Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/16

action, it seemed to her, resulted from the mutual action and influence of two such poles; and this idea the speaker explained by means of a mathematical demonstration. As far as sex obtains in human affairs man represents the extensive and woman the intensive pole of motive, feeling, and intention. Man and woman were both entirely human and endowed in the same degree with sensibility, intelligence, and energy. They have equal average capacities for the sum of those operations which constitute life, and are equally capable of culture, material, moral, and mental. Both think by logic, and live by affection. The degrees of maturity correspond in the two sexes. The best man is not better than the best woman, and the worst man not worse than the worst of the other sex. The fiend and the angel can be made in the form and features of either indifferently. In the substance, mental and moral, of which the two are made, there is neither qualitive nor quantitive difference, for she did not believe that either in weight or solidity, contained in the absolute productive energy, one would, in any degree, outvalue the other. The equality of the two was latent, but their unlikeness was patent. The difference was that of a divided function, whose object continues to be one. The labor of illustrating, maintaining, and transmitting life was distributed between the two ; not by accidental and arbitrary determination, but in accordance with a certain divided function in the two, which, when matched each with the other, presented a moral and economic unit. Society was the multiplication of that unity. Both sexes worshipped the same being, though in different ways. Man represented the centrifugal, woman the centripetal division of force. In all good human lives the active and the passive were mixed. The nature and capacity of either sex has in it the elements of both. A sympathetic man has the woman in him; a reasoning, energetic woman the man in her; for the vir must be in both in order that both should be human. Each person has the active and passive half, like the sun and shadow sides of a planet. In the progress of the great necessity from which we come experience obliges us to reverse the old Hebrew method. Man is always born of woman, and this is the logical sequence. As the world from the ideal, as the multiplicity from the unity so man comes from woman, and every man looks back to his mother with mysterious wonder as to the origin of his life, known to her