element in the
rhythm of the universe.

It is only by associating itself with love and malice--it is only by
getting itself transformed into love and malice that the sexual
instinct is able to lift itself up, or to sink itself down, into the
subtler levels of the soul's vision. The secret of life lies far deeper
than the obvious bodily phenomena of sex. The fountains from
which life springs _may flow through that channel_ but they flow
from a depth far below these physical or magnetic agitations. And
it is only the abysmal cunning of the inert malice, which opposes
itself to creation that tempts philosophers and artists to lay such a
disproportionate stress upon this thing. The great artists are always
known by their power to transcend sex and to reduce sex to its
relative insignificance. In the greatest of all sculpture, in the
greatest of all music, in the greatest of all poetry, the difference
between the sexes disappears.

The inert malice delights to emphasize this thing, because its
normal functioning implies the most desperate exertion of the
possessive instinct known to humanity. The sexual instinct unless
transfigured by love, tends towards death; because the sexual
instinct desires to petrify into everlasting immobility what the
creative instinct would change and transform. What the sexual
instinct secretly desires is the eternal death of the object of its
passion. It would strike its victim if it could into everlasting
immobility so that it could satiate its lust of possession upon it
without limit and without end. Any object of sexual desire,
untransformed by love, is, for the purposes of such desire, already
turned into a living corpse.

But although, according to the method we have been following,
the difference between men and women is but of small account in
the real life of the soul, it remains that humanity has absurdly and
outrageously neglected the especial vision of the woman, as, in her
bodily senses and her magnetic instincts, she differs from man we
may well hope that with the economic independence of women,
which is so great and desirable a revolution in our age, individual
women of genius will arise, able to present, in philosophy and art,
the peculiar and especial reaction to the universe which women
possess as women we may well desire such a consummation in
view of the fact that all except the very greatest of men have
permitted their vision of the world to be perverted and distorted by