Page:B20442294.djvu/233

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MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
205

judgment of it could coincide if the interpretations of the positivists be accepted. It is only on the assumption that there exists an ego unconditioned by time and intrinsically capable of moral judgments, endowed with memory and with the power of making comparisons, that we can justify the belief in the possibility of introspection.

If woman had a sense of her personal value and the will to defend it against all external attacks she could not be jealous. Apparently all women are jealous, and jealousy depends on the failure to recognise the rights of others. Even the jealousy of a mother when she sees another woman's daughters married before her own depends simply on her want of the sense of justice.

Without justice there can be no society, so that jealousy is an absolutely unsocial quality. The formation of societies in reality presupposes the existence of true individuality. Woman has no faculty for the affairs of State or politics, as she has no social inclinations; and women's societies, from which men are excluded, are certain to break up after a short time. The family itself is not really a social structure; it is essentially unsocial, and men who give up their clubs and societies after marriage soon rejoin them. I had written this before the appearance of Heinrich Schürte' valuable ethnological work, in which he shows that asso- ciations of men, and not the family, form the beginnings of society.

Pascal made the wonderful remark that human beings seek society only because they cannot bear solitude and wish to forget themselves. It is the fact expressed in these words which puts in harmony my earlier statement that women had not the faculty of solitude and my present statement that she is essentially unsociable.

If a woman possessed an "ego" she would have the sense of property both in her own case and that of others. The thieving instinct, however, is much more developed in men than in women. So-called "kleptomaniacs" (those who steal without necessity) are almost exclusively women. Women understand power and riches but not personal