Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/365

Rh from grinning and showing his teeth. Even Christianity cannot refrain from correcting the Biblical genesis by the story of the Virgin, who, without human aid, brought into the world the noblest of men, according to the Christian conception. Where is the man who would attempt, without the aid of a woman, to bring a Virgin Mary into the world?

Let us therefore place woman first, and let us prepare ourselves by a reflection upon womanhood for an adequate examination of manhood. But the object of this reflection cannot be to merely emphasize the difference between the two sexes; the object is rather to find the characteristic traits through which each sex presents itself in its ideal character, its greatest perfection; in other words, to learn to know the ideal woman as well as the ideal man. This task presents the peculiar difficulty that it cannot be solved in an objective sense, and without partnership, because, although both sexes are dependent upon each other, they have, in spite of their belonging together, different interests and different points of view. In truth, man and woman can only be judged objectively by a neuter. But since we have not yet reached this neutrality, since all that is possible, to us, is the peculiar point of view of the one sex with regard to the other, since neither sex exists for itself, but each for the sake of the other, or has significance only with relation to the other, therefore this relationship alone ought to determine the judgment, so that woman would be the