MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
It is now time to return to the actual subject of this investigation in
order to see how far its explanation has been helped by the lengthy
digressions, which must often have seemed wide of the mark.
The consequences of the fundamental principles that have been developed
are of such radical importance to the psychology of the sexes that, even
if the former deductions have been assented to, the present conclusions
may find no acceptance. This is not the place to analyse such a
possibility; but in order to protect the theory I am now going to set
up, from all objections, I shall fully substantiate it in the fullest
possible manner by convincing arguments.
Shortly speaking the matter stands as follows: I have shown that logical
and ethical phenomena come together in the conception of truth as the
ultimate good, and posit the existence of an intelligible ego or a soul,
as a form of being of the highest super-empirical reality. In such a
being as the absolute female there are no logical and ethical phenomena,
and, therefore, the ground for the assumption of a soul is absent. The
absolute female knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and
the words law and duty, duty towards herself, are words which are least
familiar to her. The inference that she is wanting in supersensual
personality is fully justified. The absolute female has no ego.
In a certain sense this is an end of the investigation, a final
conclusion to which all analysis of the female leads. And although this
conclusion, put thus concisely, seems harsh and intolerant, paradoxical
and too abrupt in its novelty, it must be remembered that the author is
not the first who has taken such a view; he is more in the position of
one who has discovered the philosophical grounds for an opinion of long
standing.
The Chinese from time immemorial have denied that women possess a
personal soul. If a Chinaman is asked how many children he has, he
counts only the boys, and will say none if he has only daughters.
Mahomet excluded women from Paradise for the same reason, and on this
view depends the degraded position of women in Oriental countries.
Amongst the philosophers, the opinions of Aristotle must first be
considered. He held that in procreation the male principle was the
formative active agent, the “logos,” whilst the female was the passive
material. When we remember that Aristotle uses the word “soul” for the
active, formative, causative principle, it is plain that his idea was
akin to mine, although, as he actually expressed it, it related only to
the reproductive process; it is clear, moreover, that he, like all the
Greek philosophers except Euripides, paid no heed to woman, and did not
consider her qualities from any other point of view than that of her
share in reproduction.
Amongst the fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origen certainly had a
very low opinion of woman, and St. Augustine, except for his relations
with his mother, seems to have shared their view. At the Renaissance the
Aristotelian conceptions gained many new adherents, amongst whom Jean
Wier (1518-1588) may be cited specially. At that period there was a
general, more sensible and intuitive understanding on the subject, which
is now treated as merely curious, contemporary science having bowed the
knee to other than Aristotelian gods.
In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the characters of Anitra, Rita, and
Irene) and August Strindberg have given utterance to this view. But the
popularity of the idea of the soullessness of woman has been most
attained by the wonderful fairy tales of Fouqué, who obtained the
material for them from Paracelsus, after deep study, and which have been
set to music by E. T. A. Hoffman, Girschner, and Albert Lorzing.
Undine, the soulless Undine, is the platonic idea of woman. In spite of
all bi-sexuality she most really resembles the actuality. The well-known
phrase, “Women have no character,” really means the same thing.
Personality and individuality (intelligible), ego and soul, will and
(intelligible) character, all these are different expressions of the
same actuality, an actuality the male of mankind attains, the female
lacks.
But since the soul of man is the microcosm, and great men are those who
live entirely in and through their souls, the whole universe thus having
its being in them, the female must be described as absolutely without
the quality of genius. The male has everything within him, and, as Pico
of Mirandola put it, only specialises in this or that part of himself.
It is possible for him to attain to the loftiest heights, or to sink to
the lowest depths; he can become like animals, or plants, or even like
women, and so there exist woman-like female men.
The woman, on the other hand, can never become a man. In this consists
the most important limitation to the assertions in the first part of
this work. Whilst I know of many men who are practically completely
psychically female, not merely half so, and have seen a considerable
number of women with masculine traits, I have never yet seen a single
woman who was not fundamentally female, even when this femaleness has
been concealed by various accessories from the person herself, not to
speak of others. One must _be_ (_cf._ chap. i. part I.) either man or
woman, however many peculiarities of both sexes one may have, and this
“_being_,” the problem of this work from the start, is determined by
one’s relation to ethics and logic; but whilst there are people who are
anatomically men and psychically women, there is no such thing as a
person who is physically female and psychically male, notwithstanding
the extreme maleness of their outward appearance and the unwomanliness
of their expression.
We may now give, with certainty, a conclusive answer to the question as
to the giftedness of the sexes: there are women with undoubted traits of
genius, but there is no female genius, and there never has been one (not
even amongst those masculine women of history which were dealt with in
the first part), _and there never can be one_. Those who are in favour
of laxity in these matters, and are anxious to extend and enlarge the
idea of genius in order to make it possible to include women, would
simply by such action destroy the conception of genius. If it is in any
way possible to frame a definition of genius that would thoroughly cover
the ground, I believe that my definition succeeds. And how, then, could
a soulless being possess genius? The possession of genius is identical
with profundity; and if any one were to try to combine woman and
profundity as subject and predicate, he would be contradicted on all
sides. A female genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply
intensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious maleness.
The man of genius possesses, like everything else, the complete female
in himself; but woman herself is only a part of the Universe, and the
part can never be the whole; femaleness can never include genius. This
lack of genius on the part of woman is inevitable because woman is not a
monad, and cannot reflect the Universe.[12]
[12] It would be a simple matter to introduce at this point a list of
the works of the most famous women, and show by a few examples how
little they deserve the title of genius. But it would be a wearisome
task, and any one who would make use of such a list can easily procure
it for himself, so that I shall not do so.
The proof of the soullessness of woman is closely connected with much of
what was contained in the earlier chapters. The third chapter explained
that woman has her experiences in the form of henids, whilst those of
men are in an organised form, so that the consciousness of the female is
lower in grade than that of the male. Consciousness, however, is
psychologically a fundamental part of the theory of knowledge. From the
point of view of the theory of knowledge, consciousness and the
possession of a continuous ego, of a transcendental subjective soul, are
identical conceptions. Every ego exists only so far as it is
self-conscious, conscious of the contents of its own thoughts; all real
existence is conscious existence. I can now make an important addition
to the theory of henids. The organised contents of the thoughts of the
male are not merely those of the female articulated and formed, they are
not what was potential in the female becoming actual; from the very
first there is a qualitative difference. The psychical contents of the
male, even whilst they are still in the henid stage that they always try
to emerge from, are already partly conceptual, and it is probable that
even perceptions in the male have a direct tendency towards conceptions.
In the female, on the other hand, there is no trace of conception either
in recognition or in thinking.
The logical axioms are the foundation of all formation of mental
conceptions, and women are devoid of these; the principle of identity is
not for them an inevitable standard, nor do they fence off all other
possibilities from their conception by using the principle of
contradictories. This want of definiteness in the ideas of women is the
source of that “sensitiveness” which gives the widest scope to vague
associations and allows the most radically different things to be
grouped together. And even women with the best and least limited
memories never free themselves from this kind of association by
feelings. For instance, if they “feel reminded” by a word of some
definite colour, or by a human being of some definite thing to
eat--forms of association common with women--they rest content with the
subjective association, and do not try to find out the source of the
comparison, and if there is any relation in it to actual fact. The
complacency and self-satisfaction of women corresponds with what has
been called their intellectual unscrupulousness, and will be referred to
again in connection with their want of the power to form concepts. This
subjection to waves of feeling, this want of respect for conceptions,
this self-appreciation without any attempt to avoid shallowness,
characterise as essentially female the changeable styles of many modern
painters and novelists. Male thought is fundamentally different from
female thought in its craving for definite form, and all art that
consists of moods is essentially a formless art.
The psychical contents of man’s thoughts, therefore, are more than the
explicit realisation of what women think in henids. Woman’s thought is a
sliding and gliding through subjects, a superficial tasting of things
that a man, who studies the depths, would scarcely notice; it is an
extravagant and dainty method of skimming which has no grasp of
accuracy. A woman’s thought is superficial, and touch is the most highly
developed of the female senses, the most notable characteristic of the
woman which she can bring to a high state by her unaided efforts. Touch
necessitates a limiting of the interest to superficialities, it is a
vague effect of the whole and does not depend on definite details. When
a woman “understands” a man (of the possibility or impossibility of any
real understanding I shall speak later) she is simply, so to speak
tasting (however wanting in taste the comparison may be) what he has
thought about her. Since, on her own part, there is no sharp
differentiation, it is plain that she will often think that she herself
has been understood when there is no more present than a vague
similarity of perceptions. The incongruity between the man and woman
depends, in a special measure, on the fact that the contents of the
thoughts of the man are not merely those of the woman in a higher state
of differentiation, but that the two have totally distinct sequences of
thought applied to the same object, conceptual thought in the one and
indistinct sensing in the other; and when what is called “understanding”
in the two cases is compared, the comparison is not between a fully
organised integrated thought and a lower stage of the same process; but
in the understanding of man and woman there is on the one side a
conceptual thought, on the other side an unconceptual “feeling,” a
henid.
The unconceptual nature of the thinking of a woman is simply the result
of her less perfect consciousness, of her want of an ego. It is the
conception that unites the mere complex of perceptions into an object,
and this it does independently of the presence of an actual perception.
The existence of the complex of perceptions is dependent on the will;
the will can shut the eyes and stop the ears so that the person no
longer sees nor hears, but may get drunk or go to sleep and forget. It
is the conception which brings freedom from the eternally subjective,
eternally psychological relativity of the actual perceptions, and which
creates the things in themselves. By its power of forming conceptions
the intellect can spontaneously separate itself from the object;
conversely, it is only when there is a comprehending function that
subject and object can be separated and so distinguished; in all other
cases there is only a mass of like and unlike images present mingling
together without law and order. The conception creates definite
realities from the floating images, the object from the perception, the
object which stands like an enemy opposite the subject that the subject
may measure its strength upon it. The conception is thus the creator of
reality; it is the “transcendental object” of Kant’s “Critique of
Reason,” but it always involves a transcendental “subject.”
It is impossible to say of a mere complex of perceptions that it is like
itself; in the moment that I have made the judgment of identity, the
complex of perceptions has become a concept. And so the conception gives
their value to all processes of verification and all syllogisms; the
conception makes the contents of thought free by binding them. It gives
freedom both to the subject and object; for the two freedoms involve
each other. All freedom is in reality self-binding, both in logic and in
ethics. Man is free only when he himself is the law. And so the function
of making concepts is the power by which man gives himself dignity; he
honours himself by giving freedom to the objective world, by making it
part of the objective body of knowledge to which recourse may be had
when two men differ. The woman cannot in this way set herself over
against realities, she and they swing together capriciously; she cannot
give freedom to her objects as she herself is not free.
The mode in which perceptions acquire independence in conceptions is the
means of getting free from subjectivity. The conception is that about
which I think, write, and speak. And in this way there comes the belief
that I can make judgments concerning it. Hume, Huxley, and other
“immanent” psychologists, tried to identify the conception with a mere
generalisation, so making no distinction between logical and
psychological thought. In doing this they ignored the power of making
judgments. In every judgment there is an act of verification or of
contradiction, an approval or rejection, and the standard for these
judgments, the idea of truth, must be something external to that on what
it is acting. If there are nothing but perceptions, then all perceptions
must have an equal validity, and there can be no standard by which to
form a real world. Empiricism in this fashion really destroys the
reality of experience, and what is called positivism is no more than
nihilism. The idea of a standard of truth, the idea of truth, cannot lie
in experience. In every judgment this idea of the existence of truth is
implicit. The claim to real knowledge depends on this capacity to judge,
involves the conception of the possibility of truth in the judgment.
This claim to be able to reach knowledge is no more than to say that the
subject can judge of the object, can say that the object is true. The
objects on which we make judgments are conceptions; the conception is
what we know. The conception places a subject and an object against one
another, and the judgment then creates a relation between the two. The
attainment of truth simply means that the subject can judge rightly of
the object, and so the function of making judgments is what places the
ego in relation to the all, is what makes a real unity of the ego and
the all possible. And thus we reach an answer to the old problem as to
whether conception or judgment has precedence; the answer is that the
two are necessary to one another. The faculty of making conceptions
cleaves subject and object and unites them again.
A being like the female, without the power of making concepts, is unable
to make judgments. In her “mind” subjective and objective are not
separated; there is no possibility of making judgments, and no
possibility of reaching, or of desiring, truth. No woman is really
interested in science; she may deceive herself and many good men, but
bad psychologists, by thinking so. It may be taken as certain, that
whenever a woman has done something of any little importance in the
scientific world (Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, &c.) it is always
because of some man in the background whom they desire to please in this
way; and it is more often justifiable to say “cherchez l’homme” where
women are concerned than “cherchez la femme” in the case of men.
But there have never been any great discoveries in the world of science
made by women, because the facility for truth only proceeds from a
desire for truth, and the former is always in proportion to the latter.
Woman’s sense of reality is much less than man’s, in spite of much
repetition of the contrary opinion. With women the pursuit of knowledge
is always subordinated to something else, and if this alien impulse is
sufficiently strong they can see sharply and unerringly, but woman will
never be able to see the value of truth in itself and in relation to her
own self. Where there is some check to what she wishes (perhaps
unconsciously) a woman becomes quite uncritical and loses all touch with
reality. This is why women so often believe themselves to have been the
victims of sexual overtures; this is the reason of extreme frequency of
hallucinations of the sense of touch in women, of the intensive reality
of which it is almost impossible for a man to form an idea. This also is
why the imagination of women is composed of lies and errors, whilst the
imagination of the philosopher is the highest form of truth.
The idea of truth is the foundation of everything that deserves the name
of judgment. Knowledge is simply the making of judgments, and thought
itself is simply another name for judgment. Deduction is the necessary
process in making judgments, and involves the propositions of identity
and of contradictories, and, as I have shown, these propositions are not
axiomatic for women.
A psychological proof that the power of making judgments is a masculine
trait lies in the fact that the woman recognises it as such, and that it
acts on her as a tertiary sexual character of the male. A woman always
expects definite convictions in a man, and appropriates them; she has no
understanding of indecision in a man. She always expects a man to talk,
and a man’s speech is to her a sign of his manliness. It is true that
woman has the gift of speech, but she has not the art of talking; she
converses (flirts) or chatters, but she does not talk. She is most
dangerous, however, when she is dumb, for men are only too inclined to
take her quiescence for silence.
The absolute female, then, is devoid not only of the logical rules, but
of the functions of making concepts and judgments which depend on them.
As the very nature of the conceptual faculty consists in posing subject
against object, and as the subject takes its deepest and fullest meaning
from its power of forming judgments on its objects, it is clear that
women cannot be recognised as possessing even the subject.
I must add to the exposition of the non-logical nature of the female
some statements as to her non-moral nature. The profound falseness of
woman, the result of the want in her of a permanent relation to the idea
of truth or to the idea of value, would prove a subject of discussion so
exhaustive that I must go to work another way. There are such endless
imitations of ethics, such confusing copies of morality, that women are
often said to be on a moral plane higher than that of man. I have
already pointed out the need to distinguish between the non-moral and
the immoral, and I now repeat that with regard to women we can talk only
of the non-moral, of the complete absence of a moral sense. It is a
well-known fact of criminal statistics and of daily life that there are
very few female criminals. The apologists of the morality of women
always point to this fact.
But in deciding the question as to the morality of women we have to
consider not if a particular person has objectively sinned against the
idea, but if the person has or has not a subjective centre of being that
can enter into a relation with the idea, a relation the value of which
is lowered when a sin is committed. No doubt the male criminal inherits
his criminal instincts, but none the less he is conscious--in spite of
theories of “moral insanity”--that by his action he has lowered the
value of his claim on life. All criminals are cowardly in this matter,
and there is none of them that thinks he has raised his value and his
self-consciousness by his crime, or that would try to justify it to
himself.
The male criminal has from birth a relation to the idea of value just
like any other man, but the criminal impulse, when it succeeds in
dominating him, destroys this almost completely. Woman, on the contrary,
often believes herself to have acted justly when, as a matter of fact,
she has just done the greatest possible act of meanness; whilst the true
criminal remains mute before reproach, a woman can at once give
indignant expression to her astonishment and anger that any one should
question her perfect right to act in this or that way. Women are
convinced of their own integrity without ever having sat in judgment on
it. The criminal does not, it is true, reflect on himself, but he never
urges his own integrity; he is much more inclined to get rid of the
thought of his integrity,[13] because it might remind him of his guilt:
and in this is the proof that he had a relation to the idea (of truth),
and only objects to be reminded of his unfaithfulness to his better
self. No male criminal has ever believed that his punishment was unjust.
A woman, on the contrary, is convinced of the animosity of her accuser,
and if she does not wish to be convinced of it, no one can persuade her
that she has done wrong.
[13] A male criminal even feels guilty when he has not actually done
wrong. He can always accept the reproaches of others as to deception,
thieving, and so on, even if he has never committed such acts, because
he knows he is capable of them. So also he always feels himself
“caught” when any other offender is arrested.
If any one talks to her it usually happens that she bursts into tears,
begs for pardon, and “confesses her fault,” and may really believe that
she feels her guilt; but only when she desires to do so, and the
outbreak of tears has given her a certain sort of satisfaction. The male
criminal is callous; he does not spin round in a trice, as a woman would
do in a similar instance if her accuser knew how to handle her
skilfully.
The personal torture which arises from guilt, which cries aloud in its
anguish at having brought such a stain upon herself, no woman knows, and
an apparent exception (the penitent, who becomes a self-mortifying
devotee,) will certainly prove that a woman only feels a vicarious
guilt.
I am not arguing that woman is evil and anti-moral; I state that she
cannot be really evil; _she is merely non-moral_.
Womanly compassion and female modesty are the two other phenomena which
are generally urged by the defenders of female virtue. It is especially
from womanly kindness, womanly sympathy, that the beautiful descriptions
of the soul of woman have gained most support, and the final argument of
all belief in the superior morality of woman is the conception of her as
the hospital nurse, the tender sister. I am sorry to have to mention
this point, and should not have done so, but I have been forced to do so
by a verbal objection made to me, which can be easily foreseen.
It is very shortsighted of any one to consider the nurse as a proof of
the sympathy of women, because it really implies the opposite. For a man
could never stand the sight of the sufferings of the sick; he would
suffer so intensely that he would be completely upset and incapable of
lengthy attendance on them. Any one who has watched nursing sisters is
astounded at their equanimity and “sweetness” even in the presence of
most terrible death throes; and it is well that it is so, for man, who
cannot stand suffering and death, would make a very bad nurse. A man
would want to assuage the pain and ward off death; in a word, he would
want to _help_; where there is nothing to be done he is better away; it
is only then that nursing is justified and that woman offers herself for
it. But it would be quite wrong to regard this capacity of women in an
ethical aspect.
Here it may be said that for woman the problem of solitude and society
does not exist. She is well adapted for social relations (as, for
instance, those of a companion or sick-nurse), simply because for her
there is no transition from solitude to society. In the case of a man,
the choice between solitude and society is serious when it has to be
made. The woman gives up no solitude when she nurses the sick, as she
would have to do were she to deserve moral credit for her action; a
woman is never in a condition of solitude, and knows neither the love of
it nor the fear of it. The woman is always living in a condition of
fusion with all the human beings she knows, even when she is alone; she
is not a “monad,” for all monads are sharply marked off from other
existences. Women have no definite individual limits; they are not
unlimited in the sense that geniuses have no limits, being one with the
whole world; they are unlimited only in the sense that they are not
marked off from the common stock of mankind.
This sense of continuity with the rest of mankind is a sexual character
of the female, and displays itself in the desire to touch, to be in
contact with, the object of her pity; the mode in which her tenderness
expresses itself is a kind of animal sense of contact. It shows the
absence of the sharp line that separates one real personality from
another. The woman does not respect the sorrow of her neighbour by
silence; she tries to raise him from his grief by speech, feeling that
she must be in physical, rather than spiritual contact with him.
This diffused life, one of the most fundamental qualities of the female
nature, is the cause of the impressibility of all women, their
unreserved and shameless readiness to shed tears on the most ordinary
occasion. It is not without reason that we associate wailing with women,
and think little of a man who sheds tears in public. A woman weeps with
those that weep and laughs with those that laugh--unless she herself is
the cause of the laughter--so that the greater part of female sympathy
is ready-made.
It is only women who demand pity from other people, who weep before them
and claim their sympathy. This is one of the strongest pieces of
evidence for the psychical shamelessness of women. A woman provokes the
compassion of strangers in order to weep with them and be able to pity
herself more than she already does. It is not too much to say that even
when a woman weeps alone she is weeping with those that she knows would
pity her and so intensifying her self-pity by the thought of the pity of
others. Self-pity is eminently a female characteristic; a woman will
associate herself with others, make herself the object of pity for these
others, and then at once, deeply stirred, begin to weep with them about
herself, the poor thing. Perhaps nothing so stirs the feeling of shame
in a man as to detect in himself the impulse towards this self-pity,
this state of mind in which the subject becomes the object.
As Schopenhauer put it, female sympathy is a matter of sobbing and
wailing on the slightest provocation, without the smallest attempt to
control the emotion; on the other hand, all true sorrow, like true
sympathy, just because it is real sorrow, must be reserved; no sorrow
can really be so reserved as sympathy and love, for these make us most
fully conscious of the limits of each personality. Love and its
bashfulness will be considered later on; in the meantime let us be
assured that in sympathy, in genuine masculine sympathy, there is always
a strong feeling of reserve, a sense almost of guilt, because one’s
friend is worse off than oneself, because I am not he, but a being
separated from his being by extraneous circumstances. A man’s sympathy
is the principle of individuality blushing for itself; and hence man’s
sympathy is reserved whilst that of woman is aggressive.
The existence of modesty in women has been discussed already to a
certain extent; I shall have more to say about it in relation with
hysteria. But it is difficult to see how it can be maintained that this
is a female virtue, if one reflect on the readiness with which women
accept the habit of wearing low-necked dresses wherever custom
prescribes it. A person is either modest or immodest, and modesty is not
a quality which can be assumed or discarded from hour to hour.
Strong evidence of the want of modesty in woman is to be derived from
the fact that women dress and undress in the presence of one another
with the greatest freedom, whilst men try to avoid similar
circumstances. Moreover, when women are alone together, they are very
ready to discuss their physical qualities, especially with regard to
their attractiveness for men; whilst men, practically without exception,
avoid all notice of one another’s sexual characters.
I shall return to this subject again. In the meantime I wish to refer to
the argument of the second chapter in this connection. One must be fully
conscious of a thing before one can have a feeling of shame about it,
and so differentiation is as necessary for the sense of shame as for
consciousness. The female, who is only sexual, can appear to be asexual
because she is sexuality itself, and so her sexuality does not stand out
separately from the rest of her being, either in space or in time, as in
the case of the male. Woman can give an impression of being modest
because there is nothing in her to contrast with her sexuality. And so
the woman is always naked or never naked--we may express it either
way--never naked, because the true feeling of nakedness is impossible to
her; always naked, because there is not in her the material for the
sense of relativity by which she could become aware of her nakedness and
so make possible the desire to cover it.
What I have been discussing depends on the actual meaning of the word
“ego” to a woman. If a woman were asked what she meant by her “ego” she
would certainly think of her body. Her superficies, that is the woman’s
ego. The ego of the female is quite correctly described by Mach in his
“Anti-metaphysical Remarks.”
The ego of a woman is the cause of the vanity which is specific of
women. The analogue of this in the male is an emanation of the set of
his will towards his conception of the good, and its objective
expression is a sensitiveness, a desire that no one shall call in
question the possibility of attaining this supreme good. It is his
personality that gives to man his value and his freedom from the
conditions of time. This supreme good, which is beyond price, because,
in the words of Kant, there can be found no equivalent for it, is the
dignity of man. Women, in spite of what Schiller has said, have no
dignity, and the word “lady” was invented to supply this defect, and her
pride will find its expression in what she regards as the supreme good,
that is to say, in the preservation, improvement, and display of her
personal beauty. The pride of the female is something quite peculiar to
herself, something foreign even to the most handsome man, an obsession
by her own body; a pleasure which displays itself, even in the least
handsome girl, by admiring herself in the mirror, by stroking herself
and playing with her own hair, but which comes to its full measure only
in the effect that her body has on man. A woman has no true solitude,
because she is always conscious of herself only in relation to others.
The other side of the vanity of women is the desire to feel that her
body is admired, or, rather, sexually coveted, by a man.
This desire is so strong that there are many women to whom it is
sufficient merely to know that they are coveted.
The vanity of women is, then, always in relation to others; a woman
lives only in the thoughts of others about her. The sensibility of women
is directed to this. A woman never forgets that some one thought her
ugly; a woman never considers herself ugly; the successes of others at
the most only make her think of herself as perhaps less attractive. But
no woman ever believes herself to be anything but beautiful and
desirable when she looks at herself in the glass; she never accepts her
own ugliness as a painful reality as a man would, and never ceases to
try to persuade others of the contrary.
What is the source of this form of vanity, peculiar to the female? It
comes from the absence of an intelligible ego, the only begetter of a
constant and positive sense of value; it is, in fact, that she is devoid
of a sense of personal value. As she sets no store by herself or on
herself, she endeavours to attain to a value in the eyes of others by
exciting their desire and admiration. The only thing which has any
absolute and ultimate value in the world is the soul. “Ye are better
than many sparrows” were Christ’s words to mankind. A woman does not
value herself by the constancy and freedom of her personality; but this
is the only possible method for every creature possessing an ego. But if
a real woman, and this is certainly the case, can only value herself at
the rate of the man who has fixed his choice on her; if it is only
through her husband or lover that she can attain to a value not only in
social and material things, but also in her innermost nature, it follows
that she possesses no personal value, she is devoid of man’s sense of
the value of his own personality for itself. And so women always get
their sense of value from something outside themselves, from their money
or estates, the number and richness of their garments, the position of
their box at the opera, their children, and, above all, their husbands
or lovers. When a woman is quarrelling with another woman, her final
weapon, and the weapon she finds most effective and discomfiting, is to
proclaim her superior social position, her wealth or title, and, above
all, her youthfulness and the devotion of her husband or lover; whereas
a man in similar case would lay himself open to contempt if he relied on
anything except his own personal individuality.
The absence of the soul in woman may also be inferred from the
following: Whilst a woman is stimulated to try to impress a man from the
mere fact that he has paid no attention to her (Goethe gave this as a
practical receipt), the whole life of a woman, in fact, being an
expression of this side of her nature, a man, if a woman treats him
rudely or indifferently, feels repelled by her. Nothing makes a man so
happy as the love of a girl; even if he did not at first return her
love, there is a great probability of love being aroused in him. The
love of a man for whom she does not care is only a gratification of the
vanity of a woman, or an awakening and rousing of slumbering desires. A
woman extends her claims equally to all men on earth.
The shamelessness and heartlessness of women are shown in the way in
which they talk of being loved. A man feels ashamed of being loved,
because he is always in the position of being the active, free agent,
and because he knows that he can never give himself entirely to love,
and there is nothing about which he is so silent, even when there is no
special reason for him to fear that he might compromise the lady by
talking. A woman boasts about her love affairs, and parades them before
other women in order to make them envious of her. Woman does not look
upon a man’s inclination for her so much as a tribute to her actual
worth, or a deep insight into her nature, as the bestowing a value on
her which she otherwise would not have, as the gift to her of an
existence and essence with which she justifies herself before others.
The remark in an earlier chapter about the unfailing memory of woman for
all the compliments she has ever received since childhood is explained
by the foregoing facts. It is from compliments, first of all, that woman
gets a sense of her “value,” and that is why women expect men to be
“polite.” Politeness is the easiest form of pleasing a woman, and
however little it costs a man it is dear to a woman, who never forgets
an attention, and lives upon the most insipid flattery, even in her old
age. One only remembers what possesses a value in one’s eyes; it may
safely be said that it is for compliments women have the most developed
memory. The woman can attain a sense of value by these external aids,
because she does not possess within her an inner standard of value
which diminishes everything outside her. The phenomena of courtesy and
chivalry are simply additional proofs that women have no souls, and that
when a man is being “polite” to a woman he is simply ascribing to her
the minimum sense of personal value, a form of deference to which
importance is attached precisely in the measure that it is
misunderstood.
The non-moral nature of woman reveals itself in the mode in which she
can so easily forget an immoral action she has committed. It is almost
characteristic of a woman that she cannot believe that she has done
wrong, and so is able to deceive both herself and her husband. Men, on
the other hand, remember nothing so well as the guilty episodes of their
lives. Here memory reveals itself as eminently a moral phenomenon.
Forgiving and forgetting, not forgiving and understanding, go together.
When one remembers a lie, one reproaches oneself afresh about it. A
woman forgets, because she does not blame herself for an act of
meanness, because she does not understand it, having no relation to the
moral idea. It is not surprising that she is ready to lie. Women have
been regarded as virtuous, simply because the problem of morality has
not presented itself to them; they have been held to be even more moral
than man; this is simply because they do not understand immorality. The
innocence of a child is not meritorious; if a patriarch could be
innocent he might be praised for it.
Introspection is an attribute confined to males, if we leave out of
account the hysterical self-reproaches of certain women--and
consciousness of guilt and repentance are equally male. The penances
that women lay on themselves, remarkable imitations of the sense of
guilt, will be discussed when I come to deal with what passes for
introspection in the female sex. The “subject” of introspection is the
moral agent; it has a relation to psychical phenomena only in so far as
it sits in judgment on them.
It is quite in the nature of positivism that Comte denies the
possibility of introspection, and throws ridicule on it. For certainly
it is absurd that a psychical event and a judgment of it could coincide
if the interpretations of the positivists be accepted. It is only on the
assumption that there exists an ego unconditioned by time and
intrinsically capable of moral judgments, endowed with memory and with
the power of making comparisons, that we can justify the belief in the
possibility of introspection.
If woman had a sense of her personal value and the will to defend it
against all external attacks she could not be jealous. Apparently all
women are jealous, and jealousy depends on the failure to recognise the
rights of others. Even the jealousy of a mother when she sees another
woman’s daughters married before her own depends simply on her want of
the sense of justice.
Without justice there can be no society, so that jealousy is an
absolutely unsocial quality. The formation of societies in reality
presupposes the existence of true individuality. Woman has no faculty
for the affairs of State or politics, as she has no social inclinations;
and women’s societies, from which men are excluded, are certain to break
up after a short time. The family itself is not really a social
structure; it is essentially unsocial, and men who give up their clubs
and societies after marriage soon rejoin them. I had written this before
the appearance of Heinrich Schurtz’ valuable ethnological work, in which
he shows that associations of men, and not the family, form the
beginnings of society.
Pascal made the wonderful remark that human beings seek society only
because they cannot bear solitude and wish to forget themselves. It is
the fact expressed in these words which puts in harmony my earlier
statement that women had not the faculty of solitude and my present
statement that she is essentially unsociable.
If a woman possessed an “ego” she would have the sense of property both
in her own case and that of others. The thieving instinct, however, is
much more developed in men than in women. So-called “kleptomaniacs”
(those who steal without necessity) are almost exclusively women. Women
understand power and riches but not personal property. When the thefts
of female kleptomaniacs are discovered, the women defend themselves by
saying that it appeared to them as if everything belonged to them. It is
chiefly women who use circulating libraries, especially those who could
quite well afford to buy quantities of books; but, as matter of fact,
they are not more strongly attracted by what they have bought than by
what they have borrowed. In all these matters the relation between
individuality and society comes into view; just as a man must have
personality himself to appreciate the personalities of others, so also
he must acquire a sense of personal right in his own property to respect
the rights of others.
One’s name and a strong devotion to it are even more dependent on
personality than is the sense of property. The facts that confront us
with reference to this are so salient that it is extraordinary to find
so little notice taken of them. Women are not bound to their names with
any strong bond. When they marry they give up their own name and assume
that of their husband without any sense of loss. They allow their
husbands and lovers to call them by new names, delighting in them; and
even when a woman marries a man that she does not love, she has never
been known to suffer any psychical shock at the change of name. The name
is a symbol of individuality; it is only amongst the lowest races on the
face of the earth, such as the bushmen of South Africa, that there are
no personal names, because amongst such as these the desire for
distinguishing individuals from the general stock is not felt. The
fundamental namelessness of the woman is simply a sign of her
undifferentiated personality.
An important observation may be mentioned here and may be confirmed by
every one. Whenever a man enters a place where a woman is, and she
observes him, or hears his step, or even only guesses he is near, she
becomes another person. Her expression and her pose change with
incredible swiftness; she “arranges her fringe” and her bodice, and
rises, or pretends to be engrossed in her work. She is full of a
half-shameless, half-nervous expectation. In many cases one is only in
doubt as to whether she is blushing for her shameless laugh, or laughing
over her shameless blushing.
The soul, personality, character--as Schopenhauer with marvellous sight
recognised--are identical with free-will. And as the female has no ego,
she has no free-will. Only a creature with no will of its own, no
character in the highest sense, could be so easily influenced by the
mere proximity to a man as woman is, who remains in functional
dependence on him instead of in free relationship to him. Woman is the
best medium, the male her best hypnotiser. For this reason alone it is
inconceivable why women can be considered good as doctors; for many
doctors admit that their principal work up to the present--and it will
always be the same--lies in the suggestive influence on their patients.
The female is uniformly more easily hypnotised than the male throughout
the animal world, and it may be seen from the following how closely
hypnotic phenomena are related to the most ordinary events. I have
already described, in discussing female sympathy, how easy it is for
laughter or tears to be induced in females. How impressed she is by
everything in the newspapers! What a martyr she is to the silliest
superstitions! How eagerly she tries every remedy recommended by her
friends!
Whoever is lacking in character is lacking in convictions. The female,
therefore, is credulous, uncritical, and quite unable to understand
Protestantism. Christians are Catholics or Protestants before they are
baptized, but, none the less, it would be unfair to describe Catholicism
as feminine simply because it suits women better. The distinction
between the Catholic and Protestant dispositions is a side of
characterology that would require separate treatment.
It has been exhaustively proved that the female is soulless and
possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom,
character nor will. This conclusion is of the highest significance in
psychology. It implies that the psychology of the male and of the female
must be treated separately. A purely empirical representation of the
psychic life of the female is possible; in the case of the male, all the
psychic life must be considered with reference to the ego, as Kant
foresaw.
The view of Hume (and Mach), which only admits that there are
“impressions” and “thoughts” (ABC and α β γ ...), and which has almost
driven the psyche out of present day psychology, declares that the whole
world is to be considered exclusively as a picture in a reflector, a
sort of kaleidoscope; it merely reduces everything to a dance of the
“elements,” without thought or order; it denies the possibility of
obtaining a secure standpoint for thought; it not only destroys the idea
of truth, and accordingly of reality, the only claims on which
philosophy rests, but it also is to blame for the wretched plight of
modern psychology.
This modern psychology proudly styles itself the “psychology without the
soul,” in imitation of its much over-rated founder, Friedrich Albert
Lange. I think I have proved in this work that without the
acknowledgment of a soul there would be no way of dealing with psychic
phenomena; just as much in the case of the male who has a soul as in the
case of the female who is soulless.
Modern psychology is eminently womanish, and that is why this
comparative investigation of the sexes is so specially instructive, and
it is not without reason that I have delayed pointing out this radical
difference; it is only now that it can be seen what the acceptation of
the ego implies, and how the confusing of masculine and feminine
spiritual life (in the broadest and deepest sense) has been at the root
of all the difficulties and errors into which those who have sought to
establish a universal psychology have fallen.
I must now raise the question--is a psychology of the male possible as a
science? The answer must be that it is not possible. I must be
understood to reject all the investigations of the experimenters, and
those who are still sick with the experimental fever may ask in wonder
if all these have no value? Experimental psychology has not given a
single explanation as to the deeper laws of masculine life; it can be
regarded only as a series of sporadic empirical efforts, and its method
is wrong inasmuch as it seeks to reach the kernel of things by surface
examination, and as it cannot possibly give an explanation of the
deep-seated source of all psychical phenomena. When it has attempted to
discover the real nature of psychical phenomena by measurements of the
physical phenomena that accompany them, it has succeeded in showing that
even in the most favourable cases there is an inconstancy and variation.
The fundamental possibility of reaching the mathematical idea of
knowledge is that the data should be constant. As the mind itself is the
creator of time and space, it is impossible to expect that geometry and
arithmetic should explain the mind, that the creature should explain the
creator.
There can be no scientific psychology of man, for the aim of psychology
is to derive what is not derivative, to prove to every man what his real
nature and essence are, to deduce these. But the possibility of deducing
them would imply that they were not free. As soon as it has been
admitted that the conduct, action, nature, of an individual man can be
determined scientifically, it will be proved that man has no free-will.
Kant and Schopenhauer understood this fully, and, on the other hand,
Hume and Herbart, the founders of modern psychology, did not believe in
free-will. It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation
of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated
efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception
and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an
empirical factor. The will, like the power of judgment, is associated
inevitably with the existence of an ego, or soul. It is not a matter of
experience, it transcends experience, and until psychology recognises
this extraneous factor, it will remain no more than a methodical annex
of physiology and biology. If the soul is only a complex of experiences
it cannot be the factor that makes experiences possible. Modern
psychology in reality denies the existence of the soul, but the soul
rejects modern psychology.
This work has decided in favour of the soul against the absurd and
pitiable psychology without a soul. In fact, it may be doubted if, on
the assumption that the soul exists and has free thought and free-will,
there can be a science of causal laws and self-imposed rules of willing
and thinking. I have no intention of trying to inaugurate a new era of
rational psychology. I wish to follow Kant in positing the existence of
a soul as the unifying and central conception, without which any
explanation or description of psychic life, however faithful in its
details, however sympathetically undertaken, must be wholly
unsatisfying. It is extraordinary how inquirers who have made no attempt
to analyse such phenomena as shame and the sense of guilt, faith and
hope, fear and repentance, love and hate, yearning and solitude, vanity
and sensitiveness, ambition and the desire for immortality, have yet the
courage simply to deny the ego because it does not flaunt itself like
the colour of an orange or the taste of a peach. How can Mach and Hume
account for such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist? Or
again, consider this: no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection
in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend his life in
a room surrounded with mirrors. Can this fear, the fear of the
doppelganger,[14] be explained on Darwinian principles? The word
doppelganger has only to be mentioned to raise a deep dread in the mind
of any man. Empirical psychology cannot explain this; it reaches the
depths. It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of little
children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less secure stage of
society. I have taken this example only to remind the empirical
psychologists that there are many things inexplicable on their
hypotheses.
[14] It is notable that women are devoid of this fear; female
doppelgangers are not heard of.
Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a Wagnerite, a
Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth? He objects to be thought a mere
echo. Even Ernst Mach is angry in anticipation at the thought that some
friend will describe him as a Positivist, Idealist, or any other
non-individual term. This feeling must not be confused with the results
of the fact that a man may describe himself as a Wagnerite, and so
forth. The latter is simply a deep approval of Wagnerism, because the
approver is himself a Wagnerite. The man is conscious that his agreement
is in reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a man
will say much about himself that he would not permit another to say of
him. As Cyrano de Bergerac put it:
“Je me les sers moi-même, avec assez de verve,
Mais je ne permets pas qu’un autre me les serve.”
It cannot be right to consider such men as Pascal and Newton, on the one
hand, as men of the highest genius, on the other, as limited by a mass
of prejudices which we of the present generation have long overcome. Is
the present generation with its electrical railways and empirical
psychology so much higher than these earlier times? Is culture, if
culture has any real value, to be compared with science, which is always
social and never individual, and to be measured by the number of public
libraries and laboratories? Is culture outside human beings and not
always in human beings?
It is in striking harmony with the ascription to men alone of an
ineffable, inexplicable personality, that in all the authenticated cases
of double or multiple personality the subjects have been women. The
absolute female is capable of sub-division; the male, even to the most
complete characterology and the most acute experiment, is always an
indivisible unit. The male has a central nucleus of his being which has
no parts, and cannot be divided; the female is composite, and so can be
dissociated and cleft.
And so it is most amusing to hear writers talking of the soul of the
woman, of her heart and its mysteries, of the psyche of the modern
woman. It seems almost as if even an accoucheur would have to prove his
capacity by the strength of his belief in the soul of women. Most women,
at least, delight to hear discussions on their souls, although they
know, so far as they can be said to _know_ anything, that the whole
thing is a swindle. The woman as the Sphinx! Never was a more
ridiculous, a more audacious fraud perpetrated. Man is infinitely more
mysterious, incomparably more complicated.
It is only necessary to look at the faces of women one passes in the
streets. There is scarcely one whose expression could not at once be
summed up. The register of woman’s feelings and disposition is so
terribly poor, whereas men’s countenances can scarcely be read after
long and earnest scrutiny.
Finally, I come to the question as to whether there exists a complete
parallelism or a condition of reciprocal interaction between mind and
body. In the case of the female, psycho-physical parallelism exists in
the form of a complete co-ordination between the mental and the
physical; in women the capacity for mental exertion ceases with senile
involution, just as it developed in connection with and in subservience
to the sexual instincts. The intelligence of man never grows as old as
that of the woman, and it is only in isolated cases that degeneration of
the mind is linked with degeneration of the body. Least of all does
mental degeneration accompany the bodily weakness of old age in those
who have genius, the highest development of mental masculinity.
It is only to be expected that the philosophers who most strongly argued
in favour of parallelism, such as Spinoza and Fechner, were also
determinists. In the case of the male, the free intelligible agent who
by his own will can distinguish between good and evil, the existence of
parallelism between mind and body must be rejected.
The question, then, as to the proper view of the psychology of the sexes
may be taken as settled. There has to be faced, however, an
extraordinarily difficult problem that, so far as I know, has not even
been stated yet, but the answer to which, none the less, strongly
supports my view of the soullessness of women.
In the earlier pages of my volume I contrasted the clarity of male
thinking processes with their vagueness in woman, and later on showed
that the power of orderly speech, in which logical judgments are
expressed, acts on women as a male sexual character. Whatever is
sexually attractive to the female must be characteristic of the male.
Firmness in a man’s character makes a sexual impression on a woman,
whilst she is repelled by the pliant man. People often speak of the
moral influence exerted on men by women, when no more is meant than that
women are striving to attain their sexual complements. Women demand
manliness from men, and feel deeply disappointed and full of contempt if
men fail them in this respect. However untruthful or great a flirt a
woman may be, she is bitterly indignant if she discover traces of
coquetry or untruthfulness in a man. She may be as cowardly as she
likes, but the man must be brave. It has been almost completely
overlooked that this is only a sexual egotism seeking to secure the most
satisfactory sexual complement. From the side of empirical observation,
no stronger proof of the soullessness of woman could be drawn than that
she demands a soul in man, that she who is not good in herself demands
goodness from him. The soul is a masculine character, pleasing to women
in the same way and for the same purpose as a masculine body or a
well-trimmed moustache. I may be accused of stating the case coarsely,
but it is none the less true. It is the man’s will that in the last
resort influences a woman most powerfully, and she has a strong faculty
for perceiving whether a man’s “I will” means mere bombast or actual
decision. In the latter case the effect on her is prodigious.
How is it that woman, who is soulless herself, can discern the soul in
man? How can she judge about his morality who is herself non-moral? How
can she grasp his character when she has no character herself? How
appreciate his will when she is herself without will?
These difficult problems lie before us, and their solutions must be
placed on strong foundations, for there will be many attempts to destroy
them.