This superiority is the natural result of motherliness, which has gradually been developed in the female sex into immediate feeling for all that is weak and in want of help, all that is budding and growing. But it follows from this that if woman, by her participation in public life, is to provide a great, new, progressive element—then not only must she not lose the power of sympathy she already possesses; she must, on the contrary, intensify and extend it. Motherliness is not to be found in all those who are already mothers, and we have arrived indeed at the strange position that—while man is beginning to see how much society needs the motherly feeling—a number of women are no longer willing to become mothers, since their personal development and civil occupation would thus be interfered with. Nothing is more necessary than that woman should be intellectually educated for her new social mission. But if meanwhile she loses her womanly character, then she will come to the social mission like a farmer with a complete set of agricultural implements but no seed. In all private activity the individuality is the best seed, while, on the other hand, in the social field women will probably for a long time be most valuable owing to their universal-womanly character; for unfortunately it is still true in public life that individuality is frequently a hindrance to co-operation, which takes place rather through partisanship in interests and views than through the working together of diverging characters. It is only in rare cases that a non-party man has the chance of interposing in a decision. At present, woman may be able to influence society not as a single personality, but rather as a new and powerful principle, a great contribution of a hitherto unemployed element. Doubtless individual women—through mental superiority, intellectual development, strength of will, and powers of work—will bring a great increase of general human value to social work. But it will nevertheless be upon the difference in kind between the nature of man and woman that we must base our hope that women’s participation in the work of society will have far-reaching results. When women think themselves able to accomplish what the whole aggregate of man’s courage, genius, devotion, self-sacrifice, and idealism has hitherto not been able to do; when in every difference of opinion on man’s and woman’s nature they attribute to him every feminine failing in addition to his own, while claiming for themselves all man’s merits, then one can be certain only about woman’s superfluity for the time being. Woman’s right to participate in public life would, however, be in a bad way, if she could not bring to it something really indispensable, new, and peculiar to herself. This new thing is her idealism and enthusiasm, however finely and easily they may blaze up, since woman is so much more inflammable than man, so much more eager to translate her enthusiasm into action.