Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/515

 sity courses, but about woman's great eternal destination. Many perverse things in this respect are preached precisely in the circles of intelligent women, and namely this: for example, they preach that woman ought not to be exclusive,—that she must not love her children more than any one else. They preach many misty, obscure things about evolution, about her equality with man; but this proposition, that woman must not love her children more than strangers, is preached everywhere, at all times, is considered an axiom, and as a practical rule includes in itself the essence of the doctrine; but this very proposition is quite false.

It is the destiny of every man, both man and woman, to serve men. With this general proposition, I believe agree all men who are not immoral. The difference between men and women in the fulfilment of this destiny is great, according to the means with which they serve men. A man serves men with physical, and mental, and moral labour. The means of his ministration are very varied. The whole activity of humanity, with the exception of childbirth and nuising, forms the arena of his ministration to men. But woman, in addition to her ability to serve men with all the same sides of her being as man, is by her constitution destined and inevitably drawn to that ministration which alone is excluded from the sphere of man's ministration. The ministration to humanity is naturally divided into two parts: one—the increase of the good in existing humanity, the other—the continuation of humanity itself. Men are preëminently destined for the first, for they are deprived of the possibility of serving the second. Women are preeminentlypreëminently [sic] destined for the second, because they are exclusively adapted for it. It is impossible, wrong, and sinful (that is, a mistake) to forget and to wipe out the second, as people try to do. From this distinction result