, 94 
 
 Eliot, George, 67 
 
 Emancipation of Women, Chap. VI., 
 
 64-75. 338 
 Embryoes, sexual differentiation of, 5 
 Emerson, 141, 230 
 Empedocles, 172 
 Emperors and genius, 139 
 Empiricism, and English philosophy, 
 
 317 
 English philosophy, 153 
 English and Jew compared, 317, 319 
 Erotics, and aesthetics. Chap. XL, 
 
 236-251 
 Eroticism and humour, 318 
 Ethics, and Logic, Chap. VI., 142- 
 
 152, Chap. VIL, 153-162 
 Euler, 315 
 Euripides, 105, 187 
 Exner, 98 
 
 Faithfulness, sexual, 220 
 
 Falkenberg, on fertilisation in sea- 
 weeds, 40 
 
 Fall, meaning of, 283 
 
 Familiarity, quality of, 144 
 
 Family, origin of, 205 
 
 amongst the Jews, 310 
 
 Faraday, 315 
 
 Fechner, 82, 292, 313, 322 
 
 Female, contrasted with male, Chap. 
 I., 79-84 
 
 F6t6, on sexual inversion, 45 
 
 Ferns, sexual attraction caused by 
 malic acid, 39 
 
 FertiUty, limited in prostitutes, 216 
 
 Feuerbach, 141, 305 
 
 Fichte, 140, 150, 307 
 
 Fischart, 226 
 
 Flowers, heterostylous, 33, 34 
 
 Forgetting, analysis of process, 97 
 
 Form, matter and form, 293 
 
 Formula, of sexual attraction, 29, 37, 
 38 
 of sexual constitution, 8 
 
 Fouqu^. 188 
 
 Freelove, 221 
 
 Freewill, 209 
 
 Freud, on hysteria, 265-277 
 
 Friendship, 49, 288 
 
 Galileo, 140, 315 
 Gall, on physiognomy, 59 
 Gauss, 140 
 Gaule, 12 
 
 Genesis, Book of, 295 
 Genital, glands, effect of transpUnta- 
 tion, 21 
 
INDEX 
 
 353 
 
 Genius, compared with talent, Chap. 
 IV., 103-113 
 and the Ego, Chap. VIII., 163- 
 
 185 
 in evohition of race, 137 
 and language, 137 
 and maleness, 113 
 and memory, Chap. V., 114-141 
 and morality, 183 
 and time, 136 
 summary of, 169, 182, 183 
 Germain, Sophie, 194 
 Girls and boys, education of, 58 
 God, Schopenhauer's definition, 313 
 Goethe, 40, 41, 43, 69, 97, 106, 107, 
 120, 126, 174, 203, 218, 228, 313, 316, 
 332, 340 
 Gonochorism, 6, 73 
 Grafting, of sexual organs, 20 
 Greeks and religion, 323 
 Guilt, hysterical consciousness of, 
 275 
 
 Meckel's "gonochorism," 6 
 
 " Hakon," King, 328 
 
 Hamilton, 317 
 
 Handel, 322 
 
 Happiness, impossibility of, 285 
 
 Hartley, 143, 317 
 
 Hatred, 236 
 
 Hauptmann, 276 
 
 Havelock Ellis, 11, 12 
 
 Hebbel, 279 
 
 Hegel, 155 
 
 Heine, 316, 323 
 
 Hellenbach, 287 
 
 Helmholtz, 82, 97 
 
 Henids, 99 
 
 Herbart, 93, 94, 141, 246 
 
 Hering. 143 
 
 Hermaphroditism, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 
 
 "Hero-worship, 113 
 Hertwig, 16 
 Heterostylism, 33, 34 
 Hildebrand, on heterostylism, 33 
 Hobbes, 316, 317 
 Homosexuality, Chap. IV., 45-52 
 
 of famous women, 66 
 Horwicz, 93, 94 
 Hume, 81, 141, 153,164, 175, 193,208, 
 
 218,317 
 Humour, analysis of, 318 
 Hunter, John, 14 
 Hutcheson, 175 
 Huxley, 193, 317 
 Hydrocele. 25 
 Hypnotism, 50 
 Hypnotism and hysteria, 277 
 Hysteria, analysis of, 265 
 
 Ibsen, 160, 187, 218, 224, 231, 258, 
 
 290, 325, 343 
 Idealism, 176 
 Idioplasm, 16, 21, 155 
 Imagination, of women, 119 
 Immortality, 127, 135, 314, 346 
 "Impressions," maternal, 217 
 Impulse, sexual, 87, 88, 282 
 Individualism, 176 
 Individuality, 282 
 Individuation, 282 
 Infants, sex of, 23, 24 
 Innocence, 243 
 Intermediate sexual forms, 7 
 Inversion, sexual, 45 
 Irony, 323 
 Israels, 316 
 
 James, W., 82, 144 
 
 Janet, on hysteria, 265, 267, 268 
 
 Jealousy, and women, 205, 289 
 
 Jewish race, 303 
 
 Jews and English compared, 319 
 
 and women compared, 320 
 Joshua, 328 
 Judaism, Chap. XIII., 301 — 330 
 
 and Christianity, 325 
 
 and the Messiah, 329 
 
 Kant, 42, 85, 105, 138, 150, 153, 158, 
 15g, 161, 164, 192, 208, 237, 246, 
 270. 313. 320, 331. 340 
 
 Karneades, 141 
 
 Karsch, 49 
 
 Kaufmann, 119 
 
 Kepler, 315 
 
 Kleptomania, 205 
 
 Kowalevsky, Sonia, 67 
 
 Kraepelin, 45 
 
 Kundry, 270, 319, 337, 344 
 
 ' ' Lady from the Sea, ' ' 218 
 
 Lamarck, 97, 143, 315 
 
 Lange, 129, 208 
 
 Language, origin of, 137 
 
 Latin, women and, 89 
 
 Lavater, 174 
 
 Laws against homosexuality, 51 
 
 of sexual attraction, 29 
 Leda, 231, 291 
 Leibnitz, 140, 171, 172, 316 
 Lepage, Bastien, 69 
 Lewes, 317 
 
 Liars, and memory, 145 
 Libraries, and women, 206 
 Lichtenberg, 153 
 Linnsus, 140, 315 
 Locke, 141, 317 
 
 Logic and the Ego, Chap. VII., 
 153, 162 
 
354 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Logic and ethics, Chap, VII., 153 — 162 
 and memory, Chap. VI., 142 — 
 152 
 
 Lohengrin, 324 
 
 Lombroso, 138 
 
 Lotze, 125 
 
 Love, analysis of, 236, 25 1 
 maternal, 225 
 and sexuality, 239 
 
 Luther, 325 
 
 Luxemburg, 69 
 
 Mach, 143, 154, 201, 208, 210, 322 
 
 Madness, and genius, 183 
 
 Madonna worship, 249 
 
 Maeterlinck, 108 
 
 Mahomet, 187, 325 
 
 Male and Female, Chap. I., 79 —84 
 
 minds, 284 
 
 plasmas, 11 
 Malic acid in ferns, 39 
 Marriage, effect on progeny of love- 
 less, 44 
 
 ideas of boys and girls on, 90 
 
 religious, 221 
 Marx, 307 
 
 Marxism, 32g ' 
 
 Masculine women, 2, 8, 17 
 Match-making, and women, 252 — 300 
 
 amongst Jews, 311 
 Materialism, and Jews, 314 
 Matriarchy, 222 
 Matter, and form, 293 ' 
 
 and woman, 292 
 Maupas, on rotifers, 24 
 Maupassant, 276 
 Mayer, 97 
 
 Medecine, Jewish influence on, 315 
 Medical view of hysteria, 271 
 "Meistersingers," 305 
 Memory, 282 
 
 and genius, Chap. V., 114 — 141 
 
 in boys and girls, 294 
 
 in relation to logic, Chap. VI., 
 T42— 152 
 Messalina, 336 
 Messiah, 325, 329 
 Meta-organisma, 287 
 Metaphysics, Jews and, 322 
 Microcosm, 171 
 Mill, J. S., 176, 317 
 Milne-Edwards, 291 
 Mirandola, 188 
 Modesty, 261, 274 
 
 womanly, 200 
 Moliere, 340 
 Moll, 52. 88 
 
 Monads, 198, 287, 294, 297 
 Monogamy, 43, 220 
 Morality, 176 
 
 Morality of women, 196, 278, 340 
 
 More, 73 
 
 Morphology, in relation to character, 
 
 Chap, v., 52 — 63 
 Motherhood, analysis of. Chap. X., 
 
 214—235 
 Mozart, 323 
 Müller, Joh., 217 
 Murder, 109 
 Music, and women, 118 
 Myxodema, 25 
 
 N^GELI, 16 
 
 Names, and women, 206 
 
 " Nana," 231 
 
 Napoleon, 182, 228, 326, 327 
 
 Newton, 140, 315 
 
 New Testament, 325 
 
 New Zealand, 339 
 
 Nietzsche, 104, 108, 140, 167, 329, 
 
 342. 344 
 Nirvana, 174 
 Nobility, Jews and, 308 
 Nörgler, 174 
 Novalis, 103, 165, 258 
 Nudity, 240, 241 
 
 Organotherapy, 21 
 
 Oriental view of women, 342 
 
 Origen, 187 
 
 Oscillations, in sexuality, 54 
 
 Ostwald, 31, 315 
 
 Ovid, 332 
 
 Owen, 307 
 
 Painting, and women, 120 
 Pairing, woman's chief instinct, 252— 
 300 
 and Jews, 311 
 " Parsifal," 305, 337, 344 
 Pascal, 179, 205 
 Pasiphäe, 291 
 Pasteur, 315 
 Paternity, 232, 346 
 Pathology, 25 
 Paul, Jean, 103, 164, 318 
 Pederasty, Chap. IV., 45 — 52 
 " Peer Gynt," 224, foot note 
 Periodicity, of genius, 107 
 Personality, multiple, 211, 267 
 Persoon, 33 
 Petzoldt, 96, 100 
 Pfeffer, 39 
 Phallus, relation of, to women, 298 
 
 347 
 Philosophy, English, 153 
 Philosophers, and genius, 141 
 Physiognomy, 59, 60 
 Piety, 322 
 Pity, 199 
 
INDEX 
 
 355 
 
 [Plasmas, male and female, ii 
 Plato, 149, 150, 240, 246, 293, 313, 
 
 343 
 Platonic love, 239 
 Pleasure, 282 
 
 Politeness, and women, 203 
 Politician, character of, 230 
 Politicians and genius, 139 
 
 and value, 134 
 Pollen, in heterostyllous flowers, 35 
 Polyandry, 222 
 Polygamy, 220 
 Pregnancy, 86, 222 
 Pre-Raphaelites, 73 
 Provost, 256 
 Prey er, 315 
 j Pride, of women, 201 
 i Property, Jewish relation to, 306 
 I Prostitution, analysis of. Chap. X., 
 I 214—235 
 
 I Protestantism, and women, 207 
 ; Psychology, 142 
 
 male and female. Chap. IX. , 
 186 — 213 
 Puberty, effect of, 90 
 Pythagoras, 343 
 
 Rabbis, Jewish, 311 
 
 Race, persistence of human, 224, 
 
 346 
 Raphael, 226 
 Recognition, 282 
 Red Sea, crossing of, 323 
 Regeneration, of lost parts, 16 
 
 moral, 283 
 Religion, founders of, 326, 327 
 
 importance of, 323 
 
 Jews and, 321 
 
 women and, 261 
 Revenge, 289 
 Reverence, 322 
 Richepin, 226 
 Rousseau, 307 
 Rudiments, of embryonic sexual 
 
 organs, 3 
 Ruskin, 307 
 
 St. Augustine, 345 
 Salome, 345 
 Samson, 328 
 Sand, George, 66 
 Sappho, 65, 66 
 
 Schelling, 81, 105, 138, 165, 246 
 Schiller, 230, 246 
 Schleiermacher, 140 
 Schoolmasters, and types, 57 
 Schopenhauer, 95, 167, 174, 199, 218, 
 223, 236, 237, 238, 281, 295, 305, 
 
 313. 318. 340 
 Schrenk-Notzing, 45 
 
 Schurtz, 205 
 
 Schwammerdam, 315 
 
 Science, and genius, 140 
 Judaism, in, 314 
 
 Secretion, internal, and sexual cha- 
 racters, 15 
 
 Sellheim and Foges, experiments on 
 castration, 18 
 
 Servant, type of woman, 272 
 
 Sex, appearance of, in embryos, 5 
 assignment of, to infants, 22, 23, 
 
 24 
 Sexual attraction, laws of. Chap. Ill,, 
 26—44 
 characters, secondary, 14, 43 
 impulses, 88 
 Sexuality, of male and female com- 
 pared, 85, 92 
 opposed to love, 239 
 of women, 260, 331, 332, 334, 
 
 335 
 Shaftesbury, 246 
 Shakespeare, 105, 109, no, 317 
 Shelley, 168, 317 
 Shrew, type of woman, 272 
 " Siegfried," 223, 305 
 Sigwart, 156 
 Simmel, George, 148 
 Slavery, compared with Jewish prob- 
 lem, 338 
 Smith, Adam, 175, 317 
 Socialism, 307 
 Society, origin of, 205 
 Socrates, 150, 246, 326 
 Solidarity, of the Jews, 310 
 Solitude, and women, 205 
 Solliers, on sexual ansesthesia, 274 
 Somerville, Marj', 194 
 
 Sophocles, 184 
 
 Soul, 313 
 
 denied by modern science, 315 
 and great men, 168 
 and modern psychology, 209 
 and women, 187 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 128, 130, 263, 317 
 
 Spinoza, 316, 317 
 
 Sprengel, 315 
 
 State, 307 
 
 Steenstrup, 12, 13 
 
 Sterility, 216 
 
 Stern, L. W.. 82 
 
 Stern, 317 
 
 " Stockman, Dr.," 325 
 
 Strauss, 112 
 
 Strindberg, 187 
 
 Sudermann, 256 
 
 Suggestibility, of women, 394 
 
 Suicide, of women, 286 
 
 Sulpicia, 319 
 
 Superstition, of women, 127 
 
356 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Swift, 317. 343 
 Sympathy, 177, 197 
 
 "Tannhäüser," 240, 305 
 
 Telegony, 233 
 
 Teresa, St., 277 
 
 Tertullian, 187, 314, 343 
 
 "Tesman," in Hedda Gabler, 258 
 
 Thely plasm, Chap. IL, 11 — 25 
 
 Time, relation to value, 133 
 
 Tolstoy, 231 
 
 Touch, sense of, in women, 191 
 
 Tragedy, 319 
 
 Transcendentalism, 314 
 
 Transfusion, of blood, 20 
 
 Travel, desire of, 237, note 
 
 Truth, 150 
 
 Türck, 138 
 
 Tylor, 128 
 
 Types, male and female, mental, 53 
 
 Undine, 188 
 
 Universality, of genius, 112 
 Untruthfulness, of women, 266 
 
 Value, theory of, 133 
 Vanity, of women, 202 
 Variation in sexual characters, 18 
 Virginity, a male idea, 333 
 woman's attitude to, 334 
 
 Virtue of women, 333 
 
 Vogt, on hysteria, 265, 274, 277 
 
 Von Eschenbach, 264 
 
 Von Höffding, 144 
 
 Von Humboldt. 140 
 
 Von Kleist, 105 
 
 Von Möbius, 59 
 
 Wagner, 67, 109, 211, 240, 279, 305, 
 
 319, 343 
 Weill, 36 
 Weismann, 81 
 Wier, 81 
 Will, 282 
 
 Wit and humour, 318 
 Woman and animals, 290, 291 
 
 character of, 280 
 
 emancipated, 64 
 
 famous, 69 
 
 future of. Chap. XIV., 351-340 
 
 compared with Jews, 320 
 
 and matter, 292 
 
 sexuality of, 260 
 
 summary of her nature, Chap> 
 XII., 252-300 
 Wundt, 94, 131, 140 
 
 " Zarathustra," 108, 1Ö7 
 Zionism, 307, 312 
 ' Zola, 105, 231, 304 
 

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