The course of my argument is now apparent. As logic and ethics have a relation only to man, it was not to be expected that woman would stand in any better position with regard to æsthetics. Æsthetics and logic are closely interconnected, as is apparent in philosophy, in mathematics, in artistic work, and in music. I have now shown the intimate relation of æsthetics to ethics. As Kant showed, æsthetics, just as much as ethics and logic, depend on the free will of the subject. As the woman has not free will, she cannot have the faculty of projecting beauty outside herself. The foregoing involves the proposition that woman cannot love. Women have made no ideal of man to correspond with the male conception of the Madonna. What woman requires from man is not purity, chastity, morality, but something else. Woman is incapable of desiring virtue in a man. It is almost an insoluble riddle that woman, herself incapable of love, should attract the love of man. It has seemed to me a possible myth or parable, that in the beginning, when men became men by some miraculous act of God, a soul was bestowed only on them. Men, when they love, are partly conscious of this deep injustice to woman, and make the fruitless but heroic effort to give her their own soul. But such a speculation is outside the limits of either science or philosophy. I have now shown what woman does not wish; there remains to show what she does wish, and how this wish is diametrically opposed to the will of man. CHAPTER XII THE NATURE OF WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE IN THE UNIVERSE “Erst Mann und Weib zusammen Machen den Menschen aus.”--KANT.