ld women anything but amiable. I am, however,
convinced that the elevation of woman's social position, and greater
care in her education, will considerably facilitate the development of
her faculties. Education should not develop mundane qualities in
women, but depth of sentiment. There are many aged women who can be
cited as examples of activity and perseverance, for their sound and
clear judgment, as well as for their affability and simplicity of
manners. Although their intellectual productiveness ceases earlier
than that of man, this in no way excludes an excellent and persevering
activity of mind, combined with much judgment and sentimental
qualities. A woman who is growing old and has lost the members of her
family, especially her husband, requires some object to replace them
in her affection. To devote herself to social activity will be the
best antidote against the peevish, querulous or sorrowful moods which
so easily take possession of the aged woman. It appears that love,
which is a phylogenetic derivative of the sexual appetite, and which
in middle life is intimately associated with this appetite, becomes
afterwards more and more independent of it and then requires more
compensation. There is here a great adaptation of love to life, an
adaptation which it is necessary to bear in mind.

In infancy the individual is naturally egoistic; his appetites all
tend to self-preservation. There are even then, however, great
individual differences, and we meet with children who are endowed with
a remarkable sentiment of duty and a great sensibility to the troubles
of others. After puberty man's sexual desire leads him to love, toward
dual egoism, and this desire becomes the principal factor in the
reproduction of the species. In old age the individual has no
reproductive aims to fulfill; his life is only a burden on society, if
it is not directed with a view to benefit others and society in
general. By expansion and purification love, at first sexual, is
gradually transformed into purely humanitarian love, _i.e._,
altruistic or social. At least this is what it should be, and then the
fundamental biogenetic law of Haeckel (ontogeny is an abridged
repetition of phylogeny) will receive an ultimate confirmation. Our
primitive unicellular animal ancestor lived for itself alone; later on
sexual reproduction without love was established; then conjugal and
family love appeared (birds, monkeys, mammals, etc.), finally social
love