ess.
Bernard Shaw tells us that "if women were as fastidious as men, morally
or physically, there would be an end to the race." Perhaps this is
true. Yet I think woman's love is always different in its fundamental
essence from the excitements of the male. We throw the whole burden of
sex-desire on to men, because we have not yet faced the truth that they
are our helpless agents in carrying on Nature's most urgent work. It
has been so from the beginning, since that first primordial mating when
the hungry male-cell gained renewal of life from the female, it is so
still, I believe it will be thus to the end.

It is when we come to the emotions and actions connected with the
maternal instinct in woman that we reach the real point of the
difference between the sexes. In its essential essence this belongs to
women alone. The male may be infected with the reproduction energy (we
have witnessed this in its finest expression among birds, where the
parental duties are shared in and, in some cases, carried out entirely
by the male), but man possesses, as yet, its faint analogy only. It is
the most primary of all woman's qualities, and, being fundamental, it
is, I believe, unalterable, and any attempt to minimise its action is
very unlikely to lead to progress. It is a two-sexed world; women and
men are not alike; I hope that they never will be.

This radical truth is so plain. Yet it seems to me that in the present
confusion many women are in danger of overlooking it. We saw in an
earlier chapter how very early in the development of life it was found
by Nature's slow but certain experiments that the establishment of two
sexes in different organisms, and their differentiation, was to the
immense advantage of progress. This initial difference leads to the
functional distinctions between the female and the male, but it goes
much further than this, finding its expression in many secondary
qualities, not on the physical side alone, but on the mental and
psychical, and is, indeed, a saturating influence that determines the
entire development of the organism into the feminine or the masculine
character. Take again the fact that this dynamic action of sex has
manifested itself in a continual progress through the uncounted
centuries. Developed by love's selection, the differentiation of the
sexes increased in the evolution of species, and as the
differentiation increased the attraction also increased, until in all
the higher forms we fin