there is no thou, there is no I; but the distinction between I and thou, the fundamental condition of all personality, of all consciousness, is only real, living, ardent, when felt as the distinction between man and woman. The thou between man and woman has quite another sound, than the monotonous thou between friends.
Nature in distinction from personality can signify nothing else than difference of sex. A personal being apart from Nature is nothing else than a being without sex, and conversely. Nature is said to be predicated of God, “in the sense in which it is said of a man, that he is of a strong, healthy nature.” But what is more feeble, what more insupportable, what more contrary to Nature than a person without sex, or a person, who in character, manners, or feelings, denies sex? What is virtue, the excellence of man as man? Manhood. Of man as woman? Womanhood. But man exists only as man and woman. The strength, the healthiness of man, consists therefore in this: that as a woman, he be truly woman; as man, truly man. Thou repudiatest “the horror of all that is real, which supposes the spiritual to be polluted by contact with the real.” Repudiate then before all, thy own horror for the distinction of sex. If God is not polluted by Nature, neither is he polluted by being associated with the idea of sex. In renouncing sex, thou renouncest thy whole principle. A moral God apart from Nature is without basis; but the basis of morality is the distinction of sex. Even the brute is capable of self-sacrificing love in virtue of the sexual distinction. All the glory of Nature, all its power, all its wisdom and profundity, concentrates and individualizes itself in distinction of sex. Why then dost thou shrink from naming the nature of God by its true name? Evidently, only because thou hast a general horror of things in their truth and reality; because thou lookest at all things through the deceptive vapours of mysticism. For this very reason then, because Nature in God is only a delusive, unsubstantial appearance, a fantastic ghost of Nature,—for it is based, as we have said, not on flesh and blood, not on a real ground,—this attempt to establish a personal God is once more a failure, and I, too, conclude with the words, “The denial of a personal God will be scientific honesty”:—and, I add, scientific truth, so long as it is not declared and shown in unequivocal terms, first a priori, on speculative grounds, that form, place, corporeality, and sex, do
