Nature and Woman, being both different forms of Life unordered and unarranged, yield to Man’s ordering mastery. They understand it and follow it, always _provided it understands them_; for, obviously, the gardener who sought to turn the rose-tree upside down, the cattle farmer who sought to make the sheep carnivorous, or the social gardener who sought to convert woman into a sort of non-productive asexual worker, might certainly come within an ace of success, but would be equally certain of having consummated the wretchedness if not the death both of the rose-tree, the sheep and woman respectively. But when nature is understood it yields cheerfully and eagerly to Man’s ordering power, although it does so dumbly and inarticulately. Woman, on the other hand, who is simply nature, Life itself, become articulate, does so admiringly, cheerfully, happily and consciously. The positive man, therefore, is positive to three things; Society, self-preservation, and Woman. He cannot be wholly positive if he lack any one of these attitudes; and those men who have maintained all these attitudes with dignity and _creative_ success, have been the only truly great men of history. Others are simply specialists, cripples, deformities or nonentities. Of course, for a man to be positive to Woman it is not necessary that he should actually have had a child from her. Circumstances may have been hostile to this consummating proof of his sexuality. This is only documentary proof, so to speak, and its absence does not necessarily argue against his having maintained a strictly positive attitude towards her and sex all his life. We must always remember, too, that the complicated and wearing responsibility that man has always cheerfully undertaken, of ordering Life and mastering nature, is an arduous and very onerous business, and that those men who have fulfilled their obligations to their social instinct most scrupulously and honestly, have frequently come to their journey’s end without having been able to cast more than a glance of hearty encouragement and tender affection at the women they passed on the road, however positive may have been their feelings towards them.