SECTION LXIX.

3. The difference of sex conditions a correspondingly different peculiarity of the moral life-work. Man represents the outward-working, productive phase of humanity, woman the receptive and formative,—he more the spirit-phase, she more the nature-phase; in him preponderate thought and will; in her rather the feelings, the heart; to man it is more peculiar to act initiatively,—to woman rather, morally to associate herself. The moral life-work of each is different in the details, but in both it is of like dignity; it is simply two different mutually-complementing phases of the same morality. The 75morality of both sexes consists, in fact, in especially developing that phase of the moral life that is peculiar to each,—not as strictly the same as, but as in harmony with, the peculiarity of the other.

The antithesis of the two sexes is the highest spiritualized manifestation of that primitive antithesis of the operative and the reposing, the active and the passive, that conditions all earthly life,—that assumes an endless variety of forms, and appears in each single phenomenon of the world under some of its many forms of combination. Nowhere do we find mere force, nowhere mere matter, but every-where in nature both are united, and yet they are not the same. What this primitive antithesis is in nature,—what the greater antitheses of the light and the heavy, repulsion and attraction, motion and rest, sun and planet, animal and plant, arteries and veins, etc., are,—this is, in highest refinement and perfection, the antithesis of man and woman in humanity. That the nature-phase is somewhat more prominent in woman than in man is evidenced also by the earlier physical development and maturity of the female sex, and by the greater dependence on nature and on the changes of the seasons in the entire female sex-life. The higher intellectual power is undoubtedly with man, and the moral subordination of woman to man in wedlock and in society is an unmistakable law of universal order. The difference of the two sexes is not to be t6ned down, but to be developed into moral harmony. As an effeminate man or masculine woman is offensive to the esthetic sense, and a hermaphrodite repugnant to uncorrupted feelings, and a sexless form expressionless and unnatural, so also, in moral respects, it is the duty of man to cultivate his manliness, and of woman to cultivate her womanliness; and any assumption by one party of the peculiarities of the opposite sex, is not only unnatural but also immoral.