There is no true positiveness to the social instinct in the positive girl. The social instinct’s next finest products,[28] which are the fine arts, are to her but means to an end—unconscious means to an end, just as everything else is: the end being the full exercise of her reproductive instinct. If a girl show a strong desire to play the violin, to paint or to write, you may feel quite sure these next finest manifestations of man’s social instinct are attracting her only temporarily, as extra plumage with which to eclipse her sisters and friends. And the really positive girl will throw all these accessories to her bodily charms overboard the moment they have served her purpose. No admirably positive woman would ever continue the pastimes of painting, or music, once they had achieved her object for her. As I suggested in Chapter III, for the social instinct to speak with even an ever so feeble voice in Woman, it means that some part of her reproductive instinct has had to stand aside—_ergo_, that her reproductive instinct is not as strong as it might be, and consequently that some flaw may be suspected either in her ancestry, or in the tone or correlation of her bodily parts. If, then, she applies herself to the fine arts—which are only the next highest bloom of the human social instinct working for order in expression—she can do so only under two conditions—(1) At the bidding of her reproductive instinct which makes her unconsciously adopt one of the arts temporarily as an extra feather with which to make her a more conspicuous female against the background formed by her sisters and friends; or (2) at the bidding of a genuine impulse to art, arising from a real whisper coming direct from her social instinct—in which case her reproductive instinct may be considered as imperfect, suspect, lacking in vigour. All positiveness to the social instinct in Woman, therefore, denotes a decline of Woman as Woman, a depression in the manifold and exalted virtues, the beauty, the charm, and the power of Woman as the breeder, the mother, and the custodian of Life. Enough has now been said on this subject to leave the reader in no doubt as to how I distinguish between the Positive Man and the Positive Woman. The first must, in order to be whole, be positive both to sex and to society, through his reproductive and social instincts respectively. The latter must, in order to be whole, be positive to sex only. Of course, I need hardly remind the reader that all men, by the exercise of their social instinct cannot be creative in social order, or in the fine arts; but the least of them, if their social instinct is normal, can protect and maintain society by observing its conventions and rules.