Only when all this is realised can one conceive what the feelings of these new men must be when they meet those new women “who are no longer willing to be slaves of the instinct for the propagation of the race;” who see in motherhood “a loss of time from their work;” “an attack upon their beauty;” an obstacle to the refined conduct of life;—a conduct of life certain to debase woman’s worth as a child-bearing being, but to elevate her to that exquisite, perfect product of culture, a “woman of the world;” an obstacle also for woman as creator of other objective cultural values. If a man with a father’s desires finds himself united with such a woman, he finds himself in marriage quite as much a prostitute as innumerable wives have felt themselves to be when they were mere tools of a man’s desire. On the contrary the desire for the elevation of mankind on the part of the new woman and the new man, is evinced in the idea that not the quantity but the quality of the children they give to humanity is most significant; that a land of fewer but more perfect men is a higher culture ideal than the principle still always maintained from the point of view of national competition, that the inhabitants of a country must only be numerous however inferior they may be. To this wholly new evolutionary conception of life the amaternal women oppose the following train of thought which greatly influences the feeling and desire of women to-day[9]: Culture now sets new duties for woman, more significant than exclusively natural ones. The more the individual life increases in value, the more the interest for the mere functions of sex declines, and with it also the value of woman _as woman_ for a society where, because of motherhood, she has become a being of secondary rank. It evinces lack of ideality if one censures this tendency of the modern woman to renounce maternity for the sake of more spiritual interests. While the mother concentrates herself upon her own child only, the woman who renounces motherhood can extend her being to embrace children as children in general. As a mother, woman is only a being of nature. But the personality, with its multiplicity of feelings and endeavours, demands an independent activity as well as maternity.