Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Hybrid Humanity is still amphibious; a creature living between two
planes, the Without and the Within, the Material and the Spiritual. And
like all amphibious creatures, the human species is, in a measure,
clumsy and imperfect. Because while fitted still with organs and
faculties that have adapted to a lower plane, it possesses likewise
organs and faculties that are adapting to a higher. Its powers thus
handicapped by requiring to engender the vital potential and the
developmental power to equip it with two orders of implement, neither
order has attained perfection of construction or of function. And both
ministering to the requirements of the other, necessarily hamper the
operations and mask the characteristics of the other.
The two sexes are making all the while for higher development, each
along routes of its contrary trend. Man develops human faculty in the
direction of the Outer and material plane of Being. Woman develops it in
the direction of the Inner and psychical plane.
Man transmits to woman a brain-hemisphere and powers ever further
increased and intensified in their relation to the concrete. Woman
transmits to man a brain-hemisphere ever further indrawn and illumined
in respect of the emotional and intrinsic. Woman's brain-hemisphere,
adapting to its concrete fellow, becomes increasingly empowered to
manifest, upon the outer plane, its own essential Woman-traits in Life
and Consciousness. Man's brain-hemisphere, adapting to its diviner
fellow, becomes increasingly illumined and inspired thereby to leaven
and exalt its concrete outlook and activities.
Man's brain, by way of its responsive adaptation to the brain of woman
interior to it in the zone of Mind, becomes thus ever more
sympathetically intelligent, or intuitive, in respect of human life and
conditions, of Science and the Arts; while losing nothing of its
Dominance and concrete power, but interpreting its operations in terms
of a profounder and a nobler Chivalry. Woman's brain becomes ever more
intelligently sympathetic and practically helpful; losing nothing of its
Recessiveness, or emotional impulse, but, on the contrary, intensifying
all its Woman-attributes by extending the range and the operations of
these in terms of a profounder and a nobler Altruism.
* * * * *
Because of their hybrid constitution, there is necessarily a borderland,
alike of faculty and function, wherein the organisation and the
characteristics of the sexes merge and approximate one another's trend
and traits. This borderland represents, however, the crudest and least
differentiated department of the personal and mental powers of both. It
is a zone of Neuterdom, and marks a grade of rudimentary organisation in
which the Sex-characteristics have not yet sufficiently diverged in
development, as clearly and finely to differentiate themselves as traits
of pure and unalloyed type.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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