The Mind Of Woman

( Originally Published 1918 )

IT has been said in the last chapter that in the background of human consciousness there has always been present the conception of woman's mind as being, in circumstances which men have not allowed themselves to imagine, a power of incalculable magnitude. This conception is visible in the records of many primitive peoples. It is to be found in later Roman history; it was in evidence for a brief space in the second and third centuries, from the period of Gaius onward, when woman, at the height of Roman civilization, having with the assistance of the legal mind emerged from the restrictions of manus, attained to a position of_ almost complete independence and the equality of the sexes was assumed by Roman jurisconsults as a fundamental principle of equity.

The same fact is to be witnessed strongly presenting itself in various forms in modern times.

The violent dislike and distrust of woman shown by the crowd of writers, and later by many men of action, who have followed Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in imagining the winning principles of Power in the Individual Integration to be the winning principles of Power in the Social Integration, are in reality a striking tribute to the mind of woman. For what has to be recognized therein is that the fear of woman's mental influence is exhibited as a kind of overwhelming obsession of the male intellect. Even the more reasoned opposition to the claims of the sex, often encountered in the current world in persons of the highest ideals, is to be taken as testimony to the underlying perception of the reach of woman's powers. For in the case of most persons of this class, especially those of the strongest convictions and sincerity, it is the instinct of the enormous potential influence of woman's mind in the coming order of civilization which drives them to oppose with all their might attempts to employ that influence in what they conceive to be a wrong and misguided manner.

In dealing with the mind of woman in the future of civilization the fundamental fact that must ever be kept clearly in view is the relationship of woman to Power. Scarcely any of the writers of social science textbooks have yet grasped the full significance of this relationship, and of the fact that the clue to all events and to ail principles in the future is that Power in the highest form of integration will win.

Now, the highest form of Power in the social integration is that in which society is rendered organic to the highest possible degree. Almost the only object to which society as a whole has been collectively organized in the past has been the object of successful war directed to the smashing and conquest of other peoples or to resistance against such an attempt. There has been no example hitherto in the world of Power in its highest and supreme type, that is to say, in a society in which mind has been organized and steadily directed through all the forms and functions of civilization over an indefinite number of generations towards the attainment of an ideal conceived to embrace the highest and the whole meaning of human effort. It is this type of society which is inevitable in the future of the world; for in the struggle for survival it will exceed in Power all other types. But to organize Power in this supreme type is possible in society in one way only. The existing individuals must be rendered capable of subordinating their minds, their lives, and all the interests within the span of their lives, to an ideal which is beyond their lives, and which may even at times be beyond their understanding.

In this deeply organized type of society efficiency projected thus into the future always of necessity implies and includes efficiency in the present. A society which is capable of consistently subordinating the present to the future has within it the power of realizing practically any aim which it may set before itself in civilization. The social mind directed forward with great strength and unity over long stretches of time to an ideal end held in view is a force absolutely irresistible. The political systems of Power organized in this way will win out over all others in the struggle of the world in the future.

The cause which makes these higher systems of Power possible has been designated in these chapters the emotion of the ideal. Many years ago William James graphically described in the first edition of his Textbook of Psychology the manner in which this cause of illimitable Power mainly represented in the mind of woman works in the individual. He did not call the cause the emotion of the ideal. He did not deal with its transmission through the social heredity or with its wide effects as related to Power as I have discussed these matters here. But within the limits that confine it, James's description of the manner in which the emotion of the ideal works in the mind of the individual is complete and of the first importance. There is enshrined within me, as within every one of us, says James, an inner man. This inner or real man he describes to be the ideal social or other regarding self.

It may be remote [he continues], it may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime. I may even expect the future generations, which would approve of me if they knew me, to know nothing about me when I am gone. Yet still the emotion which beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self.

James proceeds then to analyse the workings of this cause in the mind of the individual almost up to the point at which we begin to be concerned with its collective function as the vehicle of illimitable Power.

"What is the nature of the ideal social self?" asks James. The reply is to the effect that it is a self which seeks to set up within the individual nothing less than the standards of Universal Mind. They are the same standards of Absolute or Universal Mind which we attribute to God. It is characteristic of this inner self that, to quote James's words, "it can find its adequate socius only in an ideal world." All social progress, he continues, consists in the substitution of higher standards for lower; and it is the distinctive quality of this inner tribunal that it sets up the highest standard of all that of Universal Mind. "Most men," he concludes, " either continually or occasionally carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition."

It is in making the standards of this other-regarding self the basis of the social inheritance, and in the organization and transmission of' this inheritance under the influence of the emotion of the ideal, that there lies the road to the attainment of any object that a people may set before itself. Once the influence of the ideal is imposed upon the individual by social heredity, as described in Chapter V, he can never escape from it. It is this creation of the ideal, and the organization of the minds upon which it is imposed into the collective will, that constitute the first objective in the science of Power in the future of the world.

From time immemorial the interests in which Power has expressed itself through the self-regarding emotions have imposed their will on the world. The systems of Power, acknowledging no law and no morality but their own advantage, to which the interests resting on self have given rise, have organized themselves until they have filled the world in the past with the stress and fury of their activities. But never hitherto have the higher systems of Power which rest on the other-regarding emotions organized themselves through-out civilization with similar intensity, determined to obtain control of the social inheritance and determined to impose on the world the ideals which they have the power of realizing in civilization.

In considering the principles of Power in its highest forms, the significance and the reach in the era that is before us of the principles of the inner mind of woman become now more clearly visible. As soon as we perceive the character of the conditions assembled in the world it is evident that all systems of political utilitarianism founded on self-interest, such as those which Bentham, the Mills, and Herbert Spencer helped to build up in Britain, and all the systems of military utilitarianism in which self is glorified, as in the system which modern Germany sought to establish in the West, must pass in time to the rubbish-heap. Their final condemnation lies in the fact that, despite all appearance to the contrary, they have no ultimate validity as systems of Power. As soon as civilization knows its own mind and perceives its own objective, with the means and instruments to attain it, it will be perceived, strange as it may appear, that these systems have not a chance in the long run in the stern struggle of the world. They will all go down in the end before the long-range, long-sequence, integrating systems of Power of which the meaning transcends self and all the interests of self, of which the centre of gravity is always in the future and of which the history in all the stages constitutes that vast, tragic, ennobling, world-building drama of subordination and duty resting on sacrifice. These are the systems organized in the highest degree and therefore powerful in the highest degree, towards which life by the laws inherent in it must evolve in the social integration.

To the evolutionist who understands his subject and who has once firmly grasped in all its bearings the leading fact that the science of evolution is the science of Power, the conclusion suggested in these chapters begins here to present itself with great strength as a conviction. He sees clearly that the part which he has played in the past will not remain to the fighting male. It is the mind of woman which is destined to take the lead in the future of civilization as the principal instrument of Power.

It will be recognized in time as a fact beyond dispute that it is in the mind of woman that there is reached the completest expression of the sum of the other regarding emotions which has been defined throughout these chapters as the emotion of the ideal. Schopenhauer spoke with an insight in advance of all the philosophers and reasoners of his century when he described woman as the being of the race rather than of the individual. It is woman who, in the long aeons of evolutionary stress out of which her mind has emerged, has ever been, by reason of her relations to the man on the one hand, and to the next generation on the other, the creature in the constitution of whose mind, to a far greater extent than in the case of the mind of a man, the interests of the future, the distant, and the universal have been represented. She has lived continually in every kind of motive and emotion driving her to express herself in others and to subordinate the present to the future.

The struggle of woman with Power for untold ages has thus been a struggle which has gradually brought her mind far closer to the principles of the universal mind than the mind of man. It is for this reason that, as we saw in the last chapter, woman naturally and instinctively subordinates interest to principle. The secret of man's progress is that he has gradually released into the service of civilization, ever at higher and higher levels, all the stern, qualities of the chase and the fight bred in him through long ages of primitive struggle. But when the emotion of the ideal in woman, similarly bred in her through the long stages of our primitive past, is in like manner released into the service of civilization, the effect will transcend the effect of man's qualities. Woman as a sex will reveal in these circumstances the same power of devotion to ideals, to causes, as she does to persons. Her relationship to the future through the long eras of her evolution in the past has permanently endowed woman's mind with a capacity for self-sacrifice and renunciation, persisting through every variety of opposition and of suffering even to death, which is the highest product of the other regarding emotions, and which in woman is without any superior example in the whole realm of mind.

The elemental hunger of civilization at the present moment is for a public opinion able to subordinate the present to the future for a public opinion, that is to say, which would express through the collective will just the qualities which are here described as reaching in woman their highest expression. By no other means can civilization secure to itself the capacity to rise above the rule of the systems of Power, knowing no law but their own interests, than by this, namely, a public opinion which is touched with and sustained by emotion in the manner described in Chapter V. The miracle which was related in that chapter as taking place in every lifetime in the will of the individual, when he is made to pass irrevocably into another world by the influence on him of the internal standards set up in his mind through the cultural inheritance, is a miracle which under proper conditions is bound to be wrought equally in the collective will.

This direction of the collective will through the cultural inheritance to definite ends over long stretches of time has become the most urgent need of civilization. But the fact of the age which goes deeper than any other is that the male mind of the race, as the result of the conditions out of which it has come, is by itself incapable of rendering this service to civilization. It is in the mind of woman that the winning peoples of the world will find the psychic centre of Power in the future.

The immense importance of the cultural heredity of civilization imposed on the mind of the young of each generation under the influence of the emotion of the ideal was described in Chapter V. It is the most pregnant fact in the history of Power as written in the struggles of modern peoples. Any end towards which the will of civilization is directed in this manner has become possible of attainment. Any existing institution of the world can be altered or transformed in a brief period.

The bearing of these facts has already become visible to the occupying interests in civilization. Under a multitude of aspects it has become the chief aim of the interests which have ruled in the past to move the world now through the organization of opinion and to enlist the emotion of the ideal in the service of their own schemes of Power.

But this to the occupying interests of the past is an infinitely difficult task. For these interests cannot enlist this quality, not maintain it, not inspire it, except at its lowest levels. It is an important fact that it has never been possible in history to organize on a large scale and to steadily direct over long periods of time to a clearly de-fined end in the service of civilization the emotion of the ideal at its highest potentiality. The reason has been that it has not been possible hitherto to carry the emotion of the ideal into action on a universal scale except through the male mind. Civilization has therefore never been able to enlist in its service at the highest level of possible achievement this capacity of mind. The chief reservoir of it as it exists in the race is in the mind of woman, and it has never been uncovered. This is the most significant fact in the science of Power.

It may be observed that it is this struggle between the characteristic standards of mind that express themselves in man, and the characteristic standards of mind that express themselves in woman, which has come to dominate all the leading activities of civilization. The overwhelming heredity of the fight compels every form of Power expressing itself through men, and particularly through men of the Western races, towards that objective of self-realization in the present which is distinctive of the male mind. All the standards of conduct to the influence of which war is due are essentially standards of the self-regarding emotions thus driving men to self-realization in the present. "There are no Rights in the world like Mine." "There are no People in the world like Us." "There is no To-morrow in the world like To-day." These are the cries which have from the beginning represented the elemental emotions underlying war. They carry a challenge to the primary law of civilization with its centre of gravity in the future as deep-seated as is the challenge of the highwayman to the first law of ordered society.

Nothing can ever reconcile this elemental antagonism between the principles of civilization and the principles of war. One side must ultimately annihilate the other. But no material or economic cause, no agreement between nations can in itself abolish war. War can never be brought to an end until the cultural inheritance of civilization imposed on each generation from childhood onwards under the influence of the emotion of the ideal renders it as impossible for a nation to engage in war and lose that principal motive of self-respect which makes life worth living as it is now impossible for the normal civilized man, apart from any question whatever of material loss or gain or punishment, to engage in robbery or murder.

It is one of the most remarkable facts of human nature that the emotion of the ideal, which is the sum and highest form of the other-regarding emotions, is hardly represented at all in the male mind when the wide and particularly the future interests of civilization are concerned. Alike in the history of its external State policy and in the history written in its own statute books, nearly every Western country bears witness to this fact. The spirit of the saying noted by Durkheim as attributed to the Emperor of Germany, that, "For me, humanity ends at the Vosges,"1 is not peculiar to any country. It is the true inborn spirit of the heredity of the fighting male of the West coming down from ages before the dawn of history.

The inability to subordinate the present to the future is a pronounced characteristic of civilization under the rule of the male mind. While Western countries, in order to carry on war, have drawn mortgages on the future which stagger the imagination, there had not arisen up to the date of the world war of 1914 any democracy which possessed the power of subordinating itself to an ideal in the future even to the limited extent of paying off its national debt in times of peace in the interests of posterity. The lack of this capacity to conceive the importance of the future is visible in nearly all public and class movements in the West. How many workmen, asks a living writer, with the object of reducing all such ideal-isms to absurdity, would refuse an annuity of £200 a year on the chance that by doing so he might raise the rate of wages i per cent. 300 years hence? The more practical the nation, the more successful the class of men in the struggle for their own interests, the more absurd does such a standard of renunciation appear to them.

As soon as we get down to the realities which lie behind the science of Power in civilization, it will be perceived that in all that pertains to the emotion of the ideal at those higher levels at which it is most powerfully capable of influencing public opinion in sustained effort directed to an objective beyond the present, the mind of woman has in reality already outstripped the mind of the male of the race by an entire era of evolution. It is not without significance that in the four principal forms of activity through which public opinion in the West is influenced most directly and on the largest scale, namely, in art, literature, philosophy, and religion, all the principal revolutionary and developmental movements in recent times have a common meaning which is related to this fact. They are all best summed up as movements which represent the effort of the male mind to reach consciously, through slow, laborious, and painful stages and by an entirely different road, the position which is already woman's by inborn inheritance.

In the recent leading article, the Times, in commenting on a letter of Sir Martin Conway, in its columns, called attention to a remarkable change which has been silently taking place under our eyes over a long period in the standards of art in the West. 1 The chief aspect of this change was pointed out to consist in the fact that, to summarize Sir Martin Conway's words, we are gradually losing sense of all the formative arts (meaning thereby arts like painting and sculpture) as a means of expression, the products of such arts coming to be regarded merely as decorative objects; while, on the other hand, the greatest living art of the present is tending more and more to find its expression in literature and similar mediums through which the world is being powerfully moved by the creation of opinion.

Now the clue to development in art, as in all other forms of human activity, is the underlying relationship to Power. The beginning and end of the meaning inherent in art is capable of being expressed in a single word — Emotion. All art is nothing else than the capacity of rendering emotion contagious and so of becoming an instrument of Power by influencing human action. The history of development in art is, therefore, the history of the development in the artist of the power of rendering emotion contagious at various levels, as mind in evolution gradually rises from the standpoint of the individual in the self-regarding emotions to the standpoint of the universal in the other-regarding emotions. This is the fundamental law of progress in art and it is identical in meaning with the fundamental law of progress in ethics.

What, then, is the significance of the transition in current Western art described by Sir Martin Conway, for in it we are called to witness the products of the formative arts like sculpture and painting declining from the function of living art and coming to be regarded merely as decorative objects, while the greatest art of to-day is tending to find its expression in literature and similar mediums?

The true answer to this question carries us far. It is doubtless to this effect. The characteristic art of the West in the past, which has expressed itself through formative mediums like sculpture and painting, is the art of the era of the ascendancy in the world of the fighting male. It is, therefore, art which, as Tolstoy with profound intuition perceived, is essentially pagan in character. 1 It is the art of which Grant Allen tried to give, and in large measure succeeded in giving us, the true Darwinian principles in his Physiological Esthetics. In it there is expressed, over and above everything else, the feelings and emotions through which the individual was rendered successful in the struggle for his own interests, and through which the individual, thus successful, became the dominant power in creation. The formative art of the West is, in short, the art of all the world which most profoundly expresses the psychology of the male.

That the essentially male psychology of the formative arts of the West, which glorifies the self-regarding emotion under every aspect, is the cause which directs and rules the artist in all his efforts, may be observed on every hand. The reflective observer who walks through the ancient sculptures in the Grecian and Roman galleries of the British Museum, and who then carries his mind to the similar effects reproduced in modern statuary in the open spaces and public buildings of London, will have this impression bred immovable within him. He will have it confirmed and reinforced in an unmistakable manner by an extended study of the art of Europe as it is ex-pressed in sculpture in almost every Western city.

The effect aimed at in the art of statuary is everywhere the same throughout the West. In groups without number of classical and sham classical statues and effigies the sustained effort in sculpture is to glorify or deify almost every human attribute through which the self-regarding emotions can be expressed in their most intense form. Representations of athletes, winged figures, helmeted warriors, dying heroes; representations of struggles, duels, rapes, battles; representations of youths, men, women, crowds, animals; representations, in short, of power and mastery in every position and adventure are intended to make contagious admiration for the qualities through which the self-regarding emotions can be expressed at their highest power.

This spirit has reached in Europe in the cities of modern Prussia a peculiar efflorescence, which has been contemporaneous with the development in Germany of the intellectual and military standards described in previous chapters. A recent writer,1 describing the remarkable effects to be witnessed in a view of the Schlossbruecke and Museum at Berlin, recapitulates the enormous number of groups and the attitudes portrayed.

To crown everything [he continues], and to introduce strikingly the Prussian symbol, above the plinth of the main entrance of the Museum are no fewer than eighteen representations of the Prussian eagle. Thus, on a space of ground represented by a frontage of what cannot be much more than fifty yards, there are to be seen no fewer than forty-nine classical representations in stone of one attribute or personality and another.

The dominant aim in all the effects, whether represented thus or on a less ambitious scale, scarcely ever varies. Expressed in sculpture in all its forms in the West, this aim is to typify the self-regarding emotions and to portray them triumphing in the most perfect living instruments of force.

In the sister art of painting, the underlying influence is not so visible at first sight. But the discriminating mind soon perceives that the influence of the same dominating male psychology pervades all its expressions. It may be distinguished how it penetrates to details, even in an art like landscape painting. "How the aesthetic value of a picture of a wood is enhanced," says Schopenhauer, the typical pagan of the West, "if the artist paints, as he should, a solitary pine standing out above the others, high and erect towards heaven." Why? Because, in the formative arts of the West, the meaning which the artist seeks to utter always springs from a sub-conscious psychology which is profoundly male. Unconsciously the fighting mind realizes and revels in every feature and detail which suggest to it the omnipotence of force. In the detail of the solitary pine standing out high and erect towards heaven, it translates into contagious emotion the symbol of power thus portrayed as conquering gravity.

This tendency in art is in conflict with the deepest and most characteristic evolutionary tendency underlying Western civilization. All the leading movements in modern art, from Pre-Raphaelism to Post-Impressionism and Futurism, reflect phases of the meaning of the struggle between these two forces engaged. The monstrous inspiration which Western art inherited from the ancient civilizations was that of the self-regarding emotions triumphing through the perfection of the living instruments of force. The formative arts have been the chief mediums through which this inspiration has been interpreted.

But the inspiration which underlies all the for-ward movements in the civilization of our time, is that of the triumph of the other-regarding emotions through the belief that the life of the individual is related to ends and principles which transcend in importance every present interest in the world around us.

It is for this reason that the tendency in our time is for the greatest art of the day to become more and more what may be termed invisible art. The highest art is, therefore, seeking to express itself in the mediums through which the emotion of the ideal, which, it must be remembered, is itself the sum of the other-regarding emotions, can be most profoundly influenced. These mediums are not the formative arts. The chief vehicles of this art have now become the word and the spirit, and its highest expressions, as Sir Martin Conway described, are in literature and similar mediums through which the world is being powerfully moved. Its exponents, therefore, are the master minds of literature the seers of the visions of the writers, the poets, the reformers, the teachers who create the mind of the rising generation under the influence of emotion. They are the inspirers of causes, the founders of faiths, the sustainers of the ideal, the authors of those great policies of mind in which the human spirit, rising through contagious emotion from the individual to the universal, is transmitting, through the cultural inheritance, an accumulating power to subordinate itself in civilization to the spiritual meaning which is immanent in the world. And the meaning which underlies it is Power, always Power. It is the systems in which this inspiration lies in its highest might and reality which will win out over all competition in the future of the world.

The characteristic inspiration which is accompanying this development in which the imaginative and emotional literature of the West has become the medium of the highest art, is a very striking phenomenon. In the imaginative literature of all the peoples of the modern West as contrasted with the literature of all other people and all other times, the outstanding feature is the position acceded to woman. In the current literature of the Western world woman stands triumphant as the central figure. In it, as I have stated elsewhere, wherever man becomes an idealist it is almost invariably woman who is the measure of his idealism. It is to the mind of woman that he brings all his ideals, to prove them and to claim support for them. Almost without exception, it is woman who inspires the strongest deeds, the deepest passions, the highest idealisms of men throughout the imaginative literature of our time.

This fact, which is the most distinctive feature of the idealism of the modern West in literature, stands out alike in poetry, in the drama, and in the modern novel. Since the rise of the novel in the sixteenth century, the idealization of Woman is the feature which has grown and deepened in this medium down to the present day. It has made of the novel the predominant form of West-ern literature. The standard, moreover, which this fact of the idealization of woman has set up in art has become so fundamental that, as I have shown, it has become a canon of art in the modern novel, that man cannot be represented as the higher idealist and woman as the lower cause which has dragged him down, without a sense of artistic disaster and a feeling of failure and outrage being created in the mind of the reader.

The highest expressions of living art in the West are, in short, coming more and more to have a very close relation to the great movements of opinion touched with emotion out of which the world is being organized into larger systems of Power. Genius expressed in its highest form through the medium of art is always the capacity in the artist to render contagious through the emotion of the ideal the power of subduing the immediate world and all its existing interests, to the larger meaning which is conceived to lie in the universal. The highest type of genius in the race has ever been, for this reason, that of the great religious teachers. The tendency in living West-ern art at present is a tendency through which the function of the artist is again approaching that of the great religious teacher.

The controlling meaning which stands out in this progressive tendency in Western art amounts to this. We are watching in art, under a great number of phases, what I have described as the conscious and infinitely laborious effort of the male mind to reach by slow and painful stages, and by a different road, a position which the mind of woman has already attained in the evolutionary process. In the position which it now occupies, the mind of woman is greatly in advance of the mind of the male of the race, in the development in it of those qualities upon which Power in civilization will rest to an increasing degree in the future.

This clue to the upward transition in art is the clue to progress in all its phases. The advance therein represents the developing challenge to the triumph in the past of the world of the self-regarding emotions. But it is the qualities characteristic of the mind of woman which are bound to form the principal basis of Power in this significant change.

Tolstoy's insight was true when he asserted that it is the ideal of the other regarding emotions, as seen in that conception of the brotherhood of man which lies behind all the winning developments of civilization, which will supply the dominating influence in Western art in the future. This concept of the oneness of humanity in which the future becomes greater than the present has been, like the concept of God, inherent from the beginning in the process in which evolution is following in history the line of maximum Power. And the upward development which both concepts represent is under all its forms a development towards the ascendancy in the world of qualities that have attained a higher development in the mind of woman than they have reached in the mind of the male.

Progress in the standards of ethics in the West has the same underlying significance as this development which is taking place in the standards of art. Power in civilization, whatever the length and stress of the historical process through which the principle is established, always rests in the last resort on the displacement of the lower standards of ethics by the higher. The character of this development in which the higher standards in ethics are displacing the lower has never been more illuminatingly summarized than in a brief sentence by Green. The command in human conduct, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy-self, has never varied, said Green in effect; all that has varied in the upward progress of humanity is "the practical answer to the question, Who is my neighbour?"

Progress in ethics is, in short, to be described as the gradual extension of the reach of the other-regarding emotions till it includes the universal. The reasoning capacity of mind has no part in this world-shaping transition. The principal instrument of Power accomplishing the development has consisted always and altogether in qualities of emotion which have their chief expression in the mind of woman. God is the highest concept to which mind is carried by the emotion of the ideal. The command, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, is the highest term of the commandment, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

It will be seen at no distant date that the fundamental mistake made by the leaders of the intellectual movement which has pursued its course in the Western world since the Reformation has consisted in this. In identifying the progress of the world with the development in history of the rationalizing process of mind they have misconceived the basis of Power in civilization. Power in civilization rests ultimately on knowledge which is conveyed through emotion and not through the reasoning processes of mind.

There is a remarkable passage in the literature of the West, in which the blinding light of this conclusion and its bearing is seen as it first flashes on the mind of one of the leading rationalists of our time. In an essay on the influence of the ethic of renunciation as it has been the inspiration of conduct in the great religions, Karl Pearson finds himself towards the conclusion of his argument facing this position. "A predisposition or a prejudice having absolutely no rational basis may," so he puts it, " have a social value and tend to preserve an individual or a group of individuals in the struggle for existence. Do we not here," so he ponders, "catch a glimpse of how a nearly universal predisposition may exist without our being able to give it a rational basis?" The enlightened and reasoning individual, he continues, may renounce for himself as untrue or as a delusion the doctrines of sacrifice and subordination as taught by the great religions. "But can such renunciation become a general rule? May not the non-renouncing sections ultimately survive?"

The answer to Karl Pearson's last question here placed in italics is that by necessity inherent in the evolutionary process, of which Darwin gave us the laws in a lower stage, it is the non-renouncing sections in this sense alone of the race which will ultimately survive. It is an answer which closes the rationalistic controversy in the West. Truth and falsehood in the sense in which Karl Pearson uses them have no meaning. For Truth is the Science of Power. Truth, therefore, does not make its way in the world by controversy or reason. Its standards in the social integration are incomprehensible to the pagan mind. Con-fronted in the systems of the world with the standards of the pagan era, the exponents of Truth stand like Christ before Pilate's judgment seat. They answer nothing. They represent the Science of Power. The Facts of the world to which they belong have not yet arrived.

A question which will have risen to the minds of many throughout this chapter is this : Can it be in keeping with the order of the evolutionary process that the mind of woman, which has hitherto occupied a position of inferiority, should thus become in a relatively brief period the principal instrument of Power in the world?

It may be laid down as a rule in the history of evolution that all the great developments which have carried life into new horizons have arisen in the same way. They were based on qualities previously developed in obscurity and in conditions of apparent inferiority. But as soon as the conditions of the new era were assembled in the world, the qualities which had hitherto appeared inferior were ready to assume the function which was to carry the world into an entirely new era of progress.

Thus it was that the land forms of life, now the dominant types in the world, were developed from forms which, though possessing in embryo the qualities required in the new era, would have appeared to an observer as quite inferior types in the midst of those then dominant in the ocean. Similarly among the land types, in the long era of the dominance of the fighting types of life possessing huge bodies or clothed in defensive armour, there were developed, amongst forms appearing quite subordinate and inferior at the time, those qualities of brain which were to become the dominant factor in the struggle of types, and which were destined to carry life into new horizons.

So again in the era which dawned in life when the transmission of the accumulated results of past training in the individual became possible through language in the primates, no limited intelligence could have foreseen the nature of the new horizon into which life was to be carried through such qualities developed in conditions of apparent inferiority. For the primates would have appeared to have had stamped upon them all the marks of inferiority and even defeat in the struggle for existence in their adaptation to an arboreal life as a retreat from the forceful ascendant forms which then crowded the plains and valleys of the world. Every comparative student of form and function in the development of life down to the later phases represented in the struggle between races and civilizations, and even in the conflict between human institutions, will be able to multiply these examples indefinitely.

It may be laid down that all the eras of progress in which life has been carried to new horizons have had their origin in qualities developed thus in special conditions, qualities which would have been judged by prevailing standards to be associated with inferiority in the midst of the types then dominant. When the changing conditions of the world offered the opportunity, the qualities thus developed were ready to assume the function suitable to the new era which made the type of life possessing them a dominant one in evolution.

In the social integration the governing principle slowly rising into sight in the modern struggle of the world is that civilization rests on the social emotion. The principal instrument of the social emotion is the mind of woman. Power in the future of civilization is the science of the organization in society of the emotion of the ideal. The people who first grasp this tremendous lesson in all its practical bearings will have the world at their feet.

This is the lesson which the Emperor William II sought through the elementary school-teachers of Prussia to interpret to civilization in the world-compelling history of modern Germany. The lesson remains in all its mind-subduing significance, despite the calamitous misdirection, despite the tremendous misinterpretation.

I carry to the end of my life the memory of a certain summer afternoon in the year 1908. It was my place to deliver to the University of Ox-ford the Herbert Spencer Lecture for the year.1 In the restrained and sobered language suitable to the occasion I endeavoured to convey the message I had to deliver. To the audience present I endeavoured gently to break it, that the world into which they had been born was dead. Those who were still young, I said, would probably live to see great happenings. The rule of the old individualistic theories of Power upon which the world, and in particular the mind of England, had been nurtured in history had passed for ever. My message was that it was the beliefs and the conceptions possessing the power of organizing the minds of men through long stretches of time into systems of action in which the present was subordinated to an ideal in the future which would rule the world in the times at hand. I did not hesitate to apply the message in the prediction to which I passed.

The next age will probably be the age of the Germanization of the world. For it is those lessons of which the first stages have been displayed in the history of modern Prussia which are likely to be worked out in their fuller applications by successful States in the future.

This message to the mind of England of a few years ago was as words fallen on sand. Even William James, who listened to the lecture and who spoke to me in the name of the United States, took me to task afterwards for this prophecy.

The world which existed then has been wiped out of our Western age as if a sponge had closed its record in history. Its ruling principles have been deposed. The example of organized Power given by Germany in the world war which began in 1914 has changed for ever the direction of the main currents of Western history. It was an example of stupendous power misconceived and misdirected to the revival in the West of the ideals of Power characteristic of the pagan past. But the significance of the example remains for ever in the lesson which was given to the world as to the almost superhuman reach of organized power based on the emotion of the ideal in the collective mind.

The message which is conveyed to civilization in this war is in all its fundamental meaning the message which I attempted to deliver to Oxford in 1908, namely, that Power in the future of the world will be to the peoples who find the true application of the lessons of which the first stages have been displayed in the history of modern Prussia. In this lesson, the first step is to the knowledge that Power in the future of civilization is the science of the emotion of the ideal in the collective mind. The second step is to the knowledge that the principal instrument in the race of the science of the emotion of the ideal is in the mind of woman.