This, however, is not precisely our point. The facts we wish to establish are, in the first place, that in woman’s rôle of mother, the blind instinct to succour, to protect, and to preserve the helpless creature that she bears is of vital importance to the race; and, secondly, that this blind instinct necessarily involves a deep-seated and incorrigible lack of taste. The fact that subsequently—that is to say, when the undesirable offspring, be it cripple, cretin or idiot, grows up—it is frequently cherished by the mother more than her whole and hearty children, is but a confirmation of the point I am attempting to make; for it shows that what appeals to the true mother, and what according to our whole argument must and ought to appeal, is not the particular excellence of a given child, not its claim to any particular form of desirability, but simply its _helplessness_. And, since in the cripple, the cretin and the idiot helplessness is prolonged to a much later age than in the healthy child, it is the former to which unsophisticated and simple-minded motherhood naturally inclines. The consequences of this fundamental and vital lack of taste in women are, of course, considerable. When we read in Manu’s _Book of Laws_ that “women do not care for beauty,”[206] when Lombroso and Ferrero, in discussing woman’s taste state that “_en général, la beauté et l’intelligence la laissent indifférente_,”[207] and when we find Rousseau saying “_les femmes en général n’aiment aucun art, ne se connoissent à aucun_,”[208] we feel inclined to object, because we know of individual instances of women who have shown a marked feeling for beauty. Neither Lombroso, Manu nor Rousseau tells us, however, that their respective statements only refer to a specific and superficial manifestation of a deep and unalterable law. When once we realize that law, we see that these men must be right—not, however, because individual women have shown an indifference to beauty, but because the sex as a whole has no taste, and that, wherever discernment for beauty is pronounced in a woman, she either diverges from type or has undergone some special educating influence.