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118. Such persons will have the greatest opportunities of detecting resemblances and so finding the material for comparisons. They will always seize hold of from the past what has the greatest resemblance to the present experience, and the two experiences will be combined in such a way that no similarities or differences will be concealed. And so they are able to maintain the past against the influence of the present. It is not without reason that from time immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered to be its richness in beautiful comparisons and pictures, or that we turn to again and again, or await our favourite images with impatience when we read Homer or Shakespeare or Kloppstock. To-day when, for the first time for a century and a half, Germany is without great poets or painters, and when none the less it is impossible to find any one who is not an "author" the power of clear and beautiful comparison seems to have gone. A period the nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious words, the philosophy of which has become in more than one sense the philosophy of the unconscious can contain nothing great. Consciousness is the mark of greatness, and before it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun disperses a mist. If only consciousness were to come to this age, how quickly voices that are now famous would become silent. It is only in full consciousness, in which the experience of the present assumes greater intensity by its union with all the experiences of the past, that imagination, the necessary quality for all philosophical as for all artistic effort, can find a place. It is untrue, therefore, that women have more imagination than men. The experiences on account of which men have assigned higher powers of imagination to women come entirely from the imaginative sexual life of women. The only inferences that can be drawn from this do not belong to the present section of my work.

The absence of women from the history of music must be referred to deeper causes; but it also supports my contention that women are devoid of imagination. To produce