Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/15

 these two parties are found equally in their psychical and in their physical constitutions.

"Man and woman differ as much in their intellectual and moral as in their material aspects. All their extensiveness or variety depends upon the maintained integrity of these two types. The inferiority of the one sex to the other is assumed as characteristic Of the two throughout by the superficial thinker, and evinces an ignorance of moral and dynamic values which is at once perversive of truth, and, so far as it reacts upon man, is subversive of the ideal order and economy of nature. The solution or establishment of these values is now one of the first needs of society. The first aspect of sex, like that of an integral humanity, was tyrannical on the one hand and slavish on the other. The strong man opposed the weaker; but woman being weaker still, a sort of compensatory protection was given to her. The injustice has been always more theoretical than practical, the experience of life and the instinctive good sense of mankind acting as a restraining and compensating force in the aggregate of human action. Yet as this ideal inequality does affect the action and inter-action of man and woman, it could not be amiss to examine the extent of its existence and satisfy ourselves that such an equality does exist, either in the ideal or in the fact,in the divided being of which we term one part male and the other female. That a more worldly consideration, a more public sphere of action, and more definite labor pertains to the one than to the other is in no wise to be interpreted as evidence of superiority on the one hand and inferiority on the other. The experience of life tells us that we are constantly obliged to recede from seen values in order to realize true ones. The poorest head is often crowned with jewels, and the noblest with thorns. In this division, however, no inequality could be supposed possible, since one part of what is divine cannot be more divine than another. The distinction of sex is the mere initial of the simplest action of polarity in conscious and independent life, and thus makes the basis of two departments of labor and obligation; for two amounts of attraction and consideration. But there was nothing in it to indicate any inequality between them. The man is half, the woman half. They were not merely mathematical halves, indifferent in themselves and never operative halves. This at once necessitates the two different amounts of action. All organizing human