This makes them incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything, and the reason for it is, I fancy, as follows. A man strives to get _direct_ mastery over things either by understanding them or by compulsion. But a woman is always and everywhere driven to _indirect_ mastery, namely through a man; all her _direct_ mastery being limited to him alone. Therefore it lies in woman's nature to look upon everything only as a means for winning man, and her interest in anything else is always a simulated one, a mere roundabout way to gain her ends, consisting of coquetry and pretence. Hence Rousseau said, _Les femmes, en général, n'aiment aucun art, ne se connoissent à aucun et n'ont aucun génie_ (Lettre à d'Alembert, note xx.). Every one who can see through a sham must have found this to be the case. One need only watch the way they behave at a concert, the opera, or the play; the childish simplicity, for instance, with which they keep on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces. If it is true that the Greeks forbade women to go to the play, they acted in a right way; for they would at any rate be able to hear something. In our day it would be more appropriate to substitute _taceat mulier in theatro_ for _taceat mulier in ecclesia_; and this might perhaps be put up in big letters on the curtain. Nothing different can be expected of women if it is borne in mind that the most eminent of the whole sex have never accomplished anything in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original, or given to the world any kind of work of permanent value. This is most striking in regard to painting, the technique of which is as much within their reach as within ours; this is why they pursue it so industriously. Still, they have not a single great painting to show, for the simple reason that they lack that objectivity of mind which is precisely what is so directly necessary in painting. They always stick to what is subjective. For this reason, ordinary women have no susceptibility for painting at all: for _natura non facet saltum_. And Huarte, in his book which has been famous for three hundred years, _Examen de ingenios para las scienzias_, contends that women do not possess the higher capacities. Individual and partial exceptions do not alter the matter; women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable philistines; and because of the extremely absurd arrangement which allows them to share the position and title of their husbands they are a constant stimulus to his _ignoble_ ambitions. And further, it is because they are philistines that modern society, to which they give the tone and where they have sway, has become corrupted. As regards their position, one should be guided by Napoleon's maxim, _Les femmes n'ont pas de rang_; and regarding them in other things, Chamfort says very truly: _Elles sont faites pour commercer avec nos faiblesses avec notre folie, mais non avec notre raison.