Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/38

 women is good and joyous only when in one's consciousness one does not in any way distinguish them, as regards their sex, from everyone else. You require, I think, above all, -labor. Some labor which would absorb all your powers. I liked the pamphlet lately sent me by Alice Stockham about the "creative power," as she calls it. She says that when a man experiences, besides, all his other natural functions, the sexual demand, he should know that it is a creative demand, which expresses itself only in its lower manifestation as sexual lust: it is a creative capacity, and from the will and effort, insistent effort, depends the possibility of transferring it into another physical or, better still, spiritual activity. I think that it is indeed a power which participates in the work of God, of the establishment of His kingdom on earth: in the generative act it is only the transference to others, to one's children of the possibility of participating in God's work. In abstinence and direct activity in God's service it is the highest manifestation of life. The transition is difficult but it is possible, and it is accomplished before our eyes by hundreds and thousands of people. If you overcome, it will be well; if you do not, then marry -it will not be so well, but will not be bad. What is bad is, as Paul says, to be inflamed, to go about imbibing this poison into one's blood. Only don't trust yourself in imagining that the society of woman contains something especially good, softening. All this is an illusion of sensuality. In the society of woman, as in that of any man, there is much that is joyous; but in female society as such there is nothing