hermaphrodite in the flesh is as mythical a creature as the unicorn or griffin of armorial bearings? If the higher beings, the ‘angels’ of immortality, whose state we aspire to reach after the death of this body, combine the two sexes In one person, why is that perfection not copied in our earth-world? If, on the other hand, they do not so unite them—why do they not? I complain (as a philosopher) of arrangements in this earthly existence which introduce the ugly and coarse into the animal economy without necessity. Assuming, if you like, that parthenogenesis is a mere fable, and that the introduction of the zoosperm to the ovum is in all cases indispensable to reproduction, I ask why the zoosperm should not be engendered in woman by herself, or by other women. What is man needed for? And why, being needed as it seems, must he be a coarse and brutal being as compared with woman? And yet again, being as he is coarse and brutal, what is it that attracts woman toward him. To say that her taste is depraved, affords no answer. How came her taste to be depraved? Low qualities for low beings, but the architype of nature can have no business with depraved tastes, unless in the very wide sense that universal good includes all evil.[1] Nor does the principle of evolution, which is the principle of cosmogony, explain this phenomenon. Evolution is the division of function-monopolising homogeneities into function-distributing heterogeneities; in other words, it is the principle of the division of labour. Good; but that does not imply the degradation or corruption of any of the distributed functions. Why should the spiritual hermaphrodite evolve the natural woman and man, the one beautiful or noble, the other by comparison base? That is where I collapse.’
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