Whether we appeal to folklore, to the proverbs of the nations, or to the earliest legends of mankind, we invariably encounter in the traditional wisdom of humanity judgments upon woman which are more or less unanimous in condemning her bad temper, her disloyalty, her dishonesty, her vanity, her malice and her indolence. The very attitude of the common people towards witchcraft, after the Reformation, points to a curious popular readiness to believe in the evil influences of the female; for the fact that aged women and not aged men were the suspected parties in the persecutions against supposed cases of necromancy, is significant, even if we deny the validity of the charges that were brought against these unfortunate wretches. In another work[142] I have dealt with the two principal legends of antiquity—that of Pandora and that of Eve—in which woman is specifically identified with the introduction of evil on earth, and I shall have to return to this subject here; for it cannot be merely a coincidence that in these oldest of human myths there is this connexion between woman and evil. In the _Law Book of Manu_, which represents ancient Hindu opinion, the character of women meets again with the same charges. We read: “Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal to their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this world. “Knowing their disposition, which the Lord of creatures laid in them at the creation, to be such, (even) man must strenuously exert himself to guard them. “When creating them, Manu allotted to woman (love of their) bed, (of their) seat and (of) ornament, impure desires, wroth, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct.”[143] Lombroso and Ferrero actually regard deception as being “physiological” in women. They ascribe it to her weakness (which makes it necessary for her to rely on craft to achieve her ends), to her periodical functional disturbances, to her modesty, to the pretences necessary to acquiring an ascendancy over man, to the duties of maternity, and to one or two other inevitable circumstances in her life.[144] In Chapter VII of their work, they adduce the testimony of such acute psychologists as Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Schopenhauer, Weininger, Molière, to support their contention that in woman lying is instinctive. We might add Shakespeare, Luther, Byron, Nietzsche, La Bruyère, and many others to the list. No matter where we turn, or to whom we refer, we find, more or less, the same verdict. It lies recorded even in an Arab proverb,[145] just as it lies, though perhaps more obscurely, in most of that “tinsel of sentiment” with which, utterly false as it is, woman insists upon veiling the natural relations of the sexes; while we must not forget that for hundreds of years a great and very profound people—the Mussulmans of Europe and Asia—have denied woman a soul.