Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/859

 REVIEWS

Sex and Character. By OTTO WEININGER. Authorized Trans- lation from the Sixth German Edition. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1906. Pp. xxii-)~349.

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them. (P. 236.)

Woman is neither high-minded nor low-minded, strong-minded nor weak- minded. She is the opposite of all these. Mind cannot be predicated of her at all; she is mindless. (P. 253.)

Women have no existence and no essence ; they are not, they are nothing. Mankind occurs as male or female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in ontological reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which in the deepest interpretation is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the genius, has such a relation, and for him the absolute is either the conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of absolute beauty, and then he is an artist. Both views mean the same. Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither affirms nor denies it ; she is neither moral nor anti-moral ; mathematically speaking, she has no sign ; she is purposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil, never egotistical (and therefore has often been said to be altruistic) ; she is as non-moral as she is non-logical. But all existence is moral and logical existence. So woman has no existence. (P. 286.)

The woman of the highest standard is immeasurably beneath the man of the lowest standard. (P. 302.)

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 intel- ligible ego or 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 phe- nomena, 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 toward herself, are word* which are least familiar to her. The inference that she is lacking in supersensual personality is fully justified. The absolute female has no ego. (P. 186.)

A psychological proof that the power of making judgments is a masculine trait lies in the fact that woman recognizes it as such, and that it acts on her as a tertiary sexual character of the male. A woman always expects definite

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