That which has been woman's natural endowment from all beginning,
the blending of spiritual and sensual love, man looks upon and desires
to-day as his highest erotic ideal. His chaotic sexual impulse, the
inheritance of the past, appears to him low and base in the presence of
her in whom sexuality has always been blended with love; his worship,
intensified until it reached the metaphysical, seems to him unfounded
and eccentric before her who has ever been and ever will be entirely
human, and who is perfect in his eyes because she possesses what he is
striving after. This and nothing else is the meaning of the vague
statement that in all matters pertaining to love woman occupies a higher
position than man. She is always the same; he is always new and
problematical; never perfect, he falls into error and sin where she
cannot err, for her instinct is nature herself, and she knows not the
meaning of sin. Whatever burden man has laid upon her, she has borne it
patiently and silently; she has allowed him to worship her as a goddess
and stigmatise her as a fiend, while all the time she remained
problemless and natural, inwardly remote from the aberrations in which
her intellect believed so readily.
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