this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also
inherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the
esoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is
thus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she
is not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily
competent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from his
elders little more than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry vices
and a few degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction in all
those higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies make
necessary to her security, and in particular in all those exercises
which aim at overcoming the physical, and hence social and economic
superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity for clear
reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.

12. Honour

Here, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takes
colour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it. The
Jews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual intelligence
by the same process; a contrary process is working in the case of the
English and the Americans, and has begun to show itself in the case
of the French and Germans. The sum of feminine wisdom that I have just
mentioned--the body of feminine devices and competences that is handed
down from generation to generation of women--is, in fact, made up
very largely of doctrines and expedients that infallibly appear to the
average sentimental man, helpless as he is before them, as cynical and
immoral. He commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women have
no sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically
banal. Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it
may be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of
absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and
woman out of which rises most of man's complaint of its absence--to wit,
the conflict culminating in marriage, already described--the security of
the woman is not something that is in actual being, but something that
she is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must be
manifest that honor can have no place. An animal fighting for its very
existence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul.
Even man, for all his boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he
has anyt