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SEX AND CHARACTER

by such current terms as "womanly love," "womanly virtue," "womanly devoutness," "womanly modesty" has failed to invalidate my conclusions. I have maintained my ground in face of the strongest opposition, even including that which comes from woman's hysterical imitations of the male morality.

Woman, the normal receptive woman of whom I am speaking, is impregnated by the man not only physically (and I set down the astonishing mental alteration in women after marriage to a physical phenomenon akin to telegony), but at every age of her life, by man's consciousness and by man's social arrangements. Thus it comes about that although woman lacks all the characters of the male sex, she can assume them so cleverly and so slavishly that it is possible to make mistakes such as the idea of the higher morality of women.

But this astounding receptivity of woman is not isolated, and must be brought into practical and theoretical connection with the other positive and negative characteristics of woman.

What has the match-making instinct in woman to do with her plasticity? What connection is there between her untruthfulness and her sexuality? How does it come about that there is such a strange mixture of all these things in woman?

This brings us to ask the reason why women can assimilate everything. Whence does she derive the falsity which makes it possible for her to prefer to believe only what others have told her, to have only what they (choose to) give her, to be merely what they make her?

In order to give the right answer to these questions we must turn once more, for the last time, from the actual point. It was found that the power of recognition which animals possess, and which is the psychical equivalent of universal organic response to repeated stumili, was curiously like and unlike humany memory; both signify an equally lasting influence of an impression which was limited to a