The conclusion which we have to draw,
and which touches the foundation of the psychology of both sexes, is
that only man's emotions have a history, while those of the woman have
undergone no change.
If there is a law by which the human race is reproduced in the
individual, then the so-called atavism in the shape of abnormality
cannot be the sudden, or apparently sudden reappearance of conditions
which once were normal and then disappeared; rather must it be the final
arrest of an individual on a previous and lower stage, preventing him
from reaching our standard in one or the other emotional sphere. The
more humanity a man has in him, the more perfectly will he repeat in his
life the stages through which the race has passed, or, in other words:
the oftener that which once quickened the heart of man is repeated and
surpassed, the greater is the possibility that new things may grow out
of it. Atavism therefore is not so much the persistence of the earlier
as the absence of the later stages.
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