The correlation of bodily equipment and motive or desire, therefore, must always be kept very carefully in mind if we are to comprehend the behaviour of our fellows, and of the lower animals.
An animal that has a horn on its nose, like the rhinoceros, will have a concomitant desire to use it. Its motive for using it may be quite unconscious; but that does not matter. The little kitten does not hate you, or desire to hurt you when it uses its claws on your hands. It has a bodily part, well supplied with intricate mechanism and nerves, and it is more than it can do not to use that part.
The impulse coming from a bodily part that cries to be used is generally misinterpreted. That can be taken as a more or less universal rule. We have seen how the child, though it acted in the right way in the first example, was utterly unconscious of the true springs of its action. But that almost every positive action we perform in our lives is the outcome of a correlation of our bodily parts sending commands to our brain, is nevertheless an undeniable fact.
Take, for instance, the man who possesses the happy combination of a very good eye and an agile, dexterous hand. According to the sort of environment into which he falls, he may be one of several things—either an excellent shot and warrior, or an excellent draughtsman, sculptor, craftsman or painter. The correlation of his bodily parts determines his desires and consequently his career. His motives throughout may be unconscious—that is to say, he may be unaware until the end, of the nature of the forces that actuated him.
Turning now, with these considerations in our mind, to the contemplation of Woman, what do we find?
We find a creature who stands up to her shoulders in the business of Life and its multiplication. Artfully contrived and richly equipped for this business, and with the whole of her trunk and its nervous system intricately organized for it—so that even in her limbs and the skin upon them, so that even in her face and the hair on her head one can detect reverberations, as it were, of the mighty and momentous forces that irradiate her being—Woman cannot evade the common fate of all creatures, and cannot help being guided in her conduct rigidly by the correlation of her bodily parts, any more than all other creatures can. But her actions and the unconscious motives behind them will be all the more inevitable, for having such an elaborate, such a purposeful, and such a deep-seated mechanism as their generator.
Woman’s positiveness to Life, therefore, only amounts to her saying “Yea” to her bodily impulses, and this she cannot help doing without entertaining thoughts of self-destruction. And her “Yea” to Life is more determined, more unswerving, more unrelenting than man’s, in proportion as she is more thoroughly organized and equipped than he is for Life’s business. Her “Yea” to Life cannot be changed to “Nay,” because she is utterly unconscious of it, and is therefore powerless to change it. She may in a moment of bottomless despair say “Nay” to herself, when a sufficient number of people, or a sufficiently important one of many people, has said “Nay” to her; but even then, she is not saying “Nay” to Life, but “Nay” to the thought of living an empty life, or no life.[18]
Woman may ultimately marry. But she is already wed when she is born. She is wed to Life. Life is her taskmaster, and Life is her Lord. I shall show very soon how she unconsciously acknowledges this sway, sacrifices herself to it, and immolates herself before it—aye, even commits adultery for it, lies for it, murders and thieves for it, and sometimes kills herself for it.
What is man in the presence of this formidable engine of Life’s purpose? Merely a means that Woman unconsciously exploits while she consciously imagines that she loves him. What are her children? Children are the object of her eternally unconscious gratitude, because they are the product of her healthy functioning, the instruments on which she has played off the whole gamut of her sensibilities and sensations.
The hierarchy then reads: (1) Life, (2) Woman, (3) Man. For the present this will do.