beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women. Poor,
simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their
psychology--which, it is implied, differs little from their
physiology--long since mapped out.

It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no
less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human
character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women,
irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of
course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the
last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of
course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from
great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry;
Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas--all
such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring
from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'

This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people,
however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn
conventional symbols; just as religion is commonly confused with its
external rites and ceremonies. The comparison naturally continues itself
further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the
faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is
made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised
that religion itself is in danger--so with sex, no sooner does one or
the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional
characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its
fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in
danger.