Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/98

82 food. And even this unconscious care emanates chiefly only from the mother, while the male generally concerns himself neither for the mother nor the young after copulation. The well-known passionate love of animals for their young is at an end from the time when the latter no longer need aid, and old and young no longer know each other.

The egotism and coarse conception of men would fain have transferred this mode of propagation also to the human race. That would mean in other words: we want to be animals in this respect, not human beings. While the animal sees in the female only an instrument for procreation, the woman is to the man only the complement of his being, his second ego, in and with whom he begins to live his complete life; while in the animal a merely temporary affection secures the indispensable aid for the rearing of the young, children are to men a desirable continuation of their own personality through whom they establish their continuity beyond death with the infinite stream of humanity. And through this ethical continuity and the ethical consequences of sexual intermingling there arises between man and woman, between father and mother, between parents and children, that relation which we designate by the word family.

Thus with regard to propagation, family life at once makes an essential distinction between man