The amaternal assertion, that motherliness can be no higher than justice and truth, is an infuriating antithesis. It is as if one should assert that “air is better than water, or both better than bread.” Both assertions place the fundamental condition of life counter to other needs of life! Who shall exercise justice and truth when no new men are born? And, moreover, how shall justice and truth increase in mankind if children are not trained to a greater reverence for justice and a deeper love of truth? In order to fulfil this one office _of education_ well, mothers need their _universal human culture in its entirety_. But even if this were not so, if motherhood did not require the concentration of woman’s personality; even if motherliness remained only “primitive instinct,” yet this instinct, in the women who have guarded it, is more valuable for mankind than the universal human development of power of the women who have lost this instinct. No social nor individual activity of women could compensate for the extinction of this “instinct,” which only recently in Messina drove hundreds of mothers to shield their children with their own bodies; this “instinct,” which recently impelled a mother, who learned before she gave birth to her child that her own life must be the price for the saving of that of the child, to cry: “I have lived, but the life of my child belongs now to mankind—save the child!” So the mother died without even having seen the beautiful being for whom she gave her life. In the world of “personally” developed women, however, after a new Messina catastrophe the mothers would be found with their manuscripts and their pictures in their arms. And confronted with a choice like that related above, the mother would answer: “Let the child die, I will live my personal life to the end.” The amaternal type must persist for the present. There are in reality in our time many women who with unresponsive eyes can pass by a lovely child, among them even mothers who do not feel the pure sensuousness, the wise madness, the intoxicating delight which such a child awakens in every motherly woman; mothers who have no conception what a fascinating subject for study the soul of a child can offer. Jean Paul, who scourged worthless mothers and tried to awaken the repressed maternal instinct of his time with the charge that a woman who is bored when she has children, is a contemptible creature, would find to-day many mothers who are bored only if they have their children about them.