The supremest moment in a woman’s life, when her original nature, her natural desire manifests itself, is that in which her own sexual union takes place. She embraces the man passionately and presses him to her; it is the greatest joy of passivity, stronger even than the contented feeling of a hypnotised person, the desire of matter which has just been formed, and wishes to keep that form for ever. That is why a woman is so grateful to her possessor, even if the gratitude is limited to the moment, as in the case of prostitutes with no memory, or, if it lasts longer, as in the case of more highly differentiated women. This endless striving of the poor to attach themselves to riches, the altogether formless and therefore super-individual striving of the inarticulate to obtain form by contact, to keep it indefinitely and so gain an existence, is the deepest motive in pairing. Pairing is only possible because woman is not a monad, and has no sense of individuality; it is the endless striving of nothing to be something. It is thus that the duality of man and woman has gradually developed into complete dualism, to the dualism of the higher and lower lives, of subject and object, of form and matter, something and nothing. All metaphysical, all transcendental existence is logical and moral existence; woman is non-logical and non-moral. She has no dislike for what is logical and moral, she is not anti-logical, she is not anti-moral. She is not the negation, she is, rather, nothing. She is neither the affirmation nor the denial. A man has in himself the possibility of being the absolute something or the absolute nothing, and therefore his actions are directed towards the one or the other; woman does not sin, for she herself is the sin which is a possibility in man. The abstract male is the image of God, the absolute something; the female, and the female element in the male, is the symbol of nothing; that is the significance of the woman in the universe, and in this way male and female complete and condition one another. Woman has a meaning and a function in the universe as the opposite of man; and as the human male surpasses the animal male, so the human female surpasses the female of zoology. It is not that limited existence and limited negation (as in the animal kingdom) are at war in humanity; what there stand in opposition are unlimited existence and unlimited negation. And so male and female make up humanity. The meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity. And so nothing is so despicable as a man become female, and such a person will be regarded as the supreme criminal even by himself. And so also is to be explained the deepest fear of man; the fear of the woman, which is the fear of unconsciousness, the alluring abyss of annihilation.