But this involves more than a thorough transformation of the present conditions of production; for we are here face to face with the profoundest movement of the time, woman’s desire of freedom as a human being and as a personality, and in this we are confronted with the greatest tragic conflict the world’s history has hitherto witnessed. For if it is tragic enough for an individual or a nation relentlessly to seek out its innermost ego and to follow it even to destruction—how tragic will it not be, when the same applies to half of humanity? Such a tragedy is profound even when it occurs in the struggle between what are usually called the “good” and “evil” powers in man—a form of speech which followers of the religion of Life have given up, since they know that so-called crime may also increase human nature and human worth; that what is profoundly human may appear as evil and yet be healthy and beautiful, since it involves the enhancement of life. But infinitely greater will be the tragedy when the conflict arises between powers unquestionably good—those in the highest sense life-enhancing—and not even between secondary powers of this order, but between the very highest, the fundamental powers themselves, the profoundest conditions of being. That is how woman’s tragic problem now stands, if we leave out of consideration the egoists just alluded to and turn our eyes to the majority: woman’s nature against man’s nature, exercise of power in order to satisfy the claims of the member of the race or those of the personality. If Shakespeare came back to earth, he would now make Hamlet a woman, for whom the question “to be or not to be” would be full of a double pathos: the eternal terror of the human race and the new terror of the female sex before its own riddle; the bearer of the most refined spiritual consciousness of the time, and therefore—while forced by circumstances to make a decision—a victim of hesitancy, doubt, and fortuity. As true as that all life is a development of force, so is it that happiness is an ever more complete use of one’s powers, ever richer in promise for the future, in the direction of their greatest aptitude. But when these aptitudes lead in two contrary directions, then the soul is in the same position as the wanderers in the legend of Theseus, whom the “pine-benders” bound to the tops of two trees. The struggle that woman is now carrying on is more far-reaching than any other; and if no diversion occurs, it will finally surpass in fanaticism any war of religion or race. The woman’s movement circles round the periphery of the question without finding any radius to its centre, which is the limitation of human existence to time and space; the limitation of the soul in the power of simultaneously giving itself up to different spheres of thought and feeling, and the limitation of the body in the capacity for bearing a constantly increased burden.