Behold the enemy of the people and of the revolution! II. I had proceeded thus far in my reply when, pausing to take breath and to reflect, I grew calm. What! said I to myself, have I then no more sense than to take in earnest that shapeless thing honored by the name of theory by the good people who are so bewildered by the noise of Proudhon's drum and tam-tam that they see stars at noon-day and the sun at midnight? Let me be calm, let me not give to the affair more importance than it possesses; and since I must set forth this thing to my readers, let me do it in a fitting tone. We will leave Proudhon to explain himself in his own words. No sooner had I taken this good resolution, than I evoked M. Proudhon, and said to him in all humility: Master, I come to you that you may define for me the nature of woman, and also something of the nature of man. PROUDHON. You do well, for I alone am capable of instructing you; listen then to me. "The complete human being, _adequate to his destiny_, I speak of the physical, is the male, who, through his virility, attains the highest degree of muscular and nervous tension comporting with his nature and end, and thence, the maximum of action in labor and in battle. "Woman is a DIMINUTIVE of man, lacking one organ to become a pubescent youth. "She is a _receptacle for the germs that man alone produces_, a place of _incubation_, like the earth for the seed of the wheat; an _organ inert_ in itself, and purposeless with respect to the woman. Such an organization--_presupposes the subordination of the subject_. "In herself, I speak still of the physical, woman has no reason to exist; _she is an instrument of reproduction_ which it has pleased nature to choose in preference to any other. "Woman, in this first count, is inferior to man: _a sort of mean term between him and the rest of the animal kingdom_."--_Justice_, Vol. III., etc. And remark that I am not alone in my opinion: "Woman is not only different from man," says Paracelsus, "she is different because she is lesser, because her sex constitutes for her one faculty less. Wherever virility is wanting, the subject is imperfect; wherever it is taken away, the subject deteriorates. Woman lacks nothing in the physical point of view except _to produce germs_. "Likewise, in the intellectual point of view, woman possesses perceptions, memory and imagination, she is capable of attention, reflection, and judgment; what does she lack? "The power of producing germs, that is, ideas.--_Id._