sexual perversities and affections for animals (Pasiphäe myth and Leda myth) indicate this. But they are human beings. Even the absolute woman, whom we think of as without any trace of intelligible ego, is still the complement of man. And there is no doubt that the fact of the special sexual and erotic completion of the human male by the human female, even if it is not the moral phenomenon which advocates of marriage would have us believe, is still of tremendous importance to the woman problem. Animals are mere individuals; women are persons, although they are not personalities.
An appearance of discriminative power, though not the reality, language, though not conversation, memory, though it has no continuity or unity of consciousness—must all be granted to them.
They possess counterfeits of everything masculine, and thus are subject to those transformations which the defenders of womanliness are so fond of quoting. The result of this is a sort of amphi-sexuality of many ideas (honour, shame, love, imagination, fear, sensibility, and so on), which have both a masculine and feminine significance.
There now remains to discuss the real meaning of the contrast between the sexes.
The parts played by the male and female principles in the animal and vegetable kingdoms are not now under consideration; we are dealing solely with humanity.
That such principles of maleness and femaleness must be accepted as theoretical conceptions, and not as metaphysical ideas, was the point of this investigation from the beginning. The whole object of the book has been to settle the question, in man at least, of the really important differences between man and woman, quite apart from the mere physiological-sexual-differentiation. Furthermore, the view which sees nothing more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than an arrangement for physiological division of labour—an idea for which, I believe, the zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is responsible—appears, according to this work, quite untenable; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a superficial and intellectually complacent view.
