ct. But while such exceptional moments seem to come more
frequently to men than to women, and while a greater number of
the supreme artists and prophets of the world are of the male sex,
it cannot be denied that the average woman, in every generation,
leads a more human and a more dignified life than the average
man. And she does this because the special labours which occupy
her, such as the matter of food, of cleanliness, of the making and
mending of clothes, of the care of children and animals and
flowers, of the handling of animate and inanimate things with a
view to the increase of life and beauty upon the earth, are labours
which have gathered about them, during their long descent of the
centuries, a certain symbolic and poetic distinction which nothing
but immemorial association with mankind's primal necessities is
able to give.

The same dignity of immemorial association hangs, it is true,
about such masculine labours as are connected with the tilling of
the earth and the sailing of the sea. Certain ancient and eternally
necessary handicrafts, such as cannot be superseded by machinery,
take their place with these. But since man's particular power of
separating himself from Nature and dominating Nature by means
of logical reason, physical science and mechanical devices, puts
him in the position of continuity breaking up those usages of the
ages upon which the ritualistic element in life depends, he has
come, by inevitable evolution, to be much more the child of the
new and the arbitrary than woman is; and in his divorce from
immemorial necessity has lost much of that symbolic distinction
which the life of woman retains.

It may thus be said that while the determining will in the soul of
the average woman ought to be directed towards that exceptional
creative energy which lifts the soul out of the flux of Nature and
gives it a glimpse of the vision of the immortals, the determining
will in the soul of the average man ought to be directed towards
the heightening of his ordinary consciousness so as to bring this up
to the level of the flux of nature and to penetrate it with the
memory of the creative moments which he has had.

In both cases the material with which the will has to work is the
emotions of love and of malice; but in the case of man this malice
tends to destroy the poetry of common life, while in the case of
woman it tends to obstruct and embarrass her soul when the magic
of the apex-thought stirs w