At all events we can honestly deny that we are materialists, and do not believe that we are any the less religious or spiritual for having fought hard for our heterodox religious views through years of metaphysical study and thought. Secondly, we repudiate the suggestion that to preach the care and maintenance of the beauty and health of the body is necessarily material; for it is the invalid, the sick man, the man of this age, who calls himself “well,” who is constantly reminded of his body. A healthily functioning body can be forgotten. Thanks to its serenity, its muteness in efficiency, it allows its owner to indulge in every variety of spiritual exercise.
While, therefore, we accuse the values which for centuries have cast a slur on life and the human body of being the cause of modern decadence, we do not thereby proclaim ourselves either irreligious or materialistic; for, let those who would too hastily presume both our irreligiosity and materialism remember that there are other religions besides that which first created the body-despising values to which we allude.
And, when we challenge the modern age to prove that it can be anything else than materialistic, with its countless millions of sick or deficient bodies; when we challenge it to show in what manner the two thousand years of body-contempt and body-neglect have led us to a loftier spirituality, the very grossness of modern life, the very besottedness of the modern mind, and the very system of government in the modern world, Democracy, which is materialism in politics (estimating the value of an idea or policy by measuring the body-weight behind it, not by measuring the authority, ability, or competence behind it)—all rise before us in their ugliness, leaving us but few qualms concerning the danger that we, of our persuasion, run, of falling into materialism by questioning the values that have brought us thus far.
The masses are materialistic to-day because, in the first place, lowered vitality and defective functioning depress the spirit and dull the wits, thus unfitting the mind for all lofty pursuits; and, secondly, because at every moment of their lives their attention is either riveted upon their own halting functions or else distracted by similar disturbances in those among whom their lot is cast.
CHAPTER I
The Present Position of Women
(I) The Unmarried
We have seen that the disillusionment that dogs the heels of the values directing our civilization and its alleged progress consists in our ultimate discovery that Life, as seen through the optics of our impaired and science-aided bodies, appears to have lost a substantial portion of its reputed value. The joie de vivre becomes an antiquated myth, no longer a present experience.
If, however, this is true from the standpoint of modern men, how very much more true it must be from that of modern women! For, if it is right to claim that some of Life’s greatest and most lasting joys are connected with the maintenance of the species, woman, whose share in reproduction is much greater than man’s, must necessarily be the greater sufferer when the corporeal equipment of the race becomes defective.
In these degenerate days of fourth-rate bodily joys, therefore, when the corporeal equipment of man and woman has to be scientifically completed with the help of elaborate extra-corporeal aids, it is among the women of the species that we should expect to find the greatest revolt against the old notions concerning Life, Motherhood, and Domesticity.