The non-moral nature of woman reveals itself in the mode in which she can so easily forget an immoral action she has committed. It is almost characteristic of a woman that she cannot believe that she has done wrong, and so is able to deceive both herself and her husband. Men, on the other hand, remember nothing so well as the guilty episodes of their lives. Here memory reveals itself as eminently a moral phenomenon. Forgiving and forgetting, not forgiving and understanding, go together. When one remembers a lie, one reproaches oneself afresh about it. A woman forgets, because she does not blame herself for an act of meanness, because she does not understand it, having no relation to the moral idea. It is not surprising that she is ready to lie. Women have been regarded as virtuous, simply because the problem of morality has not presented itself to them; they have been held to be even more moral than man; this is simply because they do not understand immorality. The innocence of a child is not meritorious; if a patriarch could be innocent he might be praised for it.
Introspection is an attribute confined to males, if we leave out of account the hysterical self-reproaches of certain women—and consciousness of guilt and repentance are equally male. The penances that women lay on themselves, remarkable imitations of the sense of guilt, will be discussed when I come to deal with what passes for introspection in the female sex. The “subject” of introspection is the moral agent; it has a relation to psychical phenomena only in so far as it sits in judgment on them.
It is quite in the nature of positivism that Comte denies the possibility of introspection, and throws ridicule on it. For certainly it is absurd that a psychical event and a judgment of it could coincide if the interpretations of the positivists be accepted. It is only on the assumption that there exists an ego unconditioned by time and intrinsically capable of moral judgments, endowed with memory and with the power of making comparisons, that we can justify the belief in the possibility of introspection.
If woman had a sense of her personal value and the will to defend it against all external attacks she could not be jealous. Apparently all women are jealous, and jealousy depends on the failure to recognise the rights of others. Even the jealousy of a mother when she sees another woman’s daughters married before her own depends simply on her want of the sense of justice.
Without justice there can be no society, so that jealousy is an absolutely unsocial quality. The formation of societies in reality presupposes the existence of true individuality. Woman has no faculty for the affairs of State or politics, as she has no social inclinations; and women’s societies, from which men are excluded, are certain to break up after a short time. The family itself is not really a social structure; it is essentially unsocial, and men who give up their clubs and societies after marriage soon rejoin them. I had written this before the appearance of Heinrich Schurtz’ valuable ethnological work, in which he shows that associations of men, and not the family, form the beginnings of society.
Pascal made the wonderful remark that human beings seek society only because they cannot bear solitude and wish to forget themselves. It is the fact expressed in these words which puts in harmony my earlier statement that women had not the faculty of solitude and my present statement that she is essentially unsociable.
If a woman possessed an “ego” she would have the sense of property both in her own case and that of others. The thieving instinct, however, is much more developed in men than in women. So-called “kleptomaniacs” (those who steal without necessity) are almost exclusively women. Women understand power and riches but not personal property. When the thefts of female kleptomaniacs are discovered, the women defend themselves by saying that it appeared to them as if everything belonged to them. It is chiefly women who use circulating libraries, especially those who could quite well afford to buy quantities of books; but, as matter of fact, they are not more strongly attracted by what they have bought than by what they have borrowed. In all these matters the relation between individuality and society comes into view; just as a man must have personality himself to appreciate the personalities of others, so also he must acquire a sense of personal right in his own property to respect the rights of others.
One’s name and a strong devotion to it are even more dependent on personality than is the sense of property. The facts that confront us with reference to this are so salient that it is extraordinary to find so little notice taken of them. Women are not bound to their names with any strong bond. When they marry they give up their own name and assume that of their husband without any sense of loss. They allow their husbands and lovers to call them by new names, delighting in them; and even when a woman marries a man that she does not love, she has never been known to suffer any psychical shock at the change of name. The name is a symbol of individuality; it is only amongst the lowest races on the face of the earth, such as the bushmen of South Africa, that there are no personal names, because amongst such as these the desire for distinguishing individuals from the general stock is not felt. The fundamental namelessness of the woman is simply a sign of her undifferentiated personality.
An important observation may be mentioned here and may be confirmed by every one. Whenever a man enters a place where a woman is, and she observes him, or hears his step, or even only guesses he is near, she becomes another person. Her expression and her pose change with incredible swiftness; she “arranges her fringe” and her bodice, and rises, or pretends to be engrossed in her work. She is full of a half-shameless, half-nervous expectation. In many cases one is only in doubt as to whether she is blushing for her shameless laugh, or laughing over her shameless blushing.
The soul, personality, character—as Schopenhauer with marvellous sight recognised—are identical with free-will. And as the female has no ego, she has no free-will. Only a creature with no will of its own, no character in the highest sense, could be so easily influenced by the mere proximity to a man as woman is, who remains in functional dependence on him instead of in free relationship to him. Woman is the best medium, the male her best hypnotiser. For this reason alone it is inconceivable why women can be considered good as doctors; for many doctors admit that their principal work up to the present—and it will always be the same—lies in the suggestive influence on their patients.
The female is uniformly more easily hypnotised than the male throughout the animal world, and it may be seen from the following how closely hypnotic phenomena are related to the most ordinary events. I have already described, in discussing female sympathy, how easy it is for laughter or tears to be induced in females. How impressed she is by everything in the newspapers! What a martyr she is to the silliest superstitions! How eagerly she tries every remedy recommended by her friends!
Whoever is lacking in character is lacking in convictions. The female, therefore, is credulous, uncritical, and quite unable to understand Protestantism. Christians are Catholics or Protestants before they are baptized, but, none the less, it would be unfair to describe Catholicism as feminine simply because it suits women better. The distinction between the Catholic and Protestant dispositions is a side of characterology that would require separate treatment.
It has been exhaustively proved that the female is soulless and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will. This conclusion is of the highest significance in psychology. It implies that the psychology of the male and of the female must be treated separately. A purely empirical representation of the psychic life of the female is possible; in the case of the male, all the psychic life must be considered with reference to the ego, as Kant foresaw.
The view of Hume (and Mach), which only admits that there are “impressions” and “thoughts” (ABC and α β γ …), and which has almost driven the psyche out of present day psychology, declares that the whole world is to be considered exclusively as a picture in a reflector, a sort of kaleidoscope; it merely reduces everything to a dance of the “elements,” without thought or order; it denies the possibility of obtaining a secure standpoint for thought; it not only destroys the idea of truth, and accordingly of reality, the
