Woman Is The Psychic Centre Of Power In The Social Integration

( Originally Published 1918 )

FOR long throughout the past human energies have been cramped and limited on every side through the concentration of the Western intellect on the causes which have governed the individual integration as described in the preceding chapter. The mind and will of civilization have been overwhelmingly absorbed in the study of the facts which have made for the efficiency of Power in the struggles of this era. This is a passing phase of the world. The principles of Power in the future all lie in the social integration. And in the social integration the fact of first significance is that Power centres in emotion. The social integration is related in all its phases to that supreme capacity in the collective mind which senses and directs Power, namely, the emotion of the ideal.

One of the strangest facts of our time is this. The West knows practically nothing of the science of emotion. It knows scarcely anything, that is to say, of emotion in its most important manifestations which are in the social integration. If one takes up any of its leading textbooks on psychology at the present time it is to encounter the strange spectacle of every Western writer on the subject, with the prominent exception of Mr. William McDougall and a small group, thinking and theorizing about the facts of emotion almost as if emotion related only to the individual. Emotion is considered as some relatively inferior quality in the individual closely associated with the animal past and mainly connected with functions which man shares with the animal world. The science of emotion in its collective aspects is practically a sealed book to the West.

Throughout the stages of the great world war, for instance, it was a matter of daily occurrence, in the Western press and particularly in the press of Great Britain, to see the German peoples contemptuously referred to as the most emotional race in Europe : as if this description at once decisively relegated them to a category of inferiority. Of course the German people were emotional. The stupendous lesson in Power which Germany was giving the world was in all its phases and issues a lesson in the illimitable and incalculable power of emotion. Under our prevailing standards in the West we continually think of the control of emotion as if it indicated absence of emotion. So entirely contrary to fact is this misconception that it may be taken as a maxim of civilization that other things being equal, the higher the capacity of any individual or of any people, the higher the capacity for emotion.

It is emotion only which can in its collective applications direct the general mind in the long sequences through which Power must express itself in the social integration. It is through the emotion of the ideal, and through this cause alone, that the collective will can be concentrated and directed over long periods of time to particular ends. It is through emotion only that the present can be subordinated to the future and the organized will of civilization transmitted from one generation to the next through the young. It is through the emotion of the ideal that any collective aim whatsoever that the organized imagination of a people may set before itself in civilization becomes possible of achievement, and this in an incredibly brief interval of time.

Where are we to look for the principal source and reservoir in the future of this supreme capacity? It will be the seat of all Power. It will be the ultimate cause of dominant efficiency in the coming struggle of the world.

The answer to this question is the most striking which it has ever been the lot of a writer to give. There can be no doubt as to what the reply must be. It is not in the fighting Male of the race: it is in Woman that we have the future centre of Power in civilization. This, strange and paradoxical as it may appear, is the first lesson in Power which emerges in history from the great world war of civilization in the second decade of the twentieth century.

If we look at the history of the fighting male of the race in the vast struggle for Power which formed the past history of the world, the significance of certain facts begins to stand out with great distinctness before the mind. The existing world in every phase of its life has been the culminating stage of the prolonged drama of individual efficiency. It is the flowering stage in every institution of the qualities which have made the individuals who are supremely efficient in the struggle for their own interests the centres of all systems of Power and the masters of the world. It represents the age when interests have been short-circuited into the hands of those who have power to hold them by force and when the instant need of individuals and institutions has been either absolutely or relatively for A to be able to kill B before B is able to kill A.

Now it is evident that in all Power systems in this stage of the human world the fighting male has been, in the nature of things, the ultimate source and origin of supreme Power. He has been the maker, the doer, the creature of the instant and urgent need from the beginning of things. All the qualities based ultimately on his sex have been in the fighting male of the race those of instant realization. It has been the imperious condition of his efficiency in the struggle for Power that there should be no tomorrow in him like today. The idealisms of the long sequences, the long-drawn-out dramas of renunciation and sacrifice, have never in reality had more than a pallid meaning for the man of the fighting races of the West.

For this reason there is no practical or business people of the West in which the typical male in his inner heart does not despise idealism and all the characteristic emotion on which idealism rests. At the back of the male mind of every fighting and business people the spirit of the pagan rules and the philosophy of Omar Khayyám is enthroned. In the course of my life, in which my experience has been considerable, I have never known an Englishman who really believed any of the dogmas of the Christian religion through his reason. In all cases the individual held to them as part of an inheritance which has been imposed on him from without by causes in which his reason had had no share.

In the integrating systems of Power in the world this basis of things is being swept away. In the social integration where Power rests on the causes described in the last chapter the story of humanity is becoming with increasing intensity the vast tragic drama of duty, of sacrifice, of renunciation. All the winning systems of Power in the social integration are those in which the centre of gravity is outside the limits of the individual's own consciousness, and in which, in the long sequences of cause and effect, the units are subordinated to a meaning far beyond that of their own lives and interests through the emotion of the ideal. Reason, in reality, is quite unable to carry any of us from the principles of the individual integration into the principles of the social integration. The individual dies that the world may live, cannot really be expressed in any terms of the individual's reason. Are you willing to be damned for the glory of God? is a question which cannot be answered in the affirmative by any process of reason. But when human nature staggering upwards with its face towards the infinite and universal gives this answer, it has simply reached the highest expression of Power.

These systems of Power in the social integration do not rest on reason. They appeal to no facts the facts have not arrived. They answer nothing to argument. They are Power itself. They rest on emotion. And through the emotion of the ideal, man therein has hitched himself to omnipotence.

Now if we turn from the fighting male of the race to the other half of the world which is represented in woman, the effect on the mind of these principles is very striking as we begin to perceive their reach. At the back of human consciousness, as the literatures of nearly all peoples bear witness, there has always lurked a conception of woman's mind as being, in circumstances which men have never allowed themselves freely to imagine, a power of incalculable magnitude. Save in the expressions of it, which arise directly out of its relations to the opposite sex, woman's mind at the present time, even in the highest systems of human culture, re-mains the greatest mystery of the race.

Throughout the whole span of the human era, the development of the mind of woman has represented one fact of absolutely supreme significance, namely, that there has been expressed in it the struggle of the interests of the future against the ascendancy in the present of those Power systems, which arise from the activities of the male mind, which rest on force, which by the categorical necessity of the fight must always be directed to sectional and short-range objectives, and which from an outlook thus inherently limited to the need of the present and under the control of reason seek always to impose their own conceptions under the name of the Absolute upon every form of human activity. These systems of Power, characteristic of the individual integration, have ever sought to exploit woman in all her capacities as no other being has been exploited in life. Out of this struggle the mind of woman has emerged. It is like the emerging mind of civilization itself in the upward stress of progress. Woman is in-deed the actual prototype of all the great systems of religion, of morality, of law, upon which integrating civilization rests. For in all these the controlling meaning in which their development has centred has been this same struggle for the interests of the future against the systems of force seeking to exploit and overwhelm in the present the interests of the future which were represented in them.

In the individual integration, of which Darwin gave us the laws, the clue to Power in all the qualities and all the institutions of the winning types lies in one fact. The heredity through which Power is transmitted is in the individual. The centre of gravity in Power is, therefore, in the present. The line of maximum Power which evolution is following is the individual efficient in the struggle for his own interest the efficient individual, that is to say, whom Nietzsche described to us as acknowledging no authority but his own will and no morality but his own interests. Everything in this individual has been controlled and is still controlled by interests centred in the present, and by the necessity, actual or implicit, in all his institutions for A to be able to kill B before B is able to kill A.

In the social integration the clue to Power is quite different. The heredity through which Power is transmitted is not in the individual. It is the social or cultural inheritance. Evolution continues to follow the line of maximum Power, but it is the characteristic principle of the social integration that immensely greater Power centres in those systems which while remaining efficient in the present at the same time subject the present to the future. The centre of gravity of Power in the social integration is therefore always in the future. The control of the long organized sequences of cause and effect through which evolution thus follows the line of Power in the social integration can be only attained in one way by emotion directing action through the cultural inheritance over long periods of time to ideals beyond the lives and interests of the existing individuals. It is woman who, by the necessities of her being, has carried within her nature from the beginning in its highest potentialities the ruling principle of this new era of Power.

By her history in evolution, by her function in relation to man, by her position in relation to the future generation, woman has ever been the creature of fruition in the future as contrasted with man. The driving principle of woman's nature at all its highest levels has ever been by pure physiological necessity the subjugation of the present with all its imperious demands to a meaning beyond herself and beyond all visible interests in the present. By the necessities of evolution every strand of woman's deeper being has vibrated to this meaning for untold ages. The fighting male is through the nature of his history the creature of those short-range animal emotions which are becoming of less importance in advancing civilization. Woman, on the contrary, through her history has ever been the creature of the long-range emotions through which the instant needs of the present are subordinated to the meaning implicit in the long sequences of cause and effect through which maximum Power expresses itself in the social integration.

Nothing is more surprising to numbers of women who have long worked in public matters in con-junction with men, and also to numbers of men who have had experience of a similar kind in working with women, than the popular impression that woman represents the sex which is liable to be diverted from distant ends by passing emotions, while men are held to be relatively uninfluenced by emotion. Wide experience almost invariably brings home to the mind that this is the opposite of the truth. In men all the more powerful emotions are short-range emotions. They are all, moreover, the emotions intimately related to the overpowering heredity of the fight. In civilization the necessity for outwardly controlling emotions of this class is constant and imperative. Men throughout their lives are consequently in constant conflict with their emotions, suppressing them, hiding them, ashamed of them. The continual object of the male sex in civilization is to appear unemotional, with the result that this pose has become one of the outward marks of culture amongst civilized men.

But this is only on the surface. The emotions of the male exist beneath in overwhelming strength. Women always by a true and deep-seated instinct despise what they perceive to be the short-range emotions in men in public affairs. Even in the highest affairs of State, in legal trials, in debating assemblies, the relatively weak emotion of the ideal in man is nearly always a short-range emotion. All displays of eloquence and rhetoric in the male are intimately connected with the emotions of the fight. There is no situation in which a civilized man is so suddenly and so completely transformed into a creature of the short-range emotions of the fight as when he becomes an orator in public affairs. The gesticulations of eloquence, the beating and thumping motions of emphasis, the flashing eye, the excited visage in which the expressions varying from the sublime to the sinister rapidly' succeed each other, are all characteristic of early man in the ecstasy of the emotions of the fight.

Lecky has described with striking effect the appearance of Gladstone, with many of the aspects and accompaniments of emotion in the fighting savage, delivering with great eloquence a speech on a high moral cause. I have often seen members of the native fighting races of South Africa, like the Zulus, after drugging themselves with narcotics, wrought up to the highest flights of rhetoric in which suddenly jumping on their feet they deliver to empty space long periods of fiery eloquence and declamation all imbued with the passion and coloured with ideals of the fight.

Even in the service of the highest causes it is the short-range emotion of the fight which most powerfully drives men. I was once present at a private meeting at a crisis in British politics when leaders were being chosen. The name of one leader, now a prominent statesman, was put forward with strong and impressive recommendations by a member present. The most urgent qualification of leadership mentioned was that he was a man capable of reaching any goal in action if only he were excited by the spirit of combativeness, which it was pointed out was powerfully present in the case in question. In pursuit of principles, and in the quests of the intellect in scientific research, it may also be observed continually that it is the emotions inherited from the environment of the hunt, the chase, and the fight which most power-fully operate in the male mind, and this even in the highest regions of abstract knowledge.

As compared with this psychology of the male so strongly developed in all the fighting races of the world, the psychology of woman is absolutely distinct. It is separated from that of man by meanings which are poles apart from those just described. The mind of woman, as we shall see more clearly in the next chapter, has in reality outstripped that of man by an entire epoch of evolution in the development of those characteristic qualities upon which Power now rests in the social integration. Nearly all the past discussions about woman may be perceived at a glance to be occupied with aspects of the case which have no important relation to the fundamental issue with which we are about to become involved in civilization. Man has been engaged in discussing woman in the past from the point of view of woman's case with man or of man's case with woman. But civilization is not ultimately concerned in a fundamental way with either of those issues. The central problem is the relation of woman, not to man, but to the needs of society.

In this matter developing civilization is being driven by causes which are inherent in a direction which is inevitable. Evolution will follow the line of maximum Power. It is this question of Power which will ultimately control everything. And the significant fact towards which we have to turn is that the qualities through which maximum Power must express itself in the long sequences of the social integration, the qualities, that is to say, for which civilization cries aloud now with the living hunger of a type in evolution, are precisely those which are most characteristically represented in the mind of woman. They are the qualities by which woman instinctively subjects the present to the future through sustained emotion, accompanied by a power of sacrifice in the service of the ideal which greatly exceeds this capacity in the male sex.

When we turn for the case about woman from this point of view of Power the facts deeply impress the imagination. It is well to put entirely aside all the comparisons upon which the popular mind has run in the past of woman's capacities with man's capacities at the level of man's standards strength, endurance, brain qualities, work capacities, character inheritance all the comparisons of these qualities in woman with man's standards with which we have been usually occupied have no real significance.

Woman's relationship to Power is so different from man's in the social integration that it is at present almost beyond the full comprehension of the male mind.

To get the matter into focus it is better to avoid all preconception arising from the past, and to do this most thoroughly it is better not to take the case for woman in relation to civilization from any of its advocates, but to go straight to the discussions about woman's sex and woman's mind which have been carried on by those who have put the case against woman in civilization in the most thoroughgoing manner and in the most extreme spirit of hostility.

The whole modern attack in the West on woman's mind and the qualities of her sex centres primarily in Schopenhauer. 1 The most savage but also the most reasoned and influential case that has been made against woman in the literature of the West has come from Schopenhauer. In his oft-quoted essay on woman Schopenhauer represents, as nobody else either in literature or in science does, the cry of the inmost heart cf the pagan of the West who has built the world of the individual integration on force. Nearly all the current arguments against woman's position find their best statement in this essay. Even the crude, fierce, animal attacks on woman in later literature, like those of Nietzsche, Weiniger, and others which have followed them, are scarcely more than echoes of Schopenhauer. Their point of view is best studied in Schopenhauer's essay, where the essential positions are made with greater strength and moderation.

The first thing which strikes the observer of in-sight on reading Schopenhauer's essay is that Schopenhauer's mind, in the contemplation of woman, is revealed to the reader in a state of fear. The essay exhibits the dread of woman's mental influence as a kind of overwhelming obsession of Schopenhauer's intellect, just as the fear of woman's physical influence is exhibited in the early patristic writings as an overwhelming obsession of the ascetic mind. It will be perceived clearly at a later period that the mental attitude of Schopenhauer in this case is characteristically true to type. The psychology of Schopenhauer in the essay is the typical psychology of Power recognizing its true relation to Power, which it fears to be destined to supersede it.

Schopenhauer's central position is extraordinarily fundamental and uncompromising. He declares woman to be the natural enemy of man. The reason given for thus describing her has to be noted. She is, he asserted, the breaker and subduer of man's will power. We recognize on scrutiny that this will power which Schopenhauer has in mind is none other than the will power of the fighting male of the race the terrible, all-subduing dominant creature of efficiency in the individual integration, acknowledging no authority but his own will and no morality but his own advantage. And it is as the representative of this dominant will power of the past that we see Schopenhauer standing before woman in a state of instinctive and almost vindictive intellectual hostility. His description of her in such remarkable circumstances reads almost like a hymn of hate.

Schopenhauer forthwith describes woman as inherently a creature of evil. Her relations to life have made of her, he said, an inborn liar. He declares her to be an intellectual myope. He describes her fundamental failings to be injustice, treachery, and deception. He asserts her to be wanting in all objectivity of mind. He will not allow her the conditions of originality. She is, he said, below the male standard in intellect. He even denies woman's sex beauty. It was only, he said, the male intellect of humanity when befogged through the sexual impulse which could consider the female sex fair.

Moved by his emotions thus to curse woman altogether, Schopenhauer advances immediately to one of the most remarkable positions in the history of thought. Driven by the true instinct of genius, Schopenhauer in the same essay proceeds to write woman's charter of authority for all ages in the future of civilization. For the cause of all the qualities, which he has thus enumerated as making of woman a creature to be dreaded, Schopenhauer puts down the one significant cause. The root quality of evil in woman Schopenhauer declares to be this. The race is always to her more than the individual. The natural, the inborn, and the unchanging attitude of the whole of woman's sex to man Schopenhauer asserts to be the attitude of woman to an all-powerful opponent whose strength to enforce his will has to be subdued to a purpose in the future. For in the darkest recesses of their hearts, he continues, "women live altogether more in the race than in the individual; they regard the affairs of the species as more serious than those of the individual."

It is this extraordinary insight into woman's true relationship to Power which constitutes Schopenhauer's main contribution to the sum of human knowledge. In the result it drives him into a kind of frenzied opposition to woman. The line of Schopenhauer's successors in the modern West have since consistently striven to develop the doctrine of Power with their faces set resolutely to the past, until it becomes at length in the individual and in the state alike the disastrous Nietzschean doctrine of strength acknowledging no authority but its own will and no morality but its own advantage. Of Woman, said Nietzsche, "Thou goest to her: do not forget thy whip."' Of the State, said Bernhardi, "the whole discussion turns not on international right but simply and solely on power and expediency. "

Yet it was the same Schopenhauer who, standing at the head of the great modern pagan retrogression thus indicated, visualized woman as its natural and invincible antagonist. It is Schopenhauer who has given us woman's charter for all time in civilization. As distinct from man she is the creature to whom the Race is more than the Individual, the being to whom the Future is greater than the Present. Let civilization remember it.

When we turn now to the practical affairs of civilization and try to focus the light of this principle on the facts of the world, the illumination will be found to extend to a great distance. The evidence for the statement that it is woman by reason of her functional, racial, and evolutionary history who is the principal organ in the race of that emotion of the ideal upon the function of which developing civilization depends, is of great extent and significance.

In the integrating systems of civilization Power, as we have seen, is not transmitted through the heredity of the individual but through the cultural or social inheritance. To be able to direct or control this social heredity through the emotion of the ideal is to be able in a relatively brief period to alter or profoundly modify the world or any of its existing institutions. It is to obtain control over all the reservoirs of Power in civilization. The relationship of woman to the cultural heredity of the world through the emotion of the ideal is there-fore the first fact which meets us on the threshold of the science of Power.

The emotion of the ideal is an inseparable and the most essential part of that capacity in the human mind which senses Power. Woman from her history in the past in subjection to force has doubtless from an early period possessed this capacity in a high degree. It is peculiar to her now that under more complete conditions of civilization she possesses, in a far higher state of development than it has reached in man, the sense which instinctively recognizes the sequences through which Power is transmitted in the social integration.

Power in the social integration, as Spencer long ago pointed out, resides in those causes which produce the long sequences of effect as contrasted with the motives and impulses which in savagery produce the less important, rapid, and short-range effects. It is not in the nature of things that the male who has been from the beginning the doer, the maker, the builder, the fighter, the instrument of force, the attendant on all the instant need of things in the present, should be the equal of woman in this quality of subordinating the present to the future by the emotion of the ideal.

It is a circumstance which has to be noted that amongst the advanced fighting races this fact is nearly always instinctively recognized by men. Almost every male of the Western races, as soon as he becomes involved in the activities of Power which are characteristic of the social integration, has the same instinct. When he has need of the emotion of the ideal to carry him beyond the thick of his present difficulties, or beyond the outlook of his environment, or into these higher regions of leadership which require sacrifice prolonged beyond all interests of the present, he turns instinctively, not to another male of his kind, but to woman for support and instinctive understanding.

Men tend to hide this characteristic from their fellows in a world in which the standards of the individual integration still survive in great strength. But it is developed to the highest and completest extent in the leading and strongest minds. One has to turn to such records as Moltke's love letters and his letters to his wife to see to what an extent minds which in the popular imagination have represented the personification of Power Power precise, calculating, methodical, mathematical have possessed this characteristic. Power in minds of the highest calibre is nearly always thus exhibited as in the closest association with the emotion of the ideal. And in such circumstances when we know the facts we see them turning instinctively and naturally to woman to give strength to that quality in them which is the principal element in Power in its highest expressions.

It is characteristic of woman that the habit of mind required in these circumstances is nearly always present. It is generally inborn even though it remain latent. It renders members of the sex capable of attaining over long stretches of time a lofty, permanent, and controlled excitement which exercises a profound influence over all the activities of ordinary life. It is this kind of capacity which enables even delicate women to maintain constancy to an ideal for a prolonged period in the face of the greatest difficulties and persecutions. Women in such circumstances have the same capacity for devotion to causes as they have in other circumstances to persons even through a long succession of mental and bodily tortures. J. S. Mill described the type of mind from which this quality proceeds either in man or woman as always closely associated with the power of leadership of mankind.

It is one of the strongest and most fundamental traits of woman's nature closely associated with this quality that in a conflict between present interest and principle she instinctively and instantly tends to take the side of principle rather than that of interest. It is in the possession of this characteristic that woman is in high degree actually and literally what Schopenhauer described her to be, namely the being to whom the race is more than the individual and the future greater than the pre-sent. It is in such circumstances that Schopenhauer correctly estimated her as the enemy to be dreaded by the strong man acknowledging no authority but his own will and no morality but his own advantage ; because, to use his words, " always with woman the spring of her secret, unexpressed, and indeed unconscious and inborn morality, is the belief that the welfare of the species is placed in her hands."1 Woman is, in short, by nature the custodian of ends distant in the future to which she subdues the present: so that, again to use Schopenhauer's words, "in the recesses of her heart she lives always and altogether more in the race than in the individual."

These facts possess a significance of a high order when their relationship to the science of Power as directed through the cultural inheritance of civilization is distinguished. There is no more remarkable phenomenon of the modern Western world than that vast change, now in progress in the psychology of the race, which has a bearing intimately related to this subject.

In the literature of imagination and idealism it is impossible to ignore certain features. In the imaginative literature of the peoples of the modern West as contrasted with the literature of peoples of more primitive times and standards, a fact which strikes the mind is the position occupied therein by woman. She stands out as the central figure. It is woman who inspires nearly all the deeds, and nearly all the deep passions of men, which form the subject of the imaginative literature of the modern races. Even under the fiercest practical and competitive aspects of life we do not escape from the presence of this fact. The imaginative literature of the West is the vehicle in one form or another of all its highest idealisms. But it is woman who is always in evidence therein as the touchstone of man's ideals. Wherever man be-comes an idealist in imaginative literature it is almost invariably woman who is the measure of it. It is to the woman that man always brings his idealisms to prove them and to look for support.

So deep-seated is this instinct that it has become one of the most fundamental canons of modern Western Art, that it cannot be violated without a sense of failure being created. Wherever man is represented in Art as the higher idealist and woman as the lower cause which has dragged him down the result is artistic disaster. We feel that the ideal has been lowered and that we have returned to the depressing atmosphere of a more primitive stage of human evolution. However great the ability or the genius of the creator it cannot save us from this effect. As in Robert Herrick's The Healer, or as in George Gissing's New Grub Street, the result is invariably the same. A sense of failure and out-rage is present in the mind of the reader.

It has to be kept in view in considering this significant transition in the standards of Art that in the present epoch of the world, woman's mind is the greatest mystery of the time. In the stunting and restraining conditions of the era out of which it has emerged it has been driven in upon itself at every point to such an extent that the world knows scarcely anything about it, save in those expressions of it which arise directly out of woman's relations to the opposite sex.

The most notable and probably unforeseen effect on many western minds of Pierre Loti's Désenchantées, which produced so remarkable an impression in the harems of Turkey, was to bring home to those minds to a degree never before experienced the peculiar and intensely restricted relationship of woman to the general world, not simply in Eastern harems but throughout the whole of western civilization at the present day.

The qualities of the male mind inherited from lower levels of evolution have been ennobled and transmuted at higher levels with enormous effect in the service of civilization. Not so has it been in the case of the mind of woman. The effect of woman's entire education, and of the social training which accompanies it down to the present day in civilization, has been to shut off to an incalculable degree the characteristic and peculiar inherent values of her mind from access to the service of civilization. The culminating, effect in the past of the attitude of civilization to woman even amongst the most advanced peoples has been to inculcate the doctrine that the only duty which woman owes to the world is that which she owes through those to whom she is related through the sexual bond. Her deeper and more characteristic nature has been prevented as much by Western usage as by Eastern from being released into any other channel than that of her husband and her family.

Yet even in such conditions in which the access of woman's mind to the larger world of affairs has been walled up at all the principal approaches the results have been remarkable. It is one of the most pregnant facts in the upward progress of the race that the emotion of the ideal in its relation to Power has always had its chief and deepest expressions in the mind of woman. Even with all the disabilities under which her sex has laboured, woman's mind in the past has been the principal source of the creative idealism of the world. When all other channels have been closed to her, woman has carried the creative capacity of the emotion of the ideal into the practical world of affairs mainly through her influence on the mind of the young. She has done this to an extent of which a large part of the world is quite unconscious.

If it were possible in periods of unusual growth and crisis in the history of the world to uncover the foundations of events and to get a view of causes and origins, it would be found that the creative and sustaining influence of woman's mind in the formative stages preceding action is enormous. A knowledge of the methods by which the standards and ideas of the time are imposed on successive generations of men leaves no doubt that the influence of woman on the cultural inheritance has equalled and probably far exceeded that of all other agencies whatever.

The effect of the emotion of the ideal transmitted to the young of the rising generation by woman can never after be entirely effaced in the individual. It is greater, deeper, and more enduring than the effect of any system whatever of subsequent education. Where it is combined with the effects of such subsequent education, as to some extent it is in the systems of modern Germany and Japan, it becomes the most powerful element in character formation, giving after results in capacity for permanent and sustained aim and sacrifice in the individual absolutely impossible of attainment by any other means.

Wide acquaintance with the personal memoirs of men who have been centres of Power in history, who have become leaders of causes, or who have given direction to the idealisms of classes, of interests, or of nations or of peoples in civilization, leave developed in the mind with great strength the conviction that the part played by woman in giving direction to the mind of the young through the emotion of the ideal far exceeds that imagined by the world. It has been one of the principal determining factors throughout human history.

Knowledge of the influence which it is capable of exercising has been the basis of many potent systems of education. But it has been knowledge which has fallen far short of the reality. To measure the influence of woman in shaping and determining the mind of civilization through the young in the past is possible only to the most experienced minds. It has extended even to the regions of the highest abstract thought. Leslie Stephen, in reviewing the history of philosophical systems, gave it as his own experience that however honestly and eagerly the philosopher may desire to try his conclusions by the severest test, always in the end his real problem came to be: "How conclusions which are agreeable to his emotions can be connected with the postulates which are congenial to his intellect.' That is to say, in short, that it is always the emotion of the ideal which predetermines the conclusions.

And in nearly all such cases when the inquiry is carried far enough, the significant controlling fact in the background is found to be that the emotion of the ideal has had its strength and direction given to it by the influence of woman's mind at an early stage in the development of the individual.

All the foregoing results, and they are of the highest order of significance to the existing world, have been under the conditions of the past when woman has been practically without any contact, in her own right or in the right of her sex, with the living facts of the real world of human activities. They open to the mind a vision of possibilities of the science of Power of which men have not dreamed. A new horizon in the history of Power will be reached in the world when civilization perceives the significance of utilizing towards the aims of collective Power this being to whom, through the emotion of the ideal, the race is always more than the individual and the future greater than the present. The type of civilization which first organizes itself around this central capacity of woman's mind will have a stupendous advantage over all others in the coming struggle of the world.