Woman is not the only mammal for whom, apart from the peculiar form of the penis, the first approaches are painful; but there is perhaps no female who has better reason than the mole for fearing the male. Her vulva, exteriorly unperforated, is covered by hide, downy as that of the rest of her body; she must, to be fecundated, undergo a veritable surgical operation. One knows how these beasts live, burrowing in search of food, in long subterranean galleries, of which the wastage, pushed up here and there forms the mole-ridge. In rutting time, forgetting his hunting, the male starts in quest of a female; as soon as he divines her, he starts digging in her direction, furiously excavating the hostile earth. Feeling herself hunted, the female flees. Hereditary instinct makes her tremble before the tool which shall open her belly, before the redoubtable gimlet-armed penis which has perforated her mother and all her female ancestors. She flees, digs, as the male advances, cross-hatching tunnels in which her persecutor may end by losing his way; but the male also is educated by heredity: he does not follow the female but circles round her, heads her off, ends by catching her in an impasse, and while she is still ramming her blind muzzle into the earth, he grips, operates, fecundates. Charming emblem of modesty, this small, soft, black-pelted beast. What human virgin would show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who, alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her hands to open the walls, all her strength to flee from her suitor? Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in nature, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react, at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and the finest of them are those whose explanation we are forbidden to seek. Why is the she-bat violent, the she-mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole observes the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the rule? There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which we group in modes perceptible to our intelligence, facts which are always provisory, and which a change of perspective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the notion of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact into the logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a fashion of speaking, an abbreviation, a point of rest. The law is half the facts plus one. Every law is at the mercy of an accident, an unexpected encounter; and yet, without the idea of law all would be mere night in our consciousness. "The male," says Aristotle, in his Treatise on Generation, "represents the specific form, the female, the matter. She is passive, in so much as she is female; the male is active."