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102
SEX AND CHARACTER

cleverer than themselves; that they would be repelled by a man who said that all they thought was right, and did not know better than they did. In short, the woman makes it a criterion of manliness that the man should be superior to herself mentally, that she should be influenced and dominated by the man; and this in itself is enough to ridicule all ideas of sexual equality.

The male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously This is certainly the necessary conclusion for the extreme cases. The woman receives her consciousness from the man; the function to bring into consciousness what was outside it is a sexual function of the typical man with regard to the typical woman, and is a necessary part of his ideal completeness.

And now we are brought up against the problem of talent; the whole modern woman question appears to be resolving itself into a dispute as to whether men or women are more highly gifted. As the question is generally propounded there is no attempt to distinguish between the pure types of sex; ihe conclusions with regard to these that I have been able to set forth have an important bearing on the answer to the question.