WOMAN
A Vindication

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY
MAN’S DESCENT FROM THE GODS
THE FALSE ASSUMPTIONS OF DEMOCRACY
ETC.

WOMAN
A Vindication
By
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI
CONSTABLE · LONDON
BOMBAY · SYDNEY · 1923

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

“The most disgusting cant permeates everything. Except for the representation of savage and violent sentiments, everything is stifled by it.”—Stendhal, De l’Amour.

The object of this volume is twofold: in the first place to raise certain weighty objections to that industrialization and commercialization of woman, which has stamped the “progress” of Western Europe during the last fifty years; and, secondly, to reveal woman, not only as a creature whose least engaging characteristics are but the outcome of the most vital qualities within her, but also as a social being in whom these least engaging characteristics themselves only become disturbing and undesirable when she is partially or totally out of hand.

While trying to escape the influence of all that “tinsel of false sentiment” which in the atmosphere of Democracy and sentimentality has gathered about the subject of Woman in modern England, it has been my endeavour to defend her against certain traditional and well-founded charges, by showing that the very traits in her character which have given rise to these charges form so essential a part of her vital equipment that it would be dangerous to the race to modify or to alter them. Thus, despite the fact that there is much in this book that may possibly strike the reader as unfriendly, if not actually harsh, I am aware of no other work in which so complete and so elaborate a plea (from the standpoint of Life and Life’s needs) has been made in defence of Woman’s whole character, including all that side of it which the wisest of mankind, and the oldest traditions of mankind, have consistently and unanimously deprecated.

Couched in the briefest possible terms, my thesis is practically this, that, whether we contemplate Woman in the rôle of the adulteress, of the heartless stepmother, of the harlot, or of the creature whose duplicity has been the riddle of all ages; or whether we contemplate her as the staunchest of lovers, as the most reliable of allies, as the mother whose noble devotion to her offspring will drive her to any extreme of danger in defence of them, and as the representative of that sex which has given us a Joan of Arc, an Emily Brontë, and an Emily Davison of Derby fame; we are always confronted by a creature whose worst can, on final analysis, be shown to be only the outcome of her best and most vital qualities, turned to evil by mal-adaptation; and whose best is but the normal and effortless expression of her natural endowments.

Seeing, however, that among the mal-adaptations which cause Woman’s best to manifest itself as her worst, I include lack of guidance and control from the quarter of her menfolk, I range myself naturally among the Anti-Feminists, though at the same time I most emphatically disclaim all anti-feminine prejudices. Indeed, so far from this being the case, I am a deep and passionate admirer and lover of Woman. In order to love her, however, I do not find it necessary to exalt her to a plane on which all her sturdier, more vital, and more “dangerous” characteristics are whittled down to mere sweetness. Those to whom the love of woman depends upon so gross an idealization of her nature as to cause them to overlook or deny that “wickedness” in her, which is at once her greatest vital strength and her most powerful equipment as the custodian and the promoter of life, will find very little to sustain them in this love throughout the present volume. And, if in this age of “Safety first,” they fancy that it is expedient to rear and to love only those women from whom all “danger” has been removed, they will find that I have endeavoured to demonstrate to them the extreme peril even of this plausible ideal.

As far as I know this work represents the first radical attempt that has been made to differentiate two very definite and dissimilar types of women—the positive and the negative—and to account for their respective virtues and vices on the grounds of their peculiarities of health, tonality, vigour, and constitutional bias in favour of life. It is my belief that this is a necessary and useful differentiation, that without it there can be no clarity about Woman, and that the fact that it has not been attempted by previous writers, accounts for much in their work which is both unfair and untrue. It must be quite plain to everyone, that in a world where so-called virtue is all too frequently the outcome of a minus rather than of a plus in vitality, it would be grossly inaccurate to class all women together; for while in the case of one woman chastity may be a great feat of discernment and self-overcoming, in the case of another whose body is less tonic and less vital, it may be the easiest of human accomplishments. All reactions are known to differ according to the vitality of the organism stimulated. To overlook tonality and vitality in any description of human beings would therefore be a most unpardonable omission. Thus, Weininger’s and Schopenhauer’s failure to differentiate between positive and negative women effectually invalidates, in my opinion, most of what they have said about her; while a good deal of the rest of the literature dealing with the subject of sex seems to me to fail owing to the fact that it makes no attempt to describe a standard or a norm before it proceeds to expatiate upon sex characteristics and their consequences.

The fact that a classification on these broad lines does not prevent me from occasionally bringing charges which will seem severe against the very type that I most warmly recommend, is in no way inconsistent with my claim that my work is a vindication; for while I show that all the charges that I myself advance are only an indictment of Woman in so far as she is unguided and uncontrolled, I also defend her against many other harsh judgments which are commonly passed against her, and with which I will have nothing to do.

Thus in the course of this work, the reader will find that I defend even the so-called “male” woman against the gibes which recently it has been the fashion to level against her. And on what grounds do I undertake her vindication?—I point out that, in a nation that can boast, as England undoubtedly can, of great and worldwide masculine achievements in the past, such achievements can only have been possible because the women of the nation did not too seriously dilute the masculine qualities of the race, with the element “effeminine.” But for this to have been the rule, these women must have had a large share of masculine virtues. I show that other nations, such as the Romans and the Red Indians, also reared generations of masculine women, and always to the advantage of the community. These male women, against whom so much has been said, are therefore merely the vestiges of our great masculine past. Now they are ill-adapted, because they can no longer find the men to whose greater masculinity they might adapt themselves. It is the degeneration of man that is the cause of their mal-adaptation. Women, or at least the best women, nowadays, are no longer inspired or uplifted by their association with him.

To reply to this, as most people all too hastily do, that the last War was a proof that Englishmen at least have not degenerated, does not constitute a serious objection to my statement. For, after all, successful fighting is only one—and the most primitive—among the many desirable qualities that the masculine civilized being has cultivated.

Degeneration may be defined as a departure from the high qualities of a race or a kind. But it is possible to depart from a very great number of cultivated qualities, and still to retain the moral and physical equipment of the good fighter. When, therefore, I seek to explain a good deal of Woman’s discontent with Man, and most of her very justifiable contempt of him, by pointing to his degeneration, I mean that, despite the evidence of the great War, in which the modern European admittedly revealed the primitive fighting qualities in all their pristine strength, the man of to-day in many other respects—in the matter of catholicity of tastes, for instance, versatility of gifts, will-power, vigour, character, and health—shows a marked departure from the higher endowments of his ancestors. The fact that this degeneration is due to the devitalizing, cramping and specialized labours which several generations of Commercialism and Industrialism and excessive “Urbanism” have imposed upon the male sex, can hardly be questioned; and if we are in search of an explanation of Feminism, if we are anxious to discover how and why it is that women are now coming forward in large numbers to measure their strength against men in all those callings and offices which hitherto have been regarded as Man’s special spheres, we may be sure that the true cause of all this does not lie so much in a desirable change in Woman’s nature itself, as it does in an undesirable depreciation in our own general abilities, which women have been only too slow to observe.

To point to the great War in such circumstances, is only cant; but like all cant, it is the outcome of a desire to spare our vanity at a moment when everything points indubitably to our humiliation.

There is, however, no subject in the whole world, or at least in the whole of our English world, around which more cant has collected, than the subject of sex and the relation of the sexes. But perhaps it would be as well to make quite clear what is precisely meant by “cant” in this respect. With Stendhal, I am of the opinion that cant is created more by vanity than by Puritanism, or the sense of propriety. And it is because vanity is involved, that the fight against cant is so stubborn. If Psycho-Analysis had really assailed our vanity, instead of merely offending our sense of propriety, we should have heard much less about it. Also we have only to think of the huge popular success of writers like Zola in order to assure ourselves that for a man’s work to be hushed up and ignored, he must be guilty of a greater crime than the mere violation of the proprieties or conventions.

As a rule, mankind will listen patiently when it is told of the material and not infrequently sordid animal background to some of its dearest emotions; for, after all, it is only disturbed in its prudery by such revelations. But proceed to tear away the tinsel of cant from those activities, for instance, which are alleged to be humanitarian, “unselfish,” or to belong to the class known as “self-sacrifice,” and point out how all these activities themselves invariably arise from purely egotistical emotions and desires, and mankind will immediately become both incredulous and indignant. Why is this? Obviously because a very large section of the population of the western world find the very basis of their self-esteem in the activities enumerated. To show the egotistical root of these activities, as Hobbes, Helvetius, Stendhal and Nietzsche consistently did, is therefore to wound these people in the very sanctuary of their vanity; and those against whom this kind of violence is attempted nowadays usually retaliate with both rancour and rage. Hence the determination with which writers like Hobbes, Helvetius, Nietzsche and Stendhal are forgotten and ignored.

Over the writings of all these men there hangs a very pronounced and unmistakable fragrance, which may be almost painful at the first inhalation, and a certain atmosphere which has a noticeably low temperature. Frequently this atmosphere is quite glacial, and produces the distinctly unpleasant reaction of goose-skin in the reader’s mind. Both in the ideas they present, and in their manner of presenting them, these authors scorn to please. They all possess the same penetrating insight into the psychology of man; they reveal what the French call “une psychologie fouillée,” and their honesty is hampered by no desire to fortify themselves or their fellows in their self-esteem. Unlike Swift, however, it is certain that these men did not write “to vex the world more than to divert it,” but because they realized that certain falsifications of sentiment are dangerous and lead to degeneration.

Now there is an instinctive inclination in every reader to identify himself with the picture of humanity presented to him in the book that he happens to be perusing, whether it be a novel or a scientific treatise. Naturally enough, therefore, he is exposed to the severest shocks if at every turn he is prevented from idealizing his own nature, or from thinking too well of it, owing to the fact that the picture he is contemplating is too humiliating to be pleasant, and yet too convincing to be lightly rejected.

The bulk of modern readers, however, are women. This fact, too well known to editors and publishers, is quite inadequately understood from the standpoint of its influence on taste and quality in literary production. For not only do women reveal the trait common to all readers, which consists in a tendency to identify themselves with one of the characters of a novel, or with the portrait of humanity presented in a scientific treatise, but they are also addicted to the practice of confounding that which is pleasant to themselves with that which is true. Thus in the woman reader there is a twofold tendency to tolerate or to applaud cant; for, on the one hand, she views truth hedonistically, and, on the other, she feels deep discomfiture, either when she finds herself unable, through her false idealization of herself and her motives, to identify herself with the anti-cant portrayal of a certain heroine (Stendhal’s Félicie Féline, for instance), or, when she finds her reading of human nature, which is based upon her idealized reading of herself, affronted by a picture of humanity which shatters her rosy view.

To the influence of women in this connexion, however, ought in all fairness to be added that of a vast number of men, who, in these days, whether from the same hedonistic view of truth, or prompted by a certain poltroonery and vanity in the face of reality, tend to shrink ever more and more from any understanding of human relations and the passions that govern them, which would distort their comfortable and comforting assumptions concerning both. If, however, they actually form, together with the women, a force sufficiently powerful to govern the taste of the day, especially in the world of literature and in that department of it which treats of human psychology, we may well feel some anxiety concerning the real worth of that literature. If Byron and Stendhal could honestly complain of cant even in their time, what can be our position to-day?

Frankly acknowledging my indebtedness to the school of writers that can be said to have adopted the rigorous psychological uprightness of our great philosopher Hobbes, I have endeavoured also to strip the “tinsel of sentiment” from one of the most important of human relations, in order, if possible, to build afresh, and to build wholesomely, where too much confusion and too much falsehood have been allowed to flourish in the past. In order, however, to protect myself from a charge to which the asperity and frequent severity of my language is almost sure to expose me, it may be as well for me to state at once that, unlike many that have written on the subject of Woman, I have been animated by no bitterness and by none of those unhappy experiences which often warp judgment and impair the vision. On the contrary, to all my principal relations to women I owe the most pleasant and possibly some of the most valuable experiences of my life.

Unlike Schopenhauer, Byron, or Balzac, my relationship to my mother was an exceptionally devoted and happy one. Both friends and relatives are unanimous here, and have frequently declared that they rarely saw anything to equal it, both on her side and on my own. Up to the time of her death she was my best and dearest friend, and in my passionate love for her, my love for my subject may well be said to have begun. What has my relation to other women been? In this regard I can only say that, though I have spent an enormous amount of my time with women, I have never suffered the smallest wrong at the hands of any one of them; neither have I had any experience which could possibly give me a distorted view of the sex, or a resentful attitude towards it as a whole. I have learned a tremendous deal from women, and, having not a little of the woman in me besides (and to comprise is to comprehend), I have through the usual channels of introspection been able to supplement my objective studies with a good deal of subjective information. From my earliest youth, too, the subject of sex has interested me deeply. True, it interests every one deeply; but I have fortunately never felt any of the customary shame that so often arrests thought and speculation on the subject. Neither can I say that my environment was ever of a kind to hinder me in my free and careful study of it. Brought up in an atmosphere of art and literature, I never became acquainted with that false modesty and embarrassment that seizes upon most young people when, for the first time, they are confronted with the most mysterious and fascinating subject of existence. I was allowed to dwell on the question, had no reason to suppose it was wrong to do so, and even when, at the age of ten I took my first steps in the science of physiology—a subject I used to beg all my elders to instruct me upon—I and they little knew that I was anticipating, by at least six years, a passionate interest in the principal and most fundamental question of human relations. To this day I remember the little green manual of Physiology, by Professor Huxley, that my governess put into my hands, and I cannot say I remember any book better, save perhaps another little green volume containing Schopenhauer’s essays on Woman and the Metaphysics of Love, which I read when I was eighteen. At the age of nineteen I wrote my first book, which bore the title Girls and Love; but, needless to say, it was never published. And ever since the subject of sex has scarcely ever ceased from occupying my mind in various ways. For the rest, I have listened with respectful attention to the voice of the Ancients—of the Orient, of Egypt and of Greece—and, as usual, have listened most intently there where I knew relative permanence to have been achieved and humanity to have flourished best. Such preoccupations in regard to a matter that ought to be so natural, so well ordered, as to be taken for granted, just as breathing is, can denote but one thing, namely: that to the thoughtful, nowadays, sex has undoubtedly become a real and puzzling problem; that is to say, something that is not in order, that is not properly understood, and that every one has, as it were, to face and to overcome for himself afresh, before he can “carry on,” and before he can allow time and age to overtake him.

In the present work I have attempted to be as clear and as straightforward as is compatible with the task of handling a delicate subject delicately. I am convinced that a good deal of the dangerous silence that hangs over the vital and fundamental questions I shall sometimes have to touch upon, owes its existence for the most part to the unfortunate fact that the subject of sex, outside medical circles, has hitherto usually been confronted by only two classes of mind—the puritanically prudish, who have done their best to shelve it, and their opposite extreme, the licentious and libidinous, who have refrained from no excess or extravagance that could possibly offend and startle their opponents in the opposite camp. With neither of these classes have I any connexion. I object to the licentious as wholeheartedly as to the Puritanical. I protest against being suspected unjustly of a licentious turn of mind, because I venture to speak freely concerning a subject that is systematically hushed up to the peril of all; I also protest most emphatically against being suspected of Puritanism because I make no attempt to conceal my loathing of certain modern aspects of the sexual relationship.

Part I
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

CHAPTER I
Positiveness—The Saying of
“Yea” to Life

(1) SEX VERSUS DEATH

A scheme of life that includes death as the periodic end of each generation of beings must, if it is to persist, include some form of periodic reproduction of life. Reproduction, or the reproducing of a fresh generation of beings, is thus the necessary balance of death. This sounds the merest platitude. But it is a platitude that cannot be dwelt upon too often or too carefully, if one remembers how constantly and obstinately its consequences are denied or vilified.

To speak of the higher organic life on this globe as sexual, therefore, is merely to state in other words, that all higher organic life is doomed to die, and must be replaced by new life. Abolish death and you abolish the meaning and the need of sex and reproduction. Abolish sex and reproduction, and, if you cannot establish eternal higher organic life, the higher organic life of the globe must for ever perish.

At least for human beings and myriads of animals, Death and Sex are consequently counterparts. Sex with its purpose, reproduction, might be regarded as the contrivance for circumventing Death, for nullifying it, for cheating it of its complete victory over life. And that is why all dreams or concepts of eternal life are, and cannot help being, tainted by a certain hostility to sex: because where eternal life is the scheme, sex drops out. Conversely, all hostility to eternal life is and cannot help being tainted by a certain positiveness, friendliness and favour towards mortal life and its ally sex: because where eternal life is an impossibility, sex is indispensable.

It is for this reason that, in its depths, Christianity is more logical and more acceptable to a rational man than Mohammedanism. Christianity, accepting the concept Eternal Life, says: “In heaven there will be no marriage or giving in marriage.”[1] It realized that you cannot eat your cake and have it. Mohammedanism, while accepting the concept Eternal Life, imagines an eternity of sex-life into the bargain, which is an absurdity. Mohammed did not realize that you cannot eat your cake and have it. Read the Koran and you will understand how it happened that he could be guilty of this confusion of thought.

Sex, then, while as a scheme it is opposed to eternal life, is nevertheless the enemy of death—the most unconquerable, crafty, resourceful and untiring enemy of death—so much so, indeed, that whereas mortal life is not nearly such a good opposite of death as is eternal life (for the dead mortal is eternally dead to this world), sex might, and in this book will be regarded as the opposite of death, the reverse of death.

This point is important in any case; but it is particularly important to me in this book; because all my conclusions will be based upon it. To repeat, then, the equation reads: Sex = Mortal Life; No-Sex = Eternal Life, or, in the absence of Eternal Life, Death.

From this chapter onwards, however, save in regard to the one particular question of virtue, I shall cease from considering Eternal Life; because, as we see from the equation, Eternal Life and Death come strangely as correlatives together—that is to say, for all ordinary purposes, and as far as this world is concerned, they mean the same thing—they both oppose mortal life and sex.

A very significant conclusion arises from this: that in this conflict of sex and death, all those who are opposed to sex, or who call it a sin, or who associate it with guilt, or who cast odium upon it, range themselves on the side of death; while all those who stand by sex, favour it, wish to vindicate it, and claim for it a character absolutely free from all sin, guilt or odium, range themselves against death. Here Christianity is quite logical. At its root it is hostile to mortal life, and in favour of Eternal Life. But it never refers to Eternal Life as a possibility on this globe, but always as an existence that is a correlative of death on this globe.

Christianity, therefore, being an advocate of Eternal Life, very logically preaches that sex is to be deplored, to be avoided, and, if possible, negatived. And the Puritan, who may be regarded as the extreme Christian, is notorious for his implacable loathing of sex. Unconsciously he sees quite clearly that any scheme of organic life that involves sex, must be a substitute for eternal organic life[2]—which in an idealized form is the life for which he has been taught to crave. Death to him, therefore, is merely a merciful gateway leading from Sex into Eternal Life. Being the foe of Sex, he knows quite well that Death must be his ally, his accomplice, his ringleader, in his conspiracy to realize Eternal Life.

Is this quite clear? For the present I have wished to say nothing concerning the respective merits either of Sex, Death, Eternal Life, or Mortal Life; I have only wished to point out that, as schemes, as ideas, they are mutually exclusive and irreconcilable, and that you cannot desire the one without thereby coveting the doom of the other.

As far as this world and its problems are concerned, however—and who, if you please, stands outside this world and its problems?—we have to deal with one kind of life only—Mortal Life. As I have shown, the necessary correlative of Mortal Life, if it is to continue, is Sex. We are concerned, therefore, immediately and directly, with Mortal Life, and its indispensable correlative Sex. We need not accept the scheme as it is thus unceremoniously thrust upon us. We can deny Mortal Life and its concomitant need, Sex, by putting an end to everything at least for ourselves, through straightway committing suicide the very moment we realize that Mortal Life and Sex are undesirable. If, however, we accept the proposition, “Mortal Life is desirable,” we necessarily commit ourselves to the rider, “Sex is desirable.” These features are all we know concerning Life; they constitute the two sides of the only kind of Life of which we are aware, and however real and realistic our visions of an Eternal Life may be, however vivid our mental pictures of a Heaven may seem, such visions and such mental pictures, as we very well know, are of a kind the true existence of which is quite incapable of proof or demonstration; whereas Mortal Life is here before us, with us and in us, and the way to live it is our chief concern; the way to live it well so that it may redound to the benefit and credit of all, is our highest concern.

Throughout this book, I shall argue on the assumption that the reader, like myself, believes that mortal life is desirable. I shall take it for granted that he, like me, is content to allow transcendental questions to weigh with him only in so far as they do not render him hostile to Mortal Life. I shall therefore assume all along that he believes, as I do, that Sex is desirable, however far the consequences of such an admission may lead him.

Be this as it may, let him entertain no qualms as to the direction in which I wish these consequences to lead him. There are more than two alternatives in the choice of one’s attitude to Sex. To most people there appear to be but two opposite extremes: the attitude of the lecherous reprobate who makes decent women ashamed of being women; and the attitude of the Puritan who, in his heart of hearts, feels that if only he could have been at the Almighty’s elbow at the time of the Creation, he would have respectfully suggested a somewhat more “drawing-room” method of propagating the species.

To neither of these attitudes has this book, or the spirit of it, even the remotest relation. The acknowledgment that Mortal Life is desirable, and that consequently its indispensable correlative Sex is desirable, can be made by a man in full possession of a healthy control over his passions,[3] in a state of complete mastery over his appetites, and endowed with the most fastidious taste as to where normal desire and its gratification end, and where excess begins. Extremes belong only to the uncultured, to the hogs of life. It is they who make everything appear disgusting, simply because they are unable to approach a single aspect of life with that amount of understanding and reverence which is due to all things connected with the sacred task of making mankind and his existence an honour and not a curse to the universe.

To accept the proposition that Mortal Life is desirable and to commit one’s self by so doing to its inevitable rider that Sex is desirable, may lead one very far, as this book will show; but, if it lead one to a tastelessly pornographic or licentious attitude towards the most fundamental instinct of life, then one is of a nature that has no right to Mortal Life, much less, therefore, to its indispensable correlative Sex.

Without wishing to labour this point, but with a keen sense of the host of misunderstandings and prejudices that will cling like barnacles to a book of this kind, unless I make my position unmistakably clear from the start, let me put the case a little differently by the use of another instinct of Mortal Life. Let me say, to accept the proposition, Mortal Life is desirable, is to commit one’s self to its inevitable rider that eating and drinking are desirable. There is no objection to this statement as it stands. All who endorse Mortal Life also endorse eating and drinking. And those who attack eating and drinking, simultaneously strike at Mortal Life.

This conclusion, however, provides absolutely no sanction for those who are sufficiently material and gross to make food and drink things of shame and of horror. No man, therefore, need fear lest by acknowledging that eating and drinking are desirable he should find himself supporting gluttony, drunkenness and bestiality of all kinds. It is, however, a strange and significant coincidence that, where we find hostility to Sex, we also find a certain suspicion of all things connected with the body. The Puritans did not accept Sex as desirable; at the best they held it to be a necessary evil; but we also find the Puritans hostile to eating and drinking, and not only to excessive eating and drinking. I have already shown with sufficient elaboration elsewhere what regrettable reforms in food and drink they introduced into England in the seventeenth century.[4] This only supports my contention that you cannot be hostile to Sex without being hostile to Mortal Life in general.

If, therefore, you believe that the acceptance of Sex is immoral, as Otto Weininger did;[5] if you believe, as he did, that “woman is the sin of man”;[6] if, moreover, you claim, as he did, that “it is the Jew and the woman who are the apostles of pairing to bring guilt on mankind”;[7] if, again, you assert that “sexual union is immoral”;[8] that “women must really and truly and spontaneously relinquish it”;[9] that “woman will exist as long as man’s guilt is inexpiated, until he has really vanquished his own sexuality”;[10] that “man must free himself of sex, for in that way, and that way alone, can he free woman”;[11] and, finally—this gem of negativeness: “all sexuality implies degradation”;[12]—if this be your position, I say, then, you must logically be hostile to Mortal Life, and you cannot rationally accept it. Your only course is to commit suicide. This, as we know, Otto Weininger was logical and consistent enough to do. He died by his own hand on October 4, 1903.

(2) MORTAL LIFE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ACCEPTED

As we have seen, it is impossible to have it both ways and to remain consistent. You are at liberty, of course, to take up the Puritan’s, or Otto Weininger’s, or St. Paul’s attitude towards Sex; but, by so doing, you straightway disclaim Mortal Life itself and reject it utterly. Let this be quite clear to you before you go any further, because a good deal depends upon this simple but profoundly significant issue. The fact that St. Paul and the Puritans did not put an end to themselves right away, as Otto Weininger was clear-headed and honest enough to do, need not disturb you. Fanatics are rarely clear-headed, and they are scarcely ever honest. It is sufficient for my purpose to point to St. Paul’s and the Puritan’s hostility to life in general in order to show that, although they did not reach the logical end of their journey, they were certainly well advanced along the road thither. Besides, if you study St. Paul and the Puritans, you will find, as I have done, that there is perhaps another explanation to their apparent inconsistency.

A man may remain longer than he likes in a certain vicinity or apartment, if he feels it his duty, before taking his leave, to get others to accompany him thence, to persuade and exhort others to forsake the place as well. St. Paul certainly felt it his duty to act in this way, and so for that matter did Schopenhauer.

For us who accept Mortal Life and say “Yea” to it wholeheartedly, there are certain very grave duties too. The thing to which we say “Yea,” we wish to keep both clean, sweet and alluring. This world is our home, and we take a pride in it. We must make it such that we are able to take a pride in it. We recognize that Mortal Life includes pain as a prominent factor; but, provided that pain is practically inseparable from the best purposes of life (as, for instance, the pain of self-discipline, self-mastership, the pain of habituation to new knowledge, new arts, the pain resulting from the natural relationships to our myriads of fellows, and the pains of child-birth), we say “Yea” to it too, and with the same wholeheartedness.

We do not shrink from pain, as Schopenhauer did, we do not magnify it or concentrate upon it, as he did, and condemn the whole of existence because of it. We do not call our glorious history, as the King of the Animals, the Martyrdom of Man, as Winwood Reade did. We call our history the Triumph of Man; and it is because we wish to maintain it as the triumph of man that we face it with spirit and positiveness.

Our duties are grave, I say; they involve everything, in fact, that can be conceived as belonging to the task of keeping that to which we say “Yea” in the highest degree worthy of our “Yea”—worthy, that is to say, of our unreserved acceptance.

The conduct of Mortal Life, therefore, is our principal concern. And for this conduct to be correct and fruitful in good things, we must be quite clear as to the “shall” and the “shall not” of what we should hate and what we should love, of what we should call bad, and what we should call good.

Throughout this book the word “good” will always mean “that which is favourable to the best kind of Mortal Life and its multiplication.” If this book reveals any hate at all, it will be for that which is hostile to the best kind of life, and if it reveals any love at all it will be for everything that is friendly to the best kind of life.

This takes us far, no doubt; but not farther, I believe, than anyone should wish to go who has said “Yea” honestly and sanguinely to Mortal Life.

For instance, in opposition to men like St. Paul, Knox, Calvin, Prynne, Schopenhauer, Otto Weininger and their like, we say that Sex is good, Woman is good, the flesh is good. And we heartily dislike men like St. Paul, Knox, Calvin, Prynne, Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger because their attitude shows not only hostility to Woman and to Sex, but also, by implication, to Mortal Life, to which we have said “Yea.”

We call good all that which actuates us and maintains us in a proper exercise of our functions, and makes Mortal Life desirable: appetite, desire, lust, motherhood, fertility, reproductive love, reverence for the body, prepossession in favour of health and prejudice against sickness, respect of love, of beauty and of its multiplication. We also call good the loathing of ugliness and the desire to suppress it; we therefore approve of deep suspicion towards ugliness and illness, and towards everything and everybody that attempts to give ugliness and illness fine-sounding and euphemistic names, and we cultivate a love of moderation and a loathing of excess.

We call bad all that thwarts us in a proper exercise of our functions and all that makes Mortal Life undesirable or seem undesirable: loss of appetite or desire, the abuse of appetite or desire, as of all things; the finding of excuses or extenuating circumstances for ugliness, botchedness and sickness. We also call the following bad: excess, sterility, non-reproductive love, prostitution, homosexuality, irreverence towards the body, the setting of transcendental questions before vital questions.

On our side, in our advocacy of the first-named things, we have our instincts which, if they are sound, confirm us on every point.

It frequently happens, however, that Mortal Life is so difficult, and those who preach against it are so many, so eloquent and so powerful, that we need almost an intellectual assent over and above our instinctive acceptance of it. For it is precisely in the moments of our greatest weakness, when we feel uncertain, when we have made mistakes and know that we have erred, that the preachers against life and the body, and against the fundamental instincts and desires of Mortal Life, will seem to be right, will seem almost to convince us that they are right. Like vultures they wait afar off till they see the body of our trust and hope in life, the corpse of our clean conscience, prostrate on the ground, and then down they swoop and devour the carrion that is their natural food.

It is before such disasters happen that an intellectual assent to the deepest promptings of our instincts is the greatest need of all. In practical life it may be taken as a general rule that it is more helpful to have an intellectual justification for our mistakes and the instincts that have led to them, than the most convincing theories in favour of our virtues. For it is innocence in the exercise of our natural functions that the preachers against Mortal Life and the body are most anxious to undermine, and most successful in undermining. And how often, particularly when an instinct has, so to speak, “drawn in its horns,” or ceased to assert itself owing to a momentary mistake, check or rebuff, would not an intellectual justification of its vigorous re-assertion help us to tide over the evil hour without our falling a prey to the opposing party—to the enemies of Mortal Life and the body!

If, however, we bear in mind the maxim that everything is “good” that is favourable to the best kind of Mortal Life, and everything is “bad” that is unfavourable to the best kind of life; if, moreover, we stand bravely and firmly by the principle that Mortal Life is acceptable and desirable, and therefore that all it exacts for its continuance must also be acceptable and desirable, and consequently that the things of the body—beauty, charm, ardour—together with the flesh, the world, sex, woman, procreation, multiplication and good food, are for the glory, joy and exaltation of Mortal Life and man; if, over and above all this, we heroically embrace pain as a necessary incidental factor in the process of living, then, I say, we have an intellectual weapon far more formidable and far more effective for the warding off of those vultures of gloom and doubt—the preachers against life and the body—than any known engine of destruction could possibly be. It is this intellectual attitude to Mortal Life, with all its consequences in our code of morals, our likes and dislikes, that throughout this book I shall call the “positive” or “yea-saying” attitude: while the opposite attitude of mind will be designated by the word “negative.”[13] Nor shall I refer any longer in these pages to “Mortal Life,” but will speak merely of Life itself: for not only is it the only kind of life that will concern me here, but also, as we know nothing about Eternal Life, and our only notions of life are derived entirely from what we know of Mortal Life, Mortal Life and Life are to all intents and purposes one and the same thing for us, and the expression “Mortal Life” can well fall out at this stage of the discussion.

(3) THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POSITIVE MIND

Unless they are very delicate or very sick, all children are positive. They are fresh from the anvil of Life. Life itself speaks through them without reserve, without constraint. They have made no mistakes yet, or are not aware of having made any; they have had none of those rude shocks that shake our faith in Life and render us an easy prey to those vultures of which I have already spoken, that live on the carrion of shattered hopes and broken consciences. They say “Yea” to Life innocently and unconsciously, like kittens playing with balls of wool. And it is because they say “Yea” to Life innocently and unconsciously that they are so deeply interesting to the positive philosopher. Because in them he sees the attitude which he must maintain and sustain intellectually, despite all the shocks and misfortunes life has brought. But I point out again that I speak of this intellectual positiveness only as a helpful confirmation of sound instincts. If the sound instincts are not there, the positive intellectual attitude is nothing but a pose.

There is something strangely pathetic about this positiveness of the child. The philosopher knows the wilderness it is in. He knows that on the mountain peaks all around, the vultures are waiting hungrily to see it make its first mistake, to see it writhe under its first misfortune—or its first “guilt” as they like to call it. He knows with what extraordinary vigilance they are tracking its footsteps, so that they may be there in time, so that they may be at its side in the first moment of its doubt in Life, to tell it that Life is sinful, that lust is sinful, that sex is sinful, that the World, the Flesh and the Devil are interchangeable terms. And the positive philosopher cannot help wondering with some alarm how the child will survive this first encounter with doubt, with suspicion, and with distrust concerning that to which a moment ago it said “Yea” so wholeheartedly.

The positive philosopher trembles over the outcome of the conflict. With fear and trepidation he forges the weapons of intellectual positiveness and flings them with anxious prodigality before the child, hoping that they will sustain it in the struggle and confirm its best instincts; trusting with all his heart that they will revive its “Yea” to Life before it is completely overcome. And when the positive philosopher succeeds in this and sees the birds of ill-omen turn disconsolately away, foiled in their endeavour, he celebrates his feast of feasts; because there is more rejoicing in his heart over one child that is saved from negativeness than over thousands that repent!

To the positive philosopher, then, the healthy child is the best pattern for the yea-saying and positive man. The only danger the child is in, as I have shown, consists in the fact that it is intellectually unprepared to justify its “Yea” in the face of the preachers of “Nay.” Apart from this one flaw, however—which in a universally positive world would not be felt as a disadvantage at all (because it is only in negative environments and negative ages that a conscious or intellectual confirmation of one’s soundest instincts is necessary)—the child, or the animal for that matter, presents the perfect example of the positive attitude towards Life. The positive philosopher, therefore, learns from the child, and watches it with interest.

The principal characteristic of the healthy child is, that it does not play with its primary appetites; it does not laugh about them; it cannot abide a joke about them. Watch a healthy child eat! It is absolutely serious, absorbed, concentrated, intent! A very healthy boy will even frown over his meal, just as he will frown when he eats a piece of chocolate. It is obvious from his expression that eating is no joke with him. It is one of the gravest, most pressing, most engrossing interests in life. And the same holds good of all healthy, positive adults. Watch a healthy and positive adult at his meals; he is serious to a fault! It is only when the demands of his body have been satisfied that he begins to indulge in levity. The man who habitually jokes at the beginning of a meal is past salvation. He is negative by nature and cannot be rescued.

Seriousness towards the primary instinct of self-preservation is one of the principal characteristics of the healthy child. But the healthy child is not yet fully, consciously concerned about any other instinct; if it were—if, for instance, it were fully conscious of the reproductive instinct—we may be quite sure that it would take it quite seriously too; for it is serious—most serious perhaps—even when it is playing.

In spite of all the apparent light-heartedness of the healthy child, which is all that superficial people can see in it; in spite of the ease with which it turns from sleep to wakefulness, from tears to laughter, and vice versâ, there is a profundity, a sobriety, a solidity about its seriousness that nothing can affect. It takes its own body, itself, the world, and life tremendously seriously. It takes its wants and its desires seriously. It takes its loves and its hates seriously. Little children can be homicidal in their loathing of other children; they can be heroic in their devotion. Those who always depict children with a smile on their chubby faces, and hopping about on one leg, know nothing about them. They know nothing of the imperturbable gravity of the child, and of positiveness generally.

To watch the face of an elderly, negative spinster when a really healthy boy loses his temper, is to witness in one human countenance the whole history of the long conflict between those vultures of which I have spoken and the artless yea-sayer to Life.

Later on, if he is carefully handled, this boy will take his love seriously; he will cling to the girl he chooses in a manner that will make that same spinster marvel at his determination, and he will be as fierce and as serious in his desire for the woman of his choice as he once was over his games, over his hates, and over his meals.

Laughter is not nearly such a common characteristic of healthy positive life as the superficial imagine—more particularly noisy laughter. In every mixed party where much loud laughter or shrill laughter is heard, there is sure to be a good deal, not of gaiety, not of wanton spirits, but of nervous irascibility, sexual excitation, and particularly sexual abstinence, exasperation and—negativeness! He who travels the world over ascertains this curious fact: that loud, shrill laughter is essentially the social noise of Puritanical countries.

Positive people take too serious an attitude to life, to themselves, to each other, and particularly to members of the opposite sex, constantly to vent what they feel in an idle cackle or giggle. They laugh, but their hilarity is short, violent, and apparently effective; because it seems to relieve them for longer periods than does the laughter of negative people.

One of the chief characteristics of the positive mind, then, is the gravity, the solemn interest, with which it confronts life itself, the body that holds it, and everything vital, including sex.

Behold the healthy child, and you have an automaton guided absolutely by a positive mind! To retain this positive mind throughout one’s youth and adulthood is the greatest triumph—particularly nowadays—that anyone can achieve. He who achieves it may well laugh; he has a right to laugh; for he has mastered the most redoubtable foe a man can encounter—the powerful false values that are now seeking to prevail everywhere, and over the victims of which the vultures are muttering their thanksgiving.

The only positive form of laughter is the expression of a consciousness of acquired power. This is Hobbes’ view, it was Stendhal’s view; it is the biologist’s view, who says that laughter is the expression of superior adaptation.

Another characteristic of the positive mind is its forgetfulness in regard to the things that incapacitate it for taking a lively interest in life. This quality of the mind is simply a spiritual counterpart of the healthy body’s power of evacuating those portions of the food absorbed which cannot be assimilated without hurt: forgetting and digesting being the same function of evacuation in two different departments. The positive mind, like the healthy body it is in, knows how to get rid of a useless thing quickly—in fact knows how to forget. Things do not weigh on it, or bear it down, any more than a hearty meal lies heavily on its body’s stomach. Its body digests quickly, and has very soon done with the process. The positive mind digests quickly—particularly its supposed misdeeds. That is why it is so difficult to give a positive person a guilty conscience; because a guilty conscience is simply a costive conscience. The positive mind remembers only so much as interests it keenly, or as much as does not stand in the way of a continued positive attitude to life; just as its body only retains the nourishment out of all it absorbs.

The positive mind has no fear of pain, particularly if this pain is incurred in a vital effort. Little boys will actually enjoy enormous discomfort and pain, provided it is encountered in doing things that reek of active life, that bring their bodies into violent action, and give them the thrill and bracing sensation of overcoming an obstacle, of resisting an attempt at capture, or of effecting a capture. “Yea” is their constant attitude to everything, even to the things which, to the adult, are disagreeable.

I remember on one occasion, when I was walking home from a friend’s house in the pouring rain, I met that same friend’s two little sons returning at a perfectly leisurely pace from school. I had an umbrella, they had not. Naturally I felt it incumbent upon me to see them home, and, gathering them carefully under my silk shelter, I marched them smartly in the direction of their father’s house. I soon found, however, that all my pains were wasted on them, for whenever I was not looking, out one of them would stray into the drenching shower; and when I insisted on their keeping quite close to me, each of them gravely extended his free arm out into the rain to catch as much of it as possible, while every puddle was conscientiously and solemnly explored by their feet.

This may seem a trifling circumstance to dwell upon; but unimportant as it was, it struck me as being but another example of the indomitable yea-saying of healthy childhood to anything and everything.

The gravity of the little boy when he does these things shows clearly the relation between positiveness and things that matter—things that have weight, solidity, importance, tangibility, definition.

Another incident occurs to me as I write. I remember once feeling a little intrigued by the sight of a knot of little village boys standing like conspirators very seriously together in one of the streets of my favourite Sussex village. Their ages ranged from about eight to eleven years. I knew them all perfectly well, and the fact that I drew close up to them did not disturb them in the least. When I was near enough to discover what they were talking about, this is what I saw and heard:—In the centre of the grave and almost hushed group there stood a lad of about nine years of age. He was exhibiting his dirty hands proudly and almost arrogantly to his friends, and the latter were listening with rapt attention to his harangue. I noticed that they all appeared to be a little crestfallen and dejected, save the boy who was demonstrating with his hands, and one other boy who seemed to be arguing with him. Now the explanation of all this profound interest, rapt attention and conflicting emotions, was as follows:—The central figure, the boy of nine, had hands that were covered thickly with large warts, and he possessed one particularly big and ugly-looking specimen just beneath the knuckle of a finger of his right hand. He was exhibiting these horrible excrescences to his schoolfellows triumphantly and defying them to show anything like them, or even approaching them in size and number; and there was but one of them who had a sufficiently respectable record, where warts were concerned, to be able to answer him and meet him, as it were, on equal ground, and this was the boy who had been contesting his point all the time.

Again, this is a trifling incident, but it is full of significance for the analyst of the positive mind. This yea-saying to anything and everything, which surges up with the conviction of an explosion at every moment, everywhere, is far more important, far more profound, far more solid, as a characteristic of childhood, than that mythical innocence and sweet merriness which is the only characteristic of healthy childhood that superficial child-lovers will either grant or recognize.

(4) DISCIPLINE IN ITS RELATION TO THE POSITIVE MIND

The discipline of healthy children, because of their very positiveness, is one of the most intricate and delicate tasks that devolves upon the adult man or woman. It is the task and problem of practical morality, and to solve it without chilling any of that valuable positiveness of childhood, to impose a limit, in fact, upon juvenile positiveness without destroying or blighting it, is the most difficult achievement in education.

To say “yea” to everything—to mud, to filth, to danger, to illness (for positive children are positive even to their bodily disorders), to the rain, to animals, to vermin, to the knife, to explosives, to ladders, to dangerous altitudes, to the precipice, and so on—is of course, supremely delightful, supremely healthy; but it cannot be allowed in its full catholicity. This I am perfectly ready to knowledge. The luxuriance of the child’s positiveness must be pruned. The human being must be reared for society. He must be taught the limitations of his freedom; above all, he must be taught taste and discrimination: what to select and what to reject. And there is perhaps no more solemn moment in life than when a full-grown man or woman, in perfect possession of all the necessary intellectual equipment for the task, approaches his universally yea-saying junior to discipline it—that is to say, to determine its “yea,” to limit it, and to confine it only to a certain set of things.

The problem is obviously, how can the child be kept positive to this world while being rendered negative to the undesirable elements in this life. Or to put it in a sentence: how can I make my little boy say “No” to warts without saying “No” to the world? To all those who approach the child with a negative creed, to all those who are vultures themselves, or who derive from the vulture breed, the order is clearly “Hands off!” Only people who have retained their positive attitude to life should be allowed to interfere where children are concerned; because ordered social life itself is discipline, and but very little careful and discriminating guidance need be added. When Herbert Spencer said that children of large families were always better than those of small families, because in the case of the former the parents have less time to interfere with natural processes, he propounded a very true principle as far as the modern negative world is concerned; because most of the juvenile discipline nowadays is not only imposed by negative people, but the very social environment in which these people move and breathe is also negative and hostile to life.

The object and province of juvenile discipline are simply these: to rear a positive human being for social life; to discipline it to selection and rejection without forcing it to scout or to suspect vital functions or vital virtues. It sounds simple enough when stated in a single line; but how many misunderstandings, how many ruined careers, how many bitter, disappointed and ill-adapted adults are not the result of the opposite principle, the principle which reads that the positive child should above all be taught to distrust its deepest instincts, its body, and to be suspicious of the world, the flesh and the Devil—the latter meaning very often no more than wanton spirits.

Sometimes when one sees the kind of people—men and women—into whose gentle bloodless hands, into whose drab, lifeless but well-meaning existences, healthy helpless children are made to fall, it is difficult not to shudder. How good they are! How sweet is their ideal of what a child ought to be! How vigilant they are for any signs of “wickedness”! Who can submit to their Procrustean method and survive a whole, positive being? They know! They know what pleases God and the angels! No one is better informed than they on this subject. Honest?—no one could be more so than they. Reliable?—they could be trusted to stamp the exuberance out of a boa-constrictor! Good?—not merely good, but holy! Their mild cerulean eyes gaze beyond the child in their tender care, and towards a wonderful ideal, far away, of perfect childhood—a bright, merry, glowing angel who, preferably, would have wings on his shoulders, à la Joshua Reynolds, and nothing—no nothing at all—beneath the thorax. His body might end there with advantage. That is their belief, their hope, their ambition. All human beings might end there with advantage; but above all the child, because children are so pure, so guileless, so sweet; it is such a pity that——

Luckily, robust positiveness has a tenacity and a vigour that frequently survive even the contagion of these toads with evil consciences. But how few are the survivals compared with the number that go under annually!

That is why little girls survive the process more often than little boys; because, as a rule, unless attacked from the side of the body, a female’s positiveness to life is wholly and utterly unbreakable. But it is deeper, more silent, less conspicuous, less articulate than that of the little boy; therefore it more easily eludes the cerulean but very superficial glance of the negative adult. It is more unconscious and consequently less liable to betray itself in the presence of constraining influences. It manifests itself, too, in a less arresting, less annoying fashion; it appears to be “harmless.” Behold the girls that are turned out annually from convent schools or strictly Puritanical High Schools. If their tremendous positiveness had not been secret, concealed, subcutaneous, unconscious, how could it possibly have survived? Again and again I have heard the negative adult deny a passionate positive temperament in a little girl, when I saw it clearly. It is this mistake, this inability to detect a trait that is deep enough to be very far below the surface, that is alone responsible for the salvation of thousands of girls to-day.

Modern man is not only less positive generally than woman, but the modicum of positiveness he possesses is also more apparent, less resisting, more self-assertive, more conscious and therefore less secret. It also manifests itself in a more obtrusive and more irritating way.[14]

Boys suffer most from a negative discipline. Men are suffering most physically and mentally from our negative age. Women only suffer from the indirect results of the age—that is to say, from the deterioration it causes in their men.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See St. Matthew, chap. xxii. verse 30: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”

[2] It should always be remembered that the promise of Christianity is “the resurrection of the body.”

[3] For an explanation of what I mean by this much-abused phrase, see pp. [70], [90-94].

[4] See my Defence of Aristocracy (Constable), chap. V.

[5] See Sex and Character (Heinemann, 1906), p. 299.

[6] Ibid., p. [299].

[7] Ibid., p. [329].

[8] Ibid., p. [336].

[9] Ibid., p. [343].

[10] Ibid., p. [345].

[11] Ibid., p. [345].

[12] Op. cit., p. [346].

[13] Of course, I mean this intellectual positiveness only as a rational confirmation of bodily and constitutional positiveness; for frequently when I shall use the expression “positive” it will also mean the unconscious, spontaneous positiveness of a healthy body. From the context there will be no mistaking which I mean. The same remark applies naturally to the expression intellectual negativeness. For instance, St. Paul and Calvin were both intellectually as well as spontaneously negative. An unhealthy child, or an unhealthy adult, may be only unconsciously or spontaneously so.

[14] In this connexion, see pp. [98-103].

CHAPTER II
The Subject Treated Generally

In my Introduction I have said enough to show that I can be neither a so-called Woman-hater nor a Woman-despiser. And if I have departed somewhat from the common rules laid down by precedent for the writing of a book of this nature, it was because I felt compelled to safeguard some of my hardest and most unacceptable views and conclusions from the withering suspicion of having been dictated by bitterness or resentment.

Other men have written about Woman, and have said hard things about her too: Knox, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Weininger are among them. Neither Knox, Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche, however, started life with such a large fund of prepossession in her favour. Neither Knox, Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche can be said to have been free, as I am, from those bitter experiences and shocks that distort one’s vision and destroy one’s focus.

If I appear to say things that are hard, therefore let it be plainly understood at this stage in my work, that I do so only because I wish to speak frankly and clearly about my subject; and that in view of the muddled and maudlin misunderstandings that now hang like a stifling mist over the female sex, it is impossible to dissipate errors or to take up a clear and definite stand at all, without occasionally seeming hard, unrelenting, metallic. Any flash may be taken for a flash of steel, particularly when one is in a fog.

My intention in writing this book was to save Woman from the cruel misconceptions that are steadily undermining her body and her character, and although there is much in my work that will try the patience and the endurance of many of my readers—particularly men and unhealthy women—I could not possibly eliminate a single one of the more provocative passages without failing in what I feel to be my duty to my undertaking.

I maintain that Woman is now miserable, wretched, desperate. I am not one of those who are certain that present woman is a product of man’s own fashioning. If she were she would not be miserable, because, step by step, as man has advanced—or declined!—she too would have changed, and thus remained his adapted and contented mate. But there is something essentially idiosyncratic in Woman, something that makes her an individual, unalterable and for ever fixed; something that nothing can fashion. You can make her miserable; you can make her sick; you cannot change her! I would go further and say, that all women from Pekin to London and Lisbon are the same; they are only a little more happy or healthy, or a little more miserable and ill, according as to whether their men do or do not understand how to treat them.

Disbelieving utterly, as I do, in the theory that Modern Woman is as man has made her—I mean apart from her wretchedness or sickness, of course—I cannot uphold the view that Woman has any destiny to work out for herself. She has no “true Womanhood” that has yet to be sought and found while we leave her alone. We cannot leave her alone. The moment we leave her alone she ceases to be true Woman: where, then, could she go alone to seek and find her “true Womanhood”?

All those who speak of a “true Womanhood” to be sought and found away from us and from the children we give her, would do both Woman and the world a kindness, a great and inestimable kindness, in henceforward for ever holding their tongues on the subject of Woman.

We try to soothe our consciences; we try to slur over our social mistakes; we sneakingly pretend to ignore the fact that our social life is wrong; and we, and even some women themselves, preach the accursed doctrine that there is a true Womanhood to be sought and found in women alone, by women alone, for women alone! We have not, cannot, will not, do our duty by Women, and we assuage their blind and often unconscious misery by this damnable falsehood which thousands of them in their trustfulness believe. We tell them that somewhere in the Far Away, in the Never-Never-Land—not in the Backwoods of Superior Bunkum—there is a True Woman, a hybrid of a misunderstood Joan of Arc and a glacier. She is alone glorying in her True Womanhood. No man has fashioned her. She has no fashioning—or fashion either, for that matter!—and she simply sits and exults in her manless, childless, splendid independence! Towards this ideal we bid our sisters strive—nay, some of our sisters themselves bid their sisters strive; and we have not enough decency left to blush at our perfidy, at our blackguardly deception!

The problem is out of hand; its difficulties have proved too much for us, otherwise we could not have the barefaced duplicity to settle it in this transparently farcical manner.

What should we think of a cattle-farmer, who, on discovering that he had not enough pasture-land for all his sheep, taught the pastureless ones, when they had grown thin and wan for want of their proper food, that there was a True Sheephood somewhere, a lofty ideal—a Sheephood that could go without pasture-land and without grass altogether; a Sheephood that was self-contained and self-reliant, independent and indisputable, and that they were to go in search of that True Sheephood, and if necessary grow thinner and less attractive every day in their search for it? We should feel that they would have to be very inferior sheep to believe this story, or, rather, very real sheep indeed! Everything in their body, from their cud-chewing molars to their long grass-digesting gut, would surely tell them that the Ideal of True Sheephood was arrant nonsense, and cruel arrant nonsense too.

No, it is impossible to accept the “True Womanhood” ideal of woman gloriously alone, emancipated from man, independent and “discovered.” Inasmuch as we have not fashioned her, and could not do so if we tried, woman is as her rôle in the course of evolution has made her. She is certainly more unhappy, more tormented, more unwell, than she ever need have been; but that is because her principal adaptation—her relation to man—is now so often entirely wrong, or alas! non-existent. I point out again: if, as some presumptuously maintain, we have been fashioning her all through the ages, she would have followed us contentedly to our present stage—a thing she has not done. There is something essentially idiosyncratic in woman then, something that defies our clumsy “fashioning” hands.

This unalterable individuality has not to be found. It is not an ideal after which we might strive. It is present, it is seated in Woman now and for evermore, and one of its principal characteristics is that it cannot brook isolation, solitude, independence, glorious singleness. The “True Womanhood” hoax of Woman refound by herself, for herself, and in herself, as if all this time her association with man and her dependence upon him had been a mistake, an error of judgment, a cramping, limiting and disturbing factor in the evolution of “Pure Woman,” is simply pure falsehood of the worst description; because it overlooks the facts precisely there where they are most glaring, most undeniable, most conspicuous.

Examine the tendrils of the vine and deny that it is a creeping plant destined to cling to a wall or to a tougher plant than itself, and you would declare yourself in so many words an ignoramus or a madman.

Examine Woman and deny that she must have two primary adaptations—that to the man and that to the child—in order simply to fulfil her destiny as it is stamped indelibly on her body; and you acknowledge yourself straight away not only an ignoramus and a madman, but a dangerous specimen of both.

Immersed as Woman obviously is, up to her shoulders in the business of Life and its multiplication, let it be said plainly and unequivocally: all those who teach her that any other business is her business, all those who, in face of the dilemma of modern problems, confuse her with tales about a true Womanhood away from Life and its multiplication; all those, in short, who beguile her with promises of happiness, contentedness, or even comfort, without her primary adaptations to man and the child, are liars both unscrupulous and criminal.

And here I have touched upon what I claim to be idiosyncratic and perfectly individual in Woman—her deep and almost whole-bodied concern with Life and its multiplication. Above all the other functional differences and similarities between the sexes, this fundamental trait must prevail as a permanent and ineradicable characteristic of Woman, and it is the bedrock on which we must build, and from which we must set out, if we wish to arrive at a clear and untainted image of Woman as distinct from Man.

When, moreover, one remembers that this principal characteristic of hers is the seed and generating force of all her will, her leading instincts and her virtues, it is simply deliberate blindness to deny that she has not a distinctive and powerful individuality that places her far outside the possible influence of those “fashioning” male hands that some have the impudence to maintain have warped or diverted the true course of her evolution.

Leave her alone then; leave her to work out her own salvation, and like Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, to venture single-handed in search of that true Womanhood which according to some theorists has yet to be found, and has never yet been allowed a free development, and what happens?—She ceases from being a true Woman at her very first step into the wilderness of isolation. She denies her principal characteristic, her distinctive individuality, by the very act of desertion constituted by her flight into so-called freedom and autonomy. For the only power that rules Woman with an iron hand, the only power that moulds her destiny and actuates her behaviour and aspirations, she can never desert; and that is a power far more inexorable and irresistible than the power of man. It is the power of Life itself, with which she is much more deeply, secretly and thoroughly in touch than we are, or could ever hope to be. We are an amputation from Life, to which we return only at odd intervals, as it were to pay tribute: she is Life’s uninterrupted stream that receives this tribute.

I repeat, therefore, that while we have the power to make Woman miserable and ill—a power which for the last 250 years in England we have exercised with ever-increasing folly—we have no more right to boast that we have moulded or directed her evolution than we have a right to boast of having shaped the stars and the moon. And those women who allow us this boast and who accuse us of having arrested their development (whatever that may mean), or of having distorted their true individuality, fall with treacherous perfidy to their sex, into the ranks of Woman’s worst enemies.

How have we made Woman miserable and ill?

Let me explain what misery and illness means:

Put a mole to live upon a concrete floor, lay a frog in a parched sandy plain, and confine the agile cat to a space only just large enough to allow it to lash its tail, and you will have succeeded so thoroughly in thwarting the primary instincts of these three animals—the subterranean life of the mole, for which its large forelegs and its whole body crave; the amphibious life of the frog after which its webbed feet and nimble limbs hanker, and the stalking, hunting and prowling lust of the cat to which all its magnificent body is so superbly adjusted—that you will have made them utterly and desperately miserable and probably ill as well.

What have you done? You have deprived them of their primary adaptations. The same holds good of Woman. Millions of women to-day are hopelessly irrevocably deprived of their primary adaptations, and even those who are given their primary adaptations, so frequently receive them in a form that is inadequate and unsatisfying, effete and inferior, that even among the married women of our day there is a depth of disappointment, disillusionment and vague dissatisfaction that makes some of them even more miserable than their single sisters. The latter, at least, are still able to hope against hope (a wonderful power in women); the others can only await the end, knowing the worst and knowing that everything is hopeless.

How do we men absolve ourselves from the blame of this? For it is certainly we who mould society and ourselves, even if we do not mould women. How do we try to evade, escape, circumvent the main issue?—We have the effrontery to teach Woman the doctrine that since we fail them both in quantity and quality, there is a life away from us and the children they could have from us that is worth living. We do not scruple to tell them that they can be happy, content, comfortable, without the surroundings to which they are primarily adapted. We abet and promote a process by which millions of our women deliberately turn their backs upon their primary adaptations, and spring to our side like neuters in the arena of our active life, our besotting duties, our drudgery! But not content with undermining their health and their happiness by denying the just privilege of their primary adaptations, we undermine their spirits by casting them like convicts into the wheels of the very machine that has already reduced us to such pale shadows of our former selves, such faint echoes of manhood, that they were rightly growing dissatisfied with us.

But not only that, we taught them that they could find happiness in this independence, in this single-handed struggle—happiness! Aye, there were even some women who arose and assured their sisters that we were right and that they could live lives, yes, and enjoy Life, in this independent isolation!

If this were not all visible before us, many would still refuse to believe it. Unfortunately it is all only too true! This incredible farce is our present-day existence—our age!

We have actually not refrained from telling young girls that they can live a life away from their principal adaptations!

Only recently, for instance, when the 1921 census revealed that there were approximately 2,000,000 more women than men in Great Britain—that is to say, 2,000,000 women who on the monogamous principle could not be expected to find mates—several prominent people wrote to the papers protesting indignantly that these women were not superfluous, and arguing that there was “enough work in the world” for all the women. These people wrote as if the whole question were an economic one, and that, provided the two million unmated women could only make themselves self-supporting in their singleness, the difficulties of the case would be entirely overcome.[15] But this attitude towards the question was ridiculously unsympathetic. For, if the only object in life were to become self-supporting by means of work, one would not require to be either a man or a woman; a neuter, after the style of the worker-bee, would be all that one required to resemble. But the attitude of these prominent people was unfortunately worse than unsympathetic; it was insulting and dishonest. For, to tell a body of two million women that they need not despair, that even if they could find no mates, there would be work enough for them in order to render them self-supporting, was to assume, without enquiry, that they were neuters, or that they were capable of leading satisfactory lives as neuters. It was at least tantamount to assuming that they would be content in leading the lives of neuters—an assumption insulting both to their physical as well as to their mental development, and one which, having not a fact to support it, was entirely dishonest. Apart from all this, however, it amounted to a vulgar narrowing down of all earthly aspirations and desires, to the economic struggle—to success in the task of finding sustenance.

The Holy Catholic Church was more honest in this, and more practical than we are. It told all those women for whom society failed to provide their principal adaptations, that they could find comfort, occupation, and even a high purpose, by entering the Church, but it was frank enough to add: if you do so you must turn your back for ever upon those things for which you were built, those things to which your whole body was ingeniously and artfully adjusted and contrived.

And even when the system broke down, as it frequently did,[16] at least where Life was illicitly found in the convent or the monastery, it was found and enjoyed secretly, under the respectable auspices of a powerful institution, and not on the streets of big cities where the fruits are nothing but distress, disgrace and disease.

But behind all this unwillingness to recognize or admit that Woman cannot really be “adapted” (which is simply a biological way of saying she cannot be really happy or well) without fulfilling the destiny that her rôle in the process of evolution, and not man, stamped indelibly upon her body from the start, is the very same insidious and devastating force that has made her unhappy in other directions, that has reduced her men, for instance, to nincompoops. I refer to Puritanism.[17]

Puritanism, always so hostile to sex, would fondly like one to believe that sex is no longer one of the first considerations of Life, even for women. It would give a good deal, and has given a good deal, to convince everybody that one can “get on without it”! And, indeed, its values and atmosphere have now reared so many thousands of wretched, lank, bloodless and lifeless men and women who can get on without it, and who do get on without it, that quite a large number of people are beginning to believe that Puritanism is right. In any case, it is to these unconscious victims of its system that it now has the effrontery to point as evidence of its criminal contention when it seeks to persuade the unwary that it is right.

When, therefore, the cruel solution of modern sex problems (problems that only arose through the kind of society Puritanism has created) was supposed to have been found by telling women that “they really did not want men or children, and could easily ‘get on’ without either,” it was the voice of Puritanism that was distinct and persuasive here; Puritanism at last within an ace of complete triumph, and exulting over having achieved what to all intents and purposes must have seemed an impossible undertaking from the start.

When, however, one remembers how carefully and skilfully the ground had been prepared, when one remembers how unscrupulously every possible means had been exploited in order to consummate the end in view, how can one wonder at the unravelment!

After having reduced man to a mere shadow of his former self, after having atrophied, besmirched and slandered the sex instinct until it was literally ashamed to show its face (fancy, the fundamental instinct of life being ashamed to show its face!)—after having heaped up so much odium on the waning innocence of sexual beauties and the sacred joys of procreation that shame descended upon them like a deadly and withering shroud—no wonder that there were some, nay, thousands, who were ready to acknowledge that there was a life away from the fundamental instinct of life!

For fire alone purifies; fire alone renders some fusions and combinations possible. Damp the ardour of man, therefore, reduce his fire, and the sexual act does indeed become an affair from which many might be justified in shrinking. The procreative love of human beings was obviously designed on the presumption that they would remain warm-blooded animals. Once they grew to be cold-blooded, it of necessity became improper, impious. The procreation of fish is accomplished without any embrace, without any étreinte of male and female: but fish are cold-blooded.

Thus in support of the Puritan’s chilling cry that there was a life away from the fundamental instinct of Life, there arose very soon a chorus of disillusioned and indignant married women’s voices, who knew the anguish and embarrassment of human sexual life with a human fish, and who were not in the least prepared to conceal its horrors.

And how convincing all this seemed! How many sensitive and intelligent girls have not listened to this married woman’s chorus in support of the Puritan’s plea, and felt their hope in life, their trust in life, their love of life, shake in its foundations! So much so, indeed, that it is now possible for them to listen no longer with suspicion but with eager interest to those of their “fortunate” sisters who are too unhealthy, or too deficient in vigour to feel any desire for their principal adaptations; it is possible even for the naturally sterile among women, for the women below par in every respect, and incapable, either through repulsiveness or botchedness, to fulfil their destiny, to pass through the world without being despised, without being looked down upon. And since the number of women who lack the vigour and the spirit really to crave for their principal adaptations increases every year, an atmosphere of reality and naturalness is imparted to the artificial and destructive claims of Puritanism, which is as deceiving as it is dangerous, and as difficult to dissipate as it was slow and gradual to form.

It is precisely because women are so deeply in touch with Life, so secretly and unconsciously Life’s ally, Life’s ambassador, Life’s custodian, that they cannot help being miserable and in pain nowadays. The voice of Life inside them tells them emphatically that things are wrong, that the muddle man has made of Life is tragic, cruel, insufferable. As Life’s unconscious advocate, Woman is essentially opposed to modernity, however much she may seem in favour of it. When she appears to be most in favour of it, she is only following modern man and his ideals most closely.

Having all the equipment for Life’s most important business, it will not appear hard to believe that Woman is positive. Life through her says “Yea” to itself. In fact when Woman says “Yea” to Life, it is simply Life itself accepting itself as such. All women’s apparent negativism is either only skin deep, or else it is the outcome of bodily sickness or degeneracy. The mere fact that in all periods of decline Woman has always come to the fore, the historical fact that Feminism is undeniably a phenomenon of male degeneration—the swan-song of male-constructed societies—shows how inevitably Life itself comes forward at the last moment in order to try to rescue itself when it feels all else is failing. But it comes forward in a form that cannot lead to salvation. Because, although Woman is equipped for carrying on Life’s business, she is not equipped for ordering it. You cannot be a thing and above it, or out of it, at the same time. The part is not greater than the whole. And, as Woman is immersed in Life, she has not the duality of vision that is necessary for placing and ordering Life. She knows, because she feels, when Life is going to pieces; she knows when Life has been outraged, when hostility to Life is working havoc with Life’s material; but she can only ascertain the fact, she can only protest against the fact; she cannot remedy it.

To remind me that modern women—or the most far-seeing among them—organized a powerful agitation to obtain the Parliamentary vote, is simply to point to a proof of what I say. The Parliamentary vote is essentially a male invention. It is essentially a male idea. It is not an idea of Life. In fact, three-quarters of the harm that has come to Life might be ascribed to this very Parliamentary vote, and the Democracy it implies; and yet, when Woman in her agony casts about her for a remedy for Life’s sickness, she can do nothing more than lay hold of this futile and dangerous male invention, and seek salvation through it.

It is her cry of protest, however, that is interesting as a symptom, as a warning. And all those who have ears to hear, know it is the cry of Life itself, agitating for reform. But, as the feeling is unconscious with Woman, and as she is not equipped for the task of standing outside Life and ordering it, the remedies she advocates must be suspected and rejected just as earnestly as her cry of warning must be respected and observed.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See Arabella Kenealy in Feminism and Sex-Extinction (pp. 211-12): “That all women do not marry—cannot marry, indeed, because of their preponderance in number over the other sex—is no reason for dissembling the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie women’s most vital and valuable rôles. Nor is it a warrant for training the whole sex as though none were destined to fulfil this, their natural and noblest, if not always their happiest, vocation.”

[16] The reports made in the reign of Henry VIII by his Commissioners, concerning the state of the convents and monasteries, give proof enough of this, as do also the reports of visiting bishops in the Middle Ages.

[17] For an exhaustive description of the metamorphosis of the Englishman through the influence of Puritanism, see chapter V of my Defence of Aristocracy (Constable & Co., 1915).

CHAPTER III
Woman and her Unconscious Impulses

If a healthy child be told to sit still for a long time at a stretch, the chances are that it will disobey the order at the end of the first two minutes.

Likewise, if a rhinoceros be placed in a soft-floored stable, the chances are that it will very soon plough up the whole of its place of captivity with its nasal horn.

Other examples can be thought of: the wallowing of ducks, unprovided with water, in dirty puddles and ditches; the nail exercise of the cat on the legs of our dining-room tables; and the gnawing away of wood by white mice in a manner that can in no way effect their escape.

Let me explain some of these examples:

A healthy child—a little boy—is told to sit still. What happens? The muscles and tissues of his body are well-nourished. In his constitution there is a reserve of strength which, like the power of a galvanic battery is seeking an outlet, a method of discharging itself. All his muscles tell him most emphatically that they want to be moving, that they want to be actively employed.

Now let us turn to the child’s consciousness and to his brain. Let us look to see what is happening there. These impatient messages that are constantly coming up from every nerve and tissue in his body are registered in the brain, but they do not enter consciousness in their original form. Consciousness receives only an interpretation of them. The child is not really aware of them at all. If you asked him when he first began to move or fidget: “What is the matter with you?” he would reply either “I don’t like sitting here” or “I want to go and play.” Not only is he unconscious of the fact that while he is sitting there his body is in a state of genuine distress, because of energy seeking to be discharged, but he would be utterly incapable of using the proper phraseology to explain his condition, even if he were aware of it. All he knows, all he is conscious of is this:

(1) Playing is good fun.

He does not know that the reason why his body insists on moving is that all his tissues are alive with energy that wants to be used.

(2) Sitting here is a hopeless bore.

He does not realize that sitting still to a live body in a state of energetic exuberance is actually painful, and even if he cries from sheer pain, on this account alone, his consciousness will still say: “I want to play,” “I don’t want to sit here.” He will never say, “I am in pain,” or “It hurts not to play.”

Let him get down from his chair and go to play, and in less than a minute you will probably find him exerting vain efforts to move a huge stone or a massive log from one place to another. The purpose of the transposition of this solid and inert mass will be clear neither to you nor to him; but that is immaterial. His body wants to spend its energy, and the little boy, therefore, likes moving a large stone or a large log about. And he will cry or protest violently if you tell him he is not to do it. He does not know in the least why he wants to do it; he only knows, for the moment, that moving big stones is good.

From all this it is clear, not only that the brain’s interpretation of a bodily state is unreliable as a sign of what is actually proceeding in that body, but also that it does not always require to be reliable in order to lead its owner to do the right thing, or to adopt the proper course of action.

Now let us suppose the same child peevish and irritable. What actually happens?

Let us look inside his body for a moment! The large intestine is congested; his bowels have not been properly opened for thirty-six hours. Last night, owing to this condition, his sleep was restless and feverish. This morning he has eaten a good breakfast, but he is not so lively as he was yesterday. Messages are going up to his brain every second from every tissue in his body. And all these messages say one and the same thing: “We are not happy: we are not in our usual clean, healthy condition.” The brain itself, owing perhaps to disordered circulation, is also a little surcharged with blood; so that, in addition to the messages of distress that incessantly rise from the body, it has its own distress.

Now let us turn to the child’s consciousness! What is happening there? The child is not conscious of all the alarms and signals of distress coming up from his body; he is not conscious of the pressure of blood on his brain. All he knows is that he is feeling thoroughly and utterly discontented. And since his human intelligence tells him that discontent must have a cause, this cause must be found. An incident at breakfast soon provides the whole scheme of a convincing cause for his feeling of distress. His little sister picks up a crumb of his bread and eats it—an innocent action which, if it had happened yesterday, or the day before, would only have provoked laughter.

It is, however, sufficient to provide the badly informed brain with material for a false interpretation. The sister’s action is immediately posited as the cause of his feeling ill at ease, and in a moment all his body’s angry discontent about its bad condition is vented against the unfortunate little sister, who is as staggered as she is hurt by his sudden unaccountable outburst of tears and bitter words.

In the two examples given, what has been the unconscious motive of the little boy’s behaviour? In Example 1 it was a reserve of physical energy that was seeking an outlet—interpreted by the little boy’s consciousness as a desire to roll a stone or a log as an end in itself.

In Example 2 it was a state of physical depression which, reaching the lad’s consciousness as a vague discontent, led him to seek its cause. Thanks to a false interpretation, and still acting quite unconsciously of the real cause, he flies into a passion with his little sister, because her taking of his crumb of bread seems to him a sufficient cause for his discontentedness.

This part of my disquisition on the unconscious, together with what follows, will do excellent service, if understood, in helping the reader to see more clearly into the complicated train of consequences which, as I shall point out later on, in Chapter VIII, lead to most conjugal differences, and ultimately to Divorce. Irrelevant as the above examples may seem, therefore, I would ask the reader to endeavour to make quite sure that he understands the principle they involve; because much of the lucidity of Chapter VIII will depend upon a thorough grasp of this principle.

When I speak of people acting in a certain way, or doing otherwise unaccountable and apparently immoral deeds as the result of a bodily impulse that they misinterpret, I shall speak of an unconscious motive on their parts. Only in this sense shall I speak of unconscious motives.

The correlation of bodily equipment and motive or desire, therefore, must always be kept very carefully in mind if we are to comprehend the behaviour of our fellows, and of the lower animals.

An animal that has a horn on its nose, like the rhinoceros, will have a concomitant desire to use it. Its motive for using it may be quite unconscious; but that does not matter. The little kitten does not hate you, or desire to hurt you when it uses its claws on your hands. It has a bodily part, well supplied with intricate mechanism and nerves, and it is more than it can do not to use that part.

The impulse coming from a bodily part that cries to be used is generally misinterpreted. That can be taken as a more or less universal rule. We have seen how the child, though it acted in the right way in the first example, was utterly unconscious of the true springs of its action. But that almost every positive action we perform in our lives is the outcome of a correlation of our bodily parts sending commands to our brain, is nevertheless an undeniable fact.

Take, for instance, the man who possesses the happy combination of a very good eye and an agile, dexterous hand. According to the sort of environment into which he falls, he may be one of several things—either an excellent shot and warrior, or an excellent draughtsman, sculptor, craftsman or painter. The correlation of his bodily parts determines his desires and consequently his career. His motives throughout may be unconscious—that is to say, he may be unaware until the end, of the nature of the forces that actuated him.

Turning now, with these considerations in our mind, to the contemplation of Woman, what do we find?

We find a creature who stands up to her shoulders in the business of Life and its multiplication. Artfully contrived and richly equipped for this business, and with the whole of her trunk and its nervous system intricately organized for it—so that even in her limbs and the skin upon them, so that even in her face and the hair on her head one can detect reverberations, as it were, of the mighty and momentous forces that irradiate her being—Woman cannot evade the common fate of all creatures, and cannot help being guided in her conduct rigidly by the correlation of her bodily parts, any more than all other creatures can. But her actions and the unconscious motives behind them will be all the more inevitable, for having such an elaborate, such a purposeful, and such a deep-seated mechanism as their generator.

Woman’s positiveness to Life, therefore, only amounts to her saying “Yea” to her bodily impulses, and this she cannot help doing without entertaining thoughts of self-destruction. And her “Yea” to Life is more determined, more unswerving, more unrelenting than man’s, in proportion as she is more thoroughly organized and equipped than he is for Life’s business. Her “Yea” to Life cannot be changed to “Nay,” because she is utterly unconscious of it, and is therefore powerless to change it. She may in a moment of bottomless despair say “Nay” to herself, when a sufficient number of people, or a sufficiently important one of many people, has said “Nay” to her; but even then, she is not saying “Nay” to Life, but “Nay” to the thought of living an empty life, or no life.[18]

Woman may ultimately marry. But she is already wed when she is born. She is wed to Life. Life is her taskmaster, and Life is her Lord. I shall show very soon how she unconsciously acknowledges this sway, sacrifices herself to it, and immolates herself before it—aye, even commits adultery for it, lies for it, murders and thieves for it, and sometimes kills herself for it.

What is man in the presence of this formidable engine of Life’s purpose? Merely a means that Woman unconsciously exploits while she consciously imagines that she loves him. What are her children? Children are the object of her eternally unconscious gratitude, because they are the product of her healthy functioning, the instruments on which she has played off the whole gamut of her sensibilities and sensations.

The hierarchy then reads: (1) Life, (2) Woman, (3) Man. For the present this will do.

To understand Woman, then, we must first of all think of her as a creature who is constantly being actuated by the readiness and desire her bodily equipment feels, to be used, to be made to function, to exercise its powers. But we must always remember that she is not aware of the nature of this actuating force, that it is always the unconscious motive of her actions. We know it must be so; we know it is so; but we also know that she does not know it.

All her will, all her conduct, all her crimes or great deeds—if she perpetrate any—must be ascribed to the actuating force of her bodily equipment; but she will always be aware only of other motives for her conduct, and her mind will invariably misinterpret the causes of it.

Let me go over the ground I have just covered, in a slightly different way, in order that I may be quite sure of being understood. All those who have already thoroughly grasped my point can skip this passage.

If we examine the relation of instinct to will, what do we find it to be.[19]

An instinct may be understood as a predisposition implanted in a living creature to act in a certain way prior to experience, or, as a bias in favour of a certain line of conduct before any knowledge of that line of conduct or its consequences has been brought clearly to the conscious mind by individual experiment.

An infant, for instance, has no experience of food and its relation to the body; it has no experience of anything; but it has a predisposition to suck, which is the outcome of its bodily condition and ancestral history at a certain period of its life; and, as far as its early months are concerned, a child may be said to have an indomitable will to be suckled or to suck—it will cry violently if this proclivity be not indulged; its tears and cries will immediately subside if it has its way.

How does instinct become implanted in a living creature? Instinct may have two origins: (1) A racial origin, by which I mean that it is the outcome of an ancestral habit, and constitutes a predisposition to perform certain actions in a certain way, because of the incalculable number of times that the ancestors in the same line of descent have performed them in that way. As an example of this, take the circling movements of the dog before he lies down. The movements have no purpose now, because the domestic dog no longer lives in tall grass; but it is reminiscent of his ancestors’ behaviour for ages, and in this sense may be called an instinctive action of racial memory. The dog’s will is bent on performing this unnecessary and now perfectly empty formality, simply because his ancestors performed it so often in his line of descent.

(2) A bodily origin, by which I mean that an instinct is the natural outcome of a certain correlation of organs, bodily parts or weapons, and the possession of which in itself is sufficient to suggest and to enforce a certain mode of conduct in their possessor. As an example of this take the butting or tossing proclivities of the goat and bull respectively, the clawing of the cat, the burrowing of the mole, etc. etc. All these activities are the outcome of the possession of certain organs or bodily parts, that insist upon being used, that cause the animal to feel ill-adapted and miserable if they cannot function.

What, then, is will?

All will is obviously the power of the instinct that determines conduct for the moment, for a given period, or, as in some cases, for a lifetime.

The will of an animal, therefore, is inseparable from the instincts to which either his racial memory or his bodily parts give rise. For he will do whatever his most powerful instinct, for the time being, bids him do.

Let us now turn to man. With Reibmayr let me posit the three fundamental instincts of man as (1) the Self-preservative Instinct, (2) the Reproductive Instinct, (3) the Social Instinct.

According to his nature, man has one of these instincts stronger or weaker than the other two, and this strength or weakness determines his character, his choice of paths in life and of conduct in life.

Imagine the Self-preservative Instinct superior in power to the other two, and, like all ambitious men bent only on self-aggrandisement, he will scout both woman and society at all points where either of these threatens to make him pay too heavy a toll. Suppose that his Reproductive Instinct is the most powerful—as was the case with Mark Antony—and he will be ready to sacrifice society and himself for the woman he loves. If his Social Instinct leads him—as it lead Napoleon, Disraeli, Charles I, Strafford, Colbert and others, he will make woman and self subordinate to society’s claims upon his energies.

His will—that is to say the guiding power directing his conduct—is thus only the popular term for “leading instinct.”

In men of the Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, St. Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist type, the social instinct was so strong that it completely mastered and sacrificed the other two instincts. Their reproductive instinct was suppressed and snubbed, and women were scouted by them, while they considered their self-preservative instinct only in so far as it assisted them in continuing and prolonging the exercise of their social instinct. The will in these men resided in their leading social instinct. It was that which determined their conduct.

In the coward, the anarchist, the deserter, the ambitious upstart bent only on self-aggrandisement and security, in the unscrupulous plutocrat, the self-preservative instinct is so strong that woman and society are sacrificed or ignored, whenever any emergency or dilemma occurs in which it becomes necessary to sacrifice them for the sake of self-preservation. Such men’s wills reside entirely in the thought of their own survival and security, and are determined exclusively by the self-preservative instinct.

If, now, we ask what is Woman’s will, by what instinct is it determined?—we are in a position to say at once: Woman’s will, owing to the very correlation of her bodily parts and the important place the organs and business of Life’s multiplication hold in her constitution, is at least likely to have a strong bias or predisposition in favour of being determined by her reproductive instinct. For the latter is clearly very strongly implanted in her. The two sources from which alone instinct can arise, and from which this particular instinct can draw its strength, are present within her; they are undeniably her idiosyncracy, and they are: (1) Racial memory (her women ancestors for millions of generations, with the same organs as she possesses, having performed all the functions of conception, parturition, and the rearing of children more or less successfully, otherwise she herself would not be there) and (2) the correlation of bodily parts (her body having the full equipment for reproduction, which must crave the exercise of its functions and suggest its use, if that equipment be healthy and well-formed).

You may suggest that the same holds good of man. As a matter of fact, it does not. Because in man there is some doubt, some uncertainty as to the bias, as to the prejudice, suggested by his bodily parts. If in man the organs concerned with Life’s multiplication held the same predominant place as they do in woman, the same would certainly hold good of him. But it is obvious that this is not the case. The case is rather the reverse.

It is because of woman’s elaborate and extensive equipment precisely for the business of Life’s multiplication, that we are justified in suspecting that her will is likely to reside in this equipment, or rather in the instinct that springs and takes its strength from it. We are justified in suspecting this, on the same principle as that which justifies us in suspecting that the will of the mole is determined by its forelegs and general correlation of bodily parts.

Provided she be healthy and well-formed, then Woman’s will cannot help being determined by the paramount equipment of sex in her body, from which arises the reproductive instinct. Her social instinct will be subservient, docile, ready to retreat before its master the reproductive instinct on all occasions. The self-preservative instinct, too, save when she is with child, will be limited by and associated with the reproductive.

And all this will be so much Woman herself, so much part of her essential being, that she will not be aware of it, and while her reproductive instinct will guide her, she herself will misinterpret its promptings while doing its bidding. So much so, indeed, will she misinterpret its promptings, and her unconsciousness will be so profound, so genuine, so unpretended, and so impenetrable, that it will deceive even the spectator himself, even the contemplator and observer of Woman.

If she has virtues, they will be offshoots from the reproductive instinct; her vices will be the same. Her immorality, if she be capable of it, will be Life’s immorality, vital immorality, positive immorality.

But what is most important in understanding Woman is, I repeat, her inevitable mental misinterpretation of these phenomena. Weininger’s book is wrong, weak, unjust, because he never lays sufficient stress on this question of the unconscious and its bearing upon the nature and conduct of Woman. Later on in this book many apparent problems in the life-conduct of Woman, many of Woman’s apparent crimes, all Woman’s so-called immorality, will be explained precisely on the basis of her unconsciousness of the true forces actuating her. There is no other explanation. There is no other way of understanding these things.

Let me repeat the sort of dialogue I constantly have with the average man who is in the habit of taking things at their face value.

I. How’s Miss A.?

A.M. Oh, flourishing, thank you!

I. What is she doing now? Is she engaged yet?

A.M. No—not yet.

I. Any prospects?

A.M. None that I am aware of.

I. Where is she?

A.M. She’s attending lectures on Political Economy.

I. Political Economy!—whatever for?

A.M. Oh, she’s a very clever girl, and she’s interested in these subjects.

I. Let me think!—how old is she?

A.M. Just twenty-three.

I. Well, well! I suppose she will meet plenty of fresh men at the School of Political Economy, and may find what she wants there.

A.M. Oh, but you misunderstand Miss A. She has no such thought. She says herself that she is deeply interested in Political Economy.

I. She does not know why she goes to the School of Political Economy; she imagines it is because she is interested in the subject. But I know why she goes there. Life sends her there. And even if the only thing she could learn there were the turning and painting of skittles, she would be interested in that. Life has found that one environment has failed to give the girl her primary adaptations, so now it bids her seek a new environment.

A.M. Oh nonsense!—you always imagine women think of nothing but men.

I. I didn’t say so!

A.M. But you imply it.

I. I. I don’t even imply it.

A.M. You do!

I. On the contrary, I feel quite certain that Miss A. is quite unconscious of the true nature of the command that sent her to the School of Political Economy.

At this stage in the dialogue the average man usually shrugs his shoulders, because he knows nothing of unconscious motives; he knows nothing of the brain’s misinterpretation of the body’s messages to it, and the consequence is that he believes honestly in the avowed motive in people’s conduct always being the real and true one.

But if this were so, women, with their moral upbringing as it is at present, would be ashamed of doing half they constantly and habitually do. It is their salvation in the present Puritanical age that their deepest motives for their actions are not apparent to themselves, otherwise the more tasteful, the more sensitive among them, would fly to the nearest cellar for concealment and never show their faces again.

Never accept a Woman’s explanation of the motives actuating her—not because she is deliberately lying, but because she does not know them: The motive to her is always the one that is apparent, the one that is the outcome of her mind’s misinterpretation of the body’s messages to it.

People who say that women deliberately lie in these circumstances simply do not know the subject, and had better start studying it afresh.

Let us analyse Miss A.’s case. I assume that she is a healthy normal girl. Her hips are broad, her chest is full, she has been regular in her periods from her fourteenth year. What is going on inside her? All this equipment, in perfect working order and vigorously constituted, has not ceased from signalling to the brain ever more and more insistently for years: “We are not content; we are idle; we are sitting still; we are not functioning; we are aching from sitting still.” The brain misinterprets all this straight away, and transmits it to consciousness as follows: “What a bore life is! When is anything interesting or exciting going to happen? What are all the men in my circle doing? Why don’t they notice me, or fall in love with me?” The messages continue persistent, and they are the same as in the first case, but more emphatic, more urgent. Again the brain transmits them to consciousness as follows: “What a bore home life is! What a self-complacent, heedless creature mother is! What a tedious round this week at home has been! I must go out; I must get away from it! I must leave home! Couldn’t I study something? Anything that gets me out of this tiresome futility! Isn’t there a course of something at the School of Political Economy?” And so on!

In the terms of Life, this means simply: “My present environment is failing to procure my principal adaptations for me. Life bids me seek another environment at once.”

Fidelity to Life in Woman must prevail over every other form of fidelity. In order to be faithful to Life and Life’s purpose, therefore, Miss A. must be unfaithful to her old environment.

But to accuse such a girl of falsehood or dissimulation when she declares that she is interested in Political Economy, and is pursuing the study for its own sake, would be the cruellest injustice. Life is quite unscrupulous in achieving her ends, and if Political Economy can prove a road to them, why not Political Economy? But the woman is no more conscious of the fact that Life is secretly directing her, than the mole is of the reasons why it selects a subterranean life.

Hitherto I have spoken only of the healthy or positive woman. I must, however, refer to the unhealthy woman; because, unless she is rejected immediately, as a standard, we shall be utterly misled in our examination of the true Female attitude.

For the present work, all I shall mean by unhealthy or negative, will be that condition in which the body may be said to be either atonic—that is to say, lacking in tone, in sanguine vigour—or unfit, owing to inadequate, arrested or faulty development, for the performance of its functions.

The fact that Weininger makes no classification of healthy and unhealthy, but confines himself entirely to the two orders of women that are either inclined to be male or inclined to be truly female, vitiates the whole of his argument.

Unless I take into consideration whether a woman is properly equipped not only with the mechanism but also with the tonality of the mechanism for her functions, how can I proceed to postulate that she is either male or female in her physical bias?

We know that the impulse to use an organ normally arises in the organ itself in a state of health, and that the instincts of a creature have only the two sources—racial memory and a correlation of organs—from which they can possibly draw their strength. Suppress the more powerful of these two sources, the organic impulse, and you cannot help reducing, depressing, or even totally eliminating the instinct.

An unhealthy woman, in my sense, therefore, will approach maleness in any case, whether she have male elements in her or not (to recall Weininger); because with the decline in vigour of her reproductive instincts consequent upon the atonic condition of her reproductive organs, the voice of other instincts will make themselves heard, and she will be less of a woman the more her other instincts dare to measure themselves against her reproductive instinct.

To me, therefore, Weininger’s classification “Male” and “Female” woman seems superfluous; it serves no useful purpose—because almost all the secondary sexual characteristics of the male are rudimentary in woman and come into prominence when her sex is in abeyance, either through negativeness, immaturity (childhood), or at the climacteric (late middle age); besides, even Weininger himself admits that he has “never yet seen a single woman who was not fundamentally feminine,”[20] and scores of cases could, moreover, be adduced which show that certain races have reared women approaching as closely as possible to the male—the squaw, for instance—without having produced feminine males to couple with them.

How Weininger, by the by, reconciles the opinion just quoted with his other view, it is not incumbent upon me to say. His book is so full of shallow conclusions, contradictions and superficial judgments, that it is difficult to understand how it was ever taken seriously.

The relation of the unhealthy woman to Life, then, is rather that of the renegade, of the atheist, of the infidel, towards his native religion. She will not hanker after the business of Life and its multiplication. Her Will will not reside in her reproductive instinct. And this is what goes on in her mind:

(We are now inside the unhealthy woman’s brain.) Messages are being received from all corners of her body. Her trunk with all its intricate mechanism for reproduction sends constant signals of no urgency at all—mere small talk! “We are quite content to be left alone; we are quite happy sitting still; we are not anxious to have our lot altered in the least.” The brain misinterprets all this straight away and transmits these signals to consciousness as follows: “Man and my supposed fatal relationship to him do not interest me in the least. I am above sex. I do not even feel a thrill in the presence of the most virile, most positive male. All this talk about my lot on earth being the business of Life and its multiplication, is simply nonsense multiplied ad infinitum! I am born for higher things; I have the instinct of higher things.”

As if there could be anything higher than the purpose of human life!—Unless, of course, one is of the opinion of Schopenhauer, Weininger and the rest of that ilk, and disbelieves in the desirability of prolonging human life on earth.

To us, then, who are positive to Life, and to whom sterility is therefore a thing to be regretted, deplored, and not admired, as Weininger admired it; to us, who loathe the infertility of prostitution and particularly of homosexuality, and who regard such a statement as that of Weininger’s in regard to the last-named vice[21] as sufficient not only to condemn a whole book, but a whole man as well: the unhealthy or negative woman, despite all her superior and overweening claims, is a subject of repulsion and disgust; and we would give her a place in society where all her misinterpretations of her condition would be rendered non-infectious and innocuous.

Unfortunately, what with the influence of Puritanism and its hostility to sex and to sex-expression, what with the depressing foods and drinks it has introduced,[22] or whose use it has fostered in the nation, vitality even among creatures so positive and so vigorously positive as women, has been greatly reduced and frequently hopelessly impaired; and particularly in England, negative women, asexual women abound.

If, however, we keep strictly to our positive tenet: “that all that is good which is favourable to the best kind of life and its multiplication,” we shall have no difficulty in deciding whether this increase of asexual women is a good or a bad thing; and our judgment may be accordingly both definite and severe.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The statistics showing that more women than men commit suicide and go mad through disappointed love, prove that the importance attached by women to this rebuff is much greater than that attached to it by men. See Lombroso and Ferrero’s La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée, pp. 515 and 517.

[19] I have already done this in my Defence of Aristocracy; but as the standpoint is comparatively new, it will bear being related here in fresh terms.

[20] Op. cit., p. [188].

[21] Op. cit., p. [66]: “In the second part of my book, however, I shall show reasons in favour of the possibility that homosexuality is a higher form than hetero-sexuality.” See also p. [226], where Weininger says: “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 pass through her, place the prostitute, in a sense, above the mother.”

[22] See my Defence of Aristocracy, chapter V.

CHAPTER IV
The Positive Man and the
Positive Woman

I have spoken about the positive child and its Yea-saying attitude to Life generally. Now I am going to turn to two creatures, a man and a girl, who have been fortunate enough to succeed, despite the negative influence of the age, in growing up to manhood and mature girlhood without having lost the positive attitude to Life.

Let us consider the positive male first. And I refer to him only because no book on Woman is complete without a more than passing reference to her counterpart—Man.

First of all examine his body! It is clear that Life and its business of multiplication have not nearly so strong, so complete, a hold over him as they have over Woman. The sphere the business of reproduction, alone, occupies in his body is limited, comparatively small, and confined. The part he plays in this business is, moreover, incidental, transitory, spasmodic. As I have already said, he is an amputation from Life rather than Life itself; and he returns to Life only at certain intervals in order, as it were, to pay tribute to her, to enable her to carry on her grand scheme. When he has paid this tribute at stated intervals, the fact that he willingly renounces any further concern in the matter, in fact, with some discontent and sense of surfeit, turns away as one who does not want to have anything more to do with it, is proof enough of the relatively small part he plays. For while he turns away and refreshes his resources by indulging for a space his two other instincts only—the self-preservative and the social—Woman’s reproductive work goes silently on and may be truly said never to cease.

In Man, therefore, we must not confound the attitude of positiveness or yea-saying to Life with positiveness or yea-saying to sex. In Woman they amount practically to the same thing. Her reproductive instinct and her yea to Life are inextricably involved. They merge; they are simply different ways of expressing the same attitude. But in Man there is a positiveness to sex which is smaller, more fitful, more irregular than his positiveness to Life. For the latter may last uninterruptedly throughout his whole existence, whereas the former, as we have seen, unless he be a mere beast, is moody, transient, intermittent.

Looking upon men from the outside, therefore, we should no more expect to find their reproductive instinct universally predominant in them, than the vice of kicking is universally predominant in horses.

We should readily acknowledge that a certain supernormal sexuality might exist in men of the Mark Antony type, in which the reproductive instinct prevailed over all others; but we should be forced to conclude that as a general rule there would be every chance, even in the healthiest and most normal man, either of the self-preservative or of the social instinct obtaining the upper hand.

And this indeed is what we find constantly occurs in real life—at least sufficiently often for us to recognize that the reproductive or sexual obsession in Man is more or less an exception, or an abnormality.

From the correlation of his bodily parts, then, we cannot deduce a predominance of the reproductive instinct in Man.

What do we know of his racial memory? What have his ancestors done and been doing all these years? If we can posit anything absolutely certain about them it is this, that they have been almost incessantly concerned with the mastering of Life, and the organization of Man’s life as a social being. Nothing is more certain than that. Nothing can be read more clearly in the pages of history. Whereas the reproductive instinct has formed but a recurring leit-motif of man’s life, his social instinct, with all that it entailed in the mastery of Nature and the concomitant organization of man’s life, as a social being, has constituted the unremitting and endless harmony of his existence.

Whereas, therefore, a woman cannot be positive without being paramountly sexual, a man who would be paramountly sexual would be negative to a most important part of his being—his relationship to Nature, to the mastery of Nature, and therefore to the ordering and organization of Life, including himself as a social being.

A paramountly sexual man, therefore, is as hostile to Life as the asexual woman, and just as useless.

When a positive man faces Life with his social instinct keenly sharpened, his ordering mind becomes creative and his creation is society. He feels himself above Nature and bends it to his will which is governed by his social instinct. The stylobate of the ancient Greek temple, the elevation above the ground of the foundation of the Chêteau de Versailles—these things are but instances of the unconscious tokens Man has given all through his career as a rational being, of his feeling of difference, of distance, from rude uncultured Life. When he faces Woman, he also faces Life pure and simple, and in exactly the same spirit. But here his body obtains the mastery, and the creation is the child.

Nature and Woman, being both different forms of Life unordered and unarranged, yield to Man’s ordering mastery. They understand it and follow it, always provided it understands them; for, obviously, the gardener who sought to turn the rose-tree upside down, the cattle farmer who sought to make the sheep carnivorous, or the social gardener who sought to convert woman into a sort of non-productive asexual worker, might certainly come within an ace of success, but would be equally certain of having consummated the wretchedness if not the death both of the rose-tree, the sheep and woman respectively.

But when nature is understood it yields cheerfully and eagerly to Man’s ordering power, although it does so dumbly and inarticulately. Woman, on the other hand, who is simply nature, Life itself, become articulate, does so admiringly, cheerfully, happily and consciously.

The positive man, therefore, is positive to three things; Society, self-preservation, and Woman. He cannot be wholly positive if he lack any one of these attitudes; and those men who have maintained all these attitudes with dignity and creative success, have been the only truly great men of history. Others are simply specialists, cripples, deformities or nonentities. Of course, for a man to be positive to Woman it is not necessary that he should actually have had a child from her. Circumstances may have been hostile to this consummating proof of his sexuality. This is only documentary proof, so to speak, and its absence does not necessarily argue against his having maintained a strictly positive attitude towards her and sex all his life.

We must always remember, too, that the complicated and wearing responsibility that man has always cheerfully undertaken, of ordering Life and mastering nature, is an arduous and very onerous business, and that those men who have fulfilled their obligations to their social instinct most scrupulously and honestly, have frequently come to their journey’s end without having been able to cast more than a glance of hearty encouragement and tender affection at the women they passed on the road, however positive may have been their feelings towards them.

When we see a whole regiment, or two or three regiments, present arms, or slope arms simultaneously, so that the glint on their rifles seems like one flash that illuminates the whole multitude in the same second of time; when we see one policeman suddenly make a clear channel through the congested traffic of Cheapside, in order that a fire-engine may dash through to perform its work of rescue; or when we watch the rhythmic and regular movements of a corps de ballet, keeping strict time with a well-conducted orchestra;—a mysterious thrill passes through us, a magic breath of cool air seems to lap the lower regions of our spine, and for some reason which we do not stop to analyse, we feel uplifted, exalted, in mystic and glowing fusion with something deep and distant, buried far away in the history of our race.

What is this mysterious thrill, this cold shiver? It is intensely pleasurable. It is the only purely non-sexual thrill that in any way approaches the sexual thrill. Its importance, therefore, to us and our lives must be enormous. For the fact that it is poles asunder from sexuality, ought to make us see that here we have something, a deep instinct that is not reproductive, which is capable of feeling immense bodily pleasure.

As a matter of fact, this cold shiver is one of the most infallible signs of profound unqualified approval that our body shows. When it is felt deep down in the back, man may conclude with absolute certainty that one of the strongest, most vital and most necessary chords of his nature has been touched and set vibrating. For the fact that it is the body that speaks here, is, I repeat, a proof that we are concerned with an instinct, and not with an act of intellect. It is always possible to make quite sure of this distinction by remembering that the body never participates in an act of intellect. When the intellect apprehends anything, the body, remembering its superior rank, and its superior age, remains coldly distant and unaffected. For the intellect, as Schopenhauer rightly observed, is the servant of the body, and not vice versâ. And the body does not share either its servant’s triumphs or pleasures.

Conversely, when the body apprehends something by means of its instincts, its servant—the intellect—is all agog, intensely interested, watchful and helpful; the intellect “stands by” and is ready to seek ways and means by which the body may speedily be guided to the object of its longing or to the consummation of its desire—no matter what the instinct be that is providing the momentum.

All bodily thrills, then, are very important; because they signify that the superior part of one, the older, more traditional, more unalterable, and more untractable part of one, is gratified, acquiescent, deeply approving what happens to be taking place.

This fact is most significant, particularly in regard to all that is going to follow in this book.

The thrill of the sexual union is easily explained and disposed of once and for all:—It is the superior, the oldest, most traditional, and most unalterable part of us—our body—approving the act of procreation, which promises a continuation and a multiplication of Life.

Now my claim is that this other thrill, which, in its different way, is just as pleasurable as the thrill of sexual union, is also an act of bodily approval—but of what?

Let us consider in what circumstances this thrill is felt. I have said that it is when we see a large body of troops manœuvring in such a manner that the movements of the whole multitude are as the movements of one man. I have said that it is when we see one single man in blue step into the midst of the torrent of vehicles in Cheapside, put his hand up, and clear, as if by magic, an open thoroughfare for the fire-engine to dash through on its mission of mercy and of rescue. I have said also that it is when we see the rhythmic movements of a corps de ballet adjusted to perfection to the regular beat of a fine orchestra.

Now what is common to all these three instances? It is obvious that the only thing that can be common to them all is the quality of order, the quality which is the result and creation of the ordering power of man. Where this is found in a tangible, forcible, overwhelming form, the body approves, the body is thrilled. And this thrill is the body’s exultation over witnessing what from time immemorial must have been one of the human being’s strongest cravings and deepest faiths,—the faith in order, in regular arrangement, in the power of ordering confusion; because such order, such regular arrangement, and such power of ordering confusion, have always meant greater mastery over nature, over our foes, over Life in general, and therefore greater security, better fruit, more happiness, more beauty!

The particular manifestation of order that the body may be witnessing is immaterial; for it is not the nature of the manifestation, but its quality of order, that moves and thrills us so deeply, that, perhaps, in no other moment of our lives—save possibly in sexual union—do we feel such an exquisite titillation of our nerves and tissues.

This approval, this never-to-be-forgotten chorus of praise that our old body sings, in spite of ourselves, is the sign that our social instinct[23] feels gratified, feels secure, and in the environment in which it can thrive; for it is our social instinct that knows how to appreciate the value of order, how important order is, and how great were those who first created order out of chaos.

I do not know whether women get this cold shiver down their backs at the sight of order—I believe they do; in fact I am sure they must: because, to the extent to which they feel positive to Man and to the child they must feel positive to the order that makes men and children possible and safe acquisitions.

Woman’s respect for Man, her whole attitude of awe towards him, must of necessity fall to pieces when the order which it is his duty to Life to establish by means of his social instinct, either collapses, or proves in any way inadequate. Because, although Woman is constantly seeking to lure Man to specialize in his reproductive instinct, she never respects the man whom she thus succeeds in forcing to betray his other trusts; and knows perfectly well, unconsciously, that only that man who remains positive both to his social and his reproductive instinct, is of any use to the world and ultimately to her and her child.

For Man to fail in the exercise of his social instinct brings him into just as bad repute with decent women as when he fails in his reproductive instinct. Women realize that he cannot be wholly positive to Life without the exercise of both, and although they may make a mad and delirious rush into voluptuous pastimes with the man of degenerate social instincts—as they are doing at present, for instance—the more far-seeing among them, the more sensitive and apprehensive of their sex, will have a sense of insecurity and dissatisfaction which will make them look anxiously around and wonder whether all is well with Life and the world.

This is not the place to discuss the Woman’s Suffrage Movement; but the above adumbrates my view of the deepest causes that underlay this most interesting, most significant and most symptomatic agitation of recent years. It was by no means the most frivolous, the most superficial, and the most pretentious women who were militants in this movement. All frivolous, superficial and pretentious women nowadays are to be found only shoulder to shoulder with degenerate man wherever and whenever he is “enjoying himself,” and whiling away his empty existence in a whirl of still more empty pleasure.

For the present I must proceed with the consideration of Man’s social instinct in its relation to Woman.

In addition to the task of imposing order on chaos and of creating the foundations of civilized society, it is the social instinct of man that has always been responsible for the contriving of all codes of morality, however diverse, however conflicting. It is the social instinct in lesser men that keeps them moral. For immorality is, in the first place, a crime against society.

Social life—and all healthy human life is social life—cannot flourish unless it is well ordered; unless, that is to say, it follows certain well chosen rules of conduct, diet, amusement and the like. Where man’s social instinct begins to decline, therefore, he is not only ceasing from being positive to social life, but he is actually immoral. Of all this the best women, the most sensitive women, are vaguely, unconsciously aware. As the custodians of Life, they cannot respect, or feel confidence in, men whose social instincts are declining.