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284 But it is evident that neither I nor any other man can understand this. I can understand sin only when I cease to commit it, and the moment I understand it I cease to commit it. So also I can never comprehend life while I am still alive. There is no moment of my life when I am not bound down by this sham existence, and it must be impossible for me to understand the bond until I am free from it. When I understand a thing I am already outside it; I cannot comprehend my sinfulness while I am still sinful.

As the absolute female has no trace of individuality and will, no sense of worth or of love, she can have no part in the higher, transcendental life. The intelligible, hyper-empirical existence of the male transcends matter, space, and time. He is certainly mortal, but he is immortal as well. And so he has the power to choose between the two, between the life which is lost with death and the life to which death is only a stepping-stone. The deepest will of man is towards this perfect, timeless existence; he is compact of the desire for immortality. That the woman has no craving for perpetual life is too apparent; there is nothing in her of that eternal which man tries to interpose and must interpose between his real self and his projected, empirical self. Some sort of relation to the idea of supreme value, to the idea of the absolute, that perfect freedom which he has not yet attained, because he is bound by necessity, but which he can attain because mind is superior to matter; such a relation to the purpose of things generally, or to the divine, every man has. And although his life on earth is accompanied by separation and detachment from the absolute, his mind is always longing to be free from the taint of original sin.

Just as the love of his parents was not pure in purpose, but sought more or less a physical embodiment, the son, who is the outcome of that love, will possess his share of mortal life as well as of eternal: we are horrified at the thought of death, we fight against it, cling to this mortal life, and prove from that that we were anxious to be born as we were born, and that we still desire to be born of this world.