Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/33

Rh his wife, and should stand by her faithfully and firmly unto death. With regard to chastity he imposes the same obligation on the husband as on the wife.

Most of all, Plato occupied himself with woman. He brings forth much that is contradictory and extravagant. The most important of that which comes under consideration here is condensed in the following, which occasionally gives evidence of so coarse a conception of the sexual relations that it is hard to understand how the poetical Plato could have come by it.

According to him, man and woman share alike in the highest principle, reason, but the powers and capacities under the control of reason are physically as well as psychically weaker in woman, and she is therefore less able to approach perfection, which is the result of the harmony of all forces. (The logic of this proof can perhaps be made plain by the following example. The hawk and the dove are both equally intelligent, but the beak and the claws of the dove are much weaker than those of the hawk. It follows that the dove is less perfect as a dove than the hawk is as a hawk.) It is clear that Plato does not apply the human or feminine standard to the qualities of woman, but the masculine, a senseless presumption which even to-day inspires the judgment of most men. Plato's point of view is shown even still more plainly in the fancy (in the "Phædrus")