Page:B20442294.djvu/368

340 them for ever. It is unfortunate that so many great and famous men have had mean views on this point. The views of Schopenhauer and Demosthenes as to the emancipation of women are good instances. So also Goethe's Immer ist so das Mädchen beschäftigt und reifet im stillen

Häuslicher Tugend entgegen, den klugen Mann zu beglücken.

Wünscht sie dann endlich zu lesen, so wählt sie gewisslich ein

Kochbuch, is scarcely better than Moliere's ... Une femme en salt tonjours assez,

Quand la capacite de son esprit se hausse

A connaître un pourpoint d'avec un haut de chausse. Men will have to overcome their dislike for masculine women, for that is no more than a mean egoism. If women ever become masculine by becoming logical and ethical, they would no longer be such good material for man's projection; but that is not a sufficient reason for the present method of tying woman down to the needs of her husband and children and forbidding her certain things because they are masculine.

For even if the possibility of morality is incompatible with the idea of the absolute woman, it does not follow that man is to make no effort to save the average woman from further deterioration; much less is he to help to keep woman as she is. In every living woman the presence of what Kant calls "the germ of good" must be assumed; it is the remnant of a free state which makes it possible for woman to have a dim notion of her destiny. The theoretical possibility of grafting much more on this "germ of good" should never be lost sight of, even although nothing has ever been done, or even if nothing could ever be done in that respect.

The basis and the purpose of the universe is the good, and the whole world exists under a moral law; even to the animals, which are mere phenomena, we assign moral values, holding the elephant, for instance, to be higher than the