Page:B20442294.djvu/239

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MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
211

describe him as a Positivist, Idealist, or any other non-individual term. This feeling must not be confused with the results of the fact that a man may describe himself as a Wagnerite, and so forth. The latter is simply a deep approval of Wagnerism, because the approver is himself a Wagnerite. The man is conscious that his agreement is in reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a man will say much about himself that he would not permit another to say of him. As Cyrano de Bergerac put it:

"Je me les sers moi-meme, avec assez de verve,
Mais je ne permets pas qu'un autre me les serve."

It cannot be right to consider such men as Pascal and Newton, on the one hand, as men of the highest genius, on the other, as limited by a mass of prejudices which we of the present generation have long overcome. Is the present generation with its electrical railways and empirical psychology so much higher than these earlier times? Is culture, if culture has any real value, to be compared with science, which is always social and never individual, and to be measured by the number of public libraries and laboratories? Is culture outside human beings and not always in human beings?

It is in striking harmony with the ascription to men alone of an ineffable, inexplicable personality, that in all the authenticated cases of double or multiple personality the subjects have been women. The absolute female is capable of sub-division; the male, even to the most complete characterology and the most acute experiment, is always an indivisible unit. The male has a central nucleus of his being which has no parts, and cannot be divided; the female is composite, and so can be dissociated and cleft.

And so it is most amusing to hear writers talking of the soul of the woman, of her heart and its mysteries, of the psyche of the modern woman. It seems almost as if even an accoucheur would have to prove his capacity by the strength of his belief in the soul of women. Most women, at least, delight to hear discussions on their souls, although