That such principles of maleness and femaleness must be accepted as theoretical conceptions, and not as metaphysical ideas, was the point of this investigation from the beginning. The whole object of the book has been to settle the question, in man at least, of the really important differences between man and woman, quite apart from the mere physiological-sexual differentiation. Furthermore, the view which sees nothing more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than an arrangement for physiological division of labour--an idea for which, I believe, the zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is responsible--appears, according to this work, quite untenable; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a superficial and intellectually complacent view. Darwinism, indeed, is responsible for making popular the view that sexually differentiated organisms have been derived from earlier stages in which there was no sexual dimorphism; but long before Darwin, Gustav Theodor Fechner had already shown that the sexes could not be supposed to have arisen from an undifferentiated stage by any principle such as division of labour, adaptation to the struggle for existence, and so forth. The ideas “man” and “woman” cannot be investigated separately; their significance can be found out only by placing them side by side and contrasting them. The key to their natures must be found in their relations to each other. In attempting to discover the nature of erotics I went a little way into this subject. The relation of man to woman is simply that of subject to object. Woman seeks her consummation as the object. She is the plaything of husband or child, and, however we may try to hide it, she is anxious to be nothing but such a chattel. No one misunderstands so thoroughly what a woman wants as he who tries to find out what is passing within her, endeavouring to share her feelings and hopes, her experiences and her real nature. Woman does not wish to be treated as an active agent; she wants to remain always and throughout--this is just her womanhood--purely passive, to feel herself under another’s will. She demands only to be desired physically, to be taken possession of, like a new property. Just as mere sensation only attains reality when it is apprehended, _i.e._, when it becomes objective, so a woman is brought to a sense of her existence only by her husband or children--by these as subjects to whom she is the object--so obtaining the gift of an existence.