Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/359

Rh and yet some of his characters are female. If every man was a pure man and every woman a pure woman any man would be attracted by and suitable for any woman. There would be no basis for individual preference, because the qualities and impulses demanded would be found in any individual of the opposite sex. There would thus be no law of individual attraction. But with the intermediate forms—those partly male and partly female—each person likes in his mate the qualities he has not. Where he is male he demands female qualities in his mate, and where he is female he is attracted by a woman who in these respects has male qualities. A womanly man prefers a masculine woman and she in turn would be attracted by him because each finds qualities in the other that they do not possess. If the positive sign (+) he made to represent masculine characters and the negative (&minus;) the womanly qualities then each fitting couple would have in the one a plus quality where the other had a minus quantity. Weininger states his law as follows: "For any true sexual union it is necessary that there come together a complete male (M.) and a complete female (F.) even although in different cases the M. and F. are distributed in different proportions." The truly male part of a man and the truly male part of his affinity will thus make an ideal man, while the truly female parts of the two make an ideal woman. Each wife should possess that amount of maleness that her husband lacks and he should be female to the degree and at those points where she is male. Where two people are male and female in the same qualities there will be sexual aversion with no inclination to mate.

The interest in this doctrine is increased by the application its author makes of it to the problem of woman's emancipation. The pure woman, he contends, does not want independence and equality with men. She is dominantly sexual and cares little for what is really foreign to her nature as a woman. It is the sexually intermediate forms that desire emancipation. To the degree that a woman has inherited qualities that are male she will have a deep-seated craving t<? acquire man's character and to have his freedom and ability. All successful women show the dominance of male characters. George Eliot, he tells us, had a broad massive forehead: her movements, like her expression, were quick and decided and lacked all womanly grace. It is this male element in women that longs for equality. The womanly woman never pays any special attention to art or to science, or if she does it is only as a means of attracting a person of the opposite sex. Women really interested in intellectual matters are sexually intermediate forms. The whole woman's movement is thus unnatural and artificial. It creates an undue amount of excitement that ends in hysteria. Any attempt to emancipate all women is sure to defeat itself by the artificiality and misery it creates.

This book is a contribution to the problems discussed, and yet I feel