The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of the Catholic Church. I am not going to discuss the question of marriage or free-love. Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the world with marriage.
None the less marriage could have been invented only by man. No proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man’s desire for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.
The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute element is strong will perceive her son’s manhood and always stand in a sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother, there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her children and of a wife to her husband.
Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and unjust in the event of a quarrel.
The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards that man who will afterwards become the father of her child; in fact, in a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the mother-type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving wife; the mothers form the enduring root-stock of our race from which the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his own impermanence. It is this idea which enables the man to see in the mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence. In such minutes there may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, understands him, and takes care of him (Siegfried and Brünnhilde, Act III.). But this does not last long. (Siegfried tears himself from Brünnhilde). For a man only comes to his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him. The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books that have been written, the chapter on “Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Nature,” in Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species is set down as the only real permanence.