Page:B20442294.djvu/278

250 woman. It is a felony towards the lover himself, inasmuch as he detaches virtue and worthiness from himself; and it is a deliberate turning away from the truth, a preferring of sham to reality.

The last form in which the immorality reveals itself is that love prevents the worthlessness of woman from being realised, inasmuch as it always replaced her by an imaginary projection. Madonna worship itself is fundamentally immoral, inasmuch as it is a shutting of the eyes to truth. The Madonna worship of the great artists is a destruction of woman, and is possible only by a complete neglect of the women as they exist in experience, a replacement of actuality by a symbol, a re-creation of woman to serve the purposes of man, and a murder of woman as she exists.

When a particular man attracts a particular woman the influence is not his beauty. Only man has an instinct for beauty, and the ideals of both manly beauty and of womanly beauty have been created by man, not by woman. The qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of developed sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the higher mind. Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper, and her worship is permeated with a fear like that of a bird for a snake, of a man for the fabled Medusa head, as she feels that the object of her adoration is the power that will destroy her.

The course of my argument is now apparent. As logic and ethics have a relation only to man, it was not to be expected that woman would stand in any better position with regard to aesthetics. Esthetics and logic are closely interconnected, as is apparent in philosophy, in mathematics, in artistic work, and in music. I have now shown the intimate relation of aesthetics to ethics. As Kant showed, aesthetics, just as much as ethics and logic, depend on the free will of the subject. As the woman has not free will, she cannot have the faculty of projecting beauty outside herself.

The foregoing involves the proposition that woman cannot love. Women have made no ideal of man to