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We are now at the second chapter in the history of the relation of the sexes. Woman, as well as man, is asking to be civilised, woman, who bore man, and who will bear his children. In woman, too, is this tremendous sex-impulse, that may devastate, and that should fertilise. Is woman to live life to the full, or is her function only to hand on life? If she is to live it to the full, there is for her as for him only one solution. Sex must be not ignored or atrophied, still less must it, by a sort of mental jugglery, be at one and the same moment ignored and over-emphasised. Woman cannot be moralised through sex, because sex is a non-moral, that is a non-social instinct. But, for woman as for man, non-moral sex, the greatest of life forces, can be balanced, blended with other and humane sentiments. Man, because he is physically stronger, has got a little ahead in civilisation. Woman, not because he is stronger, but merely qua sex impulse, is at present subject to him. It is for him, surely, to hand on to her the gospel that has been his salvation, to teach her the words: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."
If sex, then, is egotistic, exclusive, if it needs balance by a broader humanity, what are the chief non-egotistic humanising tendencies? What master passions can we oppose to the individualism, the exclusiveness, the pugnacity, the egotism of sex? The answer is clear. We have two great forces at our disposal, the desire for knowledge,[1] or, as psychologists call it, the "instinct of
- ↑ "The love of knowledge must be a disinterested love; and those who are fortunate enough to possess it, just in proportion to the strength and width of their love, enter into a great kingdom where the strain of disturbing passions grows quiet and even the persecuting whisper of egotism dies at last almost completely away."—Professor Gilbert Murray.
