However powerful these emotions of the senses and of the soul may have become, there is always the possibility—for the reasons just given—that the mighty stream of tenderness may dry up, if its supply be cut off, and that thus humanity may lose its most indispensable motive power in the development of civilisation. Our destiny is shaped, not only by what we have experienced, but also by what we have turned aside to avoid experiencing. Our conscious ego is made up of our states of mind, the images, feelings, and thoughts which through our earlier life have become our inner property; and which by certain processes are connected with each other and with our present ego. The less these images, feelings, and thoughts in a woman’s past life have been determined by the sense of motherhood—intuitive or actual,—the less valuable will be the “ego” she has to assert, or the destiny she shapes for herself. And the woman whom no higher reason keeps from motherhood is a parasite upon the parent stem. The majority of these women have not even a deeper meaning in their claim to “live their own life.” They fritter themselves away in many directions and do not get much profit by the process—since it is only great feelings which give great rewards. These women, who thus without more ado renounce motherhood, have they ever held a child, not in their bosom, but even in their arms? Have they ever felt the thrill of tenderness such a soft-limbed creature, made, as it seems, of a flower’s soft surfaces and fair tints, inspires? Have they ever fallen in worship before the great and marvellous world that we thoughtlessly call “a little child’s soul”? If they have not, then we can understand these poor women, who do not perceive their poverty, wishing to make the rich as poor as themselves—whereas all the poor should be made rich. If this “liberation” of woman’s personality succeeds, it may go with her as with the princess in the story, who found herself in the rain outside the kingdom she had given up for a toy. In a modern poem a woman, when offered as a consolation the thought that childlessness will spare her many sufferings, exclaims: _Spared! To be spared what I was born to have: I am a woman and this my flesh Demands its nature’s pangs, its rightful throes, And I implore with vehemence these pains!_ (STEPHEN PHILLIPS.) When this ceases to be the desire and the choice of woman, then the prophecies of pessimistic thinkers of the voluntary extinction of the human race will be in a fair way to be realised. But in that case women would not possess the nobility which a logical reading of the world’s processes implies: they would only operate like a wheel unconsciously rolling towards the abyss.