on enjoyed by women in Pagan culture. But the field opened up
by these inquiries is too wide. The previous sections of this chapter
have grown to such length that all that is possible to me now, if I am
to have space for the matters I want still to investigate, are a few
scattered remarks and suggestions which seem to me to throw some light
on this important side of woman's life.

No one will question woman's aptitude for religion, whatever the
opinion held as to what the organic basis of that aptitude may be. If
we accept that woman is more sensitive to suggestion, more emotional,
and more imaginative in her nature, it is plain why religion affects
her more deeply than men. The extraordinary way in which woman can be
influenced by religious suggestion is similar in its nature to that
saturation of her innermost thoughts with love, which is due in part,
as I believe, to the special qualities of her sex-functions, but also,
in part, to the over-emphasised sexuality produced in her by an
artificial existence. Women have accepted religious beliefs as they
have accepted man's valuation of temporal things, even although these
may be utterly at variance with their nature and their desires.

It has been said that the disposition of woman makes her peculiarly
conservative and uncritical of religious beliefs. Others suggest that
there is a "specific religious sense" in women related with a higher
standard of character. This I do not believe: it is part of the
fiction of woman's superior morality. I think in most women is hidden
an immense appetite for life, an immense capacity for expenditure of
force. She does not often dare to listen to these deeps within her
soul; yet the insurgent voices fill her. There is in the life of most
women something wanting, some general idea, some aim to hold life
together. The effort of woman--often unconscious, but always
present--to realise herself in love has forced her to practise
duplicity and to accept dependence. And this sense of dependence in
her on a protector, not always forthcoming, and, even when present,
not always able to protect, has sent her in search of something
outside and beyond the known and fallible, and has prepared her to
accept with eagerness any professed revelation of the infallible
unknown.

We have seen again and again in the course of our inquiry how deep and
natural the sex impulse is in woman, and this, combined with the much
greater complexity of her sexual lif