Provided she be healthy and well-formed, then Woman’s will cannot help being determined by the paramount equipment of sex in her body, from which arises the reproductive instinct. Her social instinct will be subservient, docile, ready to retreat before its master the reproductive instinct on all occasions. The self-preservative instinct, too, save when she is with child, will be limited by and associated with the reproductive.
And all this will be so much Woman herself, so much part of her essential being, that she will not be aware of it, and while her reproductive instinct will guide her, she herself will misinterpret its promptings while doing its bidding. So much so, indeed, will she misinterpret its promptings, and her unconsciousness will be so profound, so genuine, so unpretended, and so impenetrable, that it will deceive even the spectator himself, even the contemplator and observer of Woman.
If she has virtues, they will be offshoots from the reproductive instinct; her vices will be the same. Her immorality, if she be capable of it, will be Life’s immorality, vital immorality, positive immorality.
But what is most important in understanding Woman is, I repeat, her inevitable mental misinterpretation of these phenomena. Weininger’s book is wrong, weak, unjust, because he never lays sufficient stress on this question of the unconscious and its bearing upon the nature and conduct of Woman. Later on in this book many apparent problems in the life-conduct of Woman, many of Woman’s apparent crimes, all Woman’s so-called immorality, will be explained precisely on the basis of her unconsciousness of the true forces actuating her. There is no other explanation. There is no other way of understanding these things.
Let me repeat the sort of dialogue I constantly have with the average man who is in the habit of taking things at their face value.
I. How’s Miss A.?
A.M. Oh, flourishing, thank you!
I. What is she doing now? Is she engaged yet?
A.M. No—not yet.
I. Any prospects?