Nietzsche speaks also of the “veil” of beautiful possibilities with which woman is covered, and which makes the charm of her life. This undefinable spiritual emanation, this dark, irrational element in woman, led von Hippel to coin the clever phrase that woman is a comma, man a full-stop. “With man, you know where you are--you have come to an end; but with woman, there is something more to be expected.” From this inward nature of woman there proceed immense results: the feminine essence is a civilizing factor of the first rank; were woman wanting, civilization would be non-existent. Very beautifully has the great Buckle drawn attention to the indispensability of woman for the spiritual progress of mankind. He remarks that men, the slaves of experience and of fact, have only the women to thank for the fact that their slavery has not become much more complete and more narrowing. Women’s way of thinking, their spiritual care, their intercourse, their influence, diffuse themselves unnoticed through the whole of society, and take their place throughout its entire structure. By means of this influence, more than by any other cause, we men have been conducted, says Buckle, to a completely thought-out world. This obscure, wonderful nature of woman has, however, its shadowy side. Upon it depends that primitive, deeply-rooted =antipathy of the sexes=, which is due to their profound heterogeneity, to the impossibility that they can ever really understand one another. Herein lie the roots of the brutal enslavement of woman by man in the course of history; of the belief in witchcraft; of contempt for women, and the continued renewal of theoretical misogyny. The victory of sexual love over this contrast is often apparent only. Leopardi, and Theophile Gautier (in “Mademoiselle de Maupin”), have shown how little woman understands the inner nature of man; how little man understands woman has been poetically described by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. For this reason, true love is an understanding of the contrasted natures, a solution of the riddle. “Être aimé, c’est être compris,” says Delphine de Girardin. What significance for the so-called “woman’s question” has the determination of the existence of psychical sexual differences? We answer: =The nature of woman, completely developed in all her peculiarities, and enriched throughout her being by all the spiritual elements of our times adequate to her being, ensures her an equal share in civilization and in the progress of humanity.=